The tick-and-flick approach to reviewing KPIs, one at a time down the scorecard, won't ever reveal the insights about how to truly improve performance.

No KPI can ever give you perfect evidence of your goals. But too often we overestimate how good a KPI needs to be, to be "right". The truth is, KPIs aren't ever "right". You just want to be sure they are "not wrong".

People occasionally ask me whether we should measure the positive, or what we want more of, rather than the negative, what we want less of. Mostly they believe it should be the positive. But when does it matter? Or does it ever matter?

One person that always seems to have fun around failure is Adam Savage, from Mythbusters. He’s like a big kid, wide-eyed and giggling, as he and his more stoic co-star, Jamie Hyneman, test all kinds of pop-culture myths, like whether you can ride a motorcycle on water, escape a turtled car under water, and put your hand into molten lead and not be injured. Adam routinely says that he doesn’t ca...