If there was just one thing I could share with you that would have the biggest impact on the ease of finding meaningful performance measures or KPIs, it's this: use words better. It's impossible to get meaningful numbers until you know exactly what you're trying to quantify.

In the Harvard Business Review this month, Martin Reeves of the Boston Consulting Group writes an interesting piece on how our increasingly uncertain world requires us to have a more deliberate strategy. He says our strategy needs a strategy. But with increasing uncertainty, is there still ...

We don't just measure performance to know we're making progress. We measure other things too, to monitor our processes, to modify our behaviours, and to celebrate achievements. So for a little side-step to the usual performance measurement stuff, let's explore the world of progress monitoring.

There are lots of goals that are really hard to measure. I've written about measuring workforce capability, but another hard-to-measure goal is workforce diversity. Don't expect a list of the best measures, though. The problem lies with what diversity actually means to you...