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.

Management guru Peter Drucker is quoted over and again for his message that the key to strategy is omission. Good strategy is ruthlessly about what not to do, than it is about what to do. The same goes for KPIs. We must be ruthless about what to measure.

When I first started my career in performance measurement, the Balanced Scorecard was the new thing. I was really excited at first, as it was being heralded as the best methodology for measuring organisational performance that had ever been developed. I was the Measurement Consultant in Queensland Rail at that time, and my hope was that I’d found the guidance I’d been looking for to lead my col...

Culture is a word we use to describe the interplay of values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours within a group of people. In organisations, workplace culture is one of the hardest things to measure. But we want to measure it, because we want to influence it.

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.

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 Terry Fagg, a local government manager, writes a short marketing brief from a fictional consulting firm called Weasel Words Inc. Be warned: this is bad advice!! (more…)

Donald Trump Jr., on 21st Century TV, interviewed my friends Howard Rohm (CEO) and Gail Stout Perry (Vice-President of Strategic Solutions) from the Balanced Scorecard Institute. During the interview they shared some great tips about strategy design, specifically with their approach to the Balanced Scorecard. They discussed:

• the problems of the C-Suite designing goals that fail ...

When you struggle to find meaningful measures for your strategic goals, there are a few problems that have to be fixed. I've written passionately and prolifically about how weasel words make goals immeasurable. And there's another problem too, called multi-focus. Multi-focus is when we blend several performance results into a single goal statem...

Avoiding business jargon helps to set goals that can be achieved and measured. That's the topic of this Harvard ManageMentor video with Stacey Barr.