Archive for the ‘Making Strategy Measurable’ Category

One of the most common reasons people hate their measures is not that the measure is bad. It’s that the measure is the wrong one for the result they’re trying to monitor.

A performance area you see this happening a lot is customer service performance. There are a raft of customer related measures around these days, each with its own promise of driving business growth. And don’t think that the research will lay it out clearly for you. Depending on what you read, you could be a believer in the Net Promoter Score’s “power on one” image, or a trigger-happy defender of the good old customer satisfaction index.

But we forget something vitally important, as we too eagerly dive into debates about which is the best measure.

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There are all kinds of reasons why so many organisations have performance reports that are bursting at the seams with measures that mean nothing, impact nothing or lead to nothing. They’re measures that some will say “that’s interesting” and others will bark are “a waste of time”.

Often it’s because they are the measures that have always been reported, or some manager once wanted the measure for a project that ended five and a half years ago but it’s still being report just in case, or because something is better than the nothing that would exist if we left it up to decision makers to decide what should be in the reports.

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Admit it – you’ve uttered these words yourself at some point, when you were faced with a goal or result that was rather intangible or fluffy and no measure immediately came to mind for it:

“It’s not measurable!”

And then you move onto the next goal to see if that’s easier to measure. But don’t give up so soon! I face this challenge with almost every client I work with. The problem is not that their goal is not measurable – it’s that the language they’ve used to express their goal is not specific enough.

So when someone tells me something’s not measurable, here are seven of my favourite retorts:

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