We all want a high-performance culture in our organisations. We want people to be results-oriented, to act with a scientific curiosity, to be relentlessly solution-focused, and to have a continuous-improvement mindset. And we want it now.

Guest author Jerry Stigall, Director of Organizational Development at Denver Regional Council of Governments, has written a guest post on what to say when they say "we're not measuring that because it's outside our control".

There isn't a single and universally applied definition of the word 'goal'. And so many different things pretend to be goals. One messy consequence is that when we try to measure our goals, we can end up with very trivial and useless measures.

Guest author Martin Klubeck, author of Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results, warns us about 3 mistakes with metrics that stem from too strong a focus on the data.