Over the past 10 years of Measure Up's life, over 13,000 subscribers have shared their biggest KPI questions with me. Almost 90% of all those questions come down to a core set of 11 questions. Only one of these is the right question to answer first.

Strategy execution more often than not feels like work, rather than true execution. Sometimes it feels like rework, when we keep redesigning it. Other times it feels like guesswork, implementing without really knowing if it’s working. And then there are times when it’s just plain hard work to get anything to happen. What we want is smooth execution to take the place of the work.

Do you believe that strategy is about projects and initiatives, so you don't need to measure your goals? Do you monitor your actions, because if they're completed, that means your goals are achieved? Do you rely on Staff Turnover Rate to assess how engaged your workforce is? If so, you're wasting your goals!

Sometimes hard-to-measure strategic goals can be fixed in the measurement process (like how Step 2 of PuMP fixes the weasel word problem). But strategy can be hard to measure due to poor logic and poor structure, and this can't be fixed in the measurement process. We have to go back and rework the planning process to make the strategy sensible.