When KPIs are not achieving their targets, performance improvement is needed. But rather than rushing to solutions prematurely, we need measurement for diagnosis. (mo...

Lag measures cannot be improved directly; only through changing one or more of their lead measures. And there are six basic steps to make this happen. (more&h...

We can't improve performance when we think KPIs are about success or failure, because it makes it a threat. Stoicism makes KPIs about curiosity and learning. (more…)

It can be tempting to ditch a KPI that doesn't tell the full story. But KPIs can't and shouldn't - they should trigger and guide our decisions, not make them for us. (more…)

Performance measures are mostly focused on improving performance in what we already do. But can this business-as-usual focus on existing performance measures sabotage necessary change?

This is a case study about the Area Agency on Aging at the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) use of XmR charts. It's by Kirsti Klaverkamp and Jerry Stigall, of Denver, Colorado. (more&h...

Does everyone agree with what your KPIs and performance measures are saying? If they're arguing, objectivity could be the problem. (more…)

Instead of implementing our change initiatives as long, drawn-out projects, we can run them as a series of iterations. Iterating our way toward a closed performance gap is going to be faster than trying to close that gap with a single big solution.

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...

Consider the measures your organisation currently uses. How many are calculated annually? Or quarterly? Or monthly? Or weekly? What's the rationale for having chosen that cadence of calculation? One of the bad habits of performance measurement is measuring too infrequently, and this means we miss important signals in our measures.