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.

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!

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.

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.

Lots of strategic plans and operational plans are full of motherhood goals, vague strategies and - if they are even considered at all - measures or KPIs that don't track anything useful. No wonder these plans sit on shelves and gather dust.

This interview with learning expert, Adam Voigt, is a collaboration where we both use the PuMP Measurability Tests technique and Measure Design technique to demonstrate a practical approach for measuring school effectiveness.

The building blocks of KPIs and performance measures is detectable evidence. And evidence is detectable when it is sensory. (more…)

Often in measuring performance we ask a question too soon: so, how do we measure that? As soon as you answer that question, you're tumbling down the rabbit-hole toward a world of silliness and subjectivity. The characters you're surrounded by are pretentious goals claiming to be too complex to measure, and confused goals draped in trivial counts and milestones.

Weasel words are the enemy of measurability. When a goal is written with them - agile, benefits, capacity, diversity, efficiency, fit for purpose, holistic, livability, productivity, sustainability, and so on - that goal is impossible to meaningfully measure. But yet there is often resistance to removing those weasel words.

One of the reasons why we can't find meaningful performance measures for our goals has to do with whether the goals are about actions or results. Action-oriented goals aren't true goals, since goals should be about making a difference, not just doing stuff. ...