If you think about when organisations work well, it's because all the parts are coordinated together and managed as an integrated whole. And that's a very good reason why we ought to treat our performance measures the same.

Most performance measures or KPIs tell you what happened. But if we're really going to manage company or organisational performance, we need to know something about what's going to happen. And that's what lead indicators do. They are a special breed of performance measure or KPI because they have predictive power.

Milestones are commonly used as KPIs or performance measures. But they are not performance measures because they fail a few essential tests of what makes a meaningful performance measure.

It happens all the time: we inadvertently measure the same thing, more than once in our businesses and end up with two or more different versions of the truth.

It's an emotional thing, performance reporting and dashboarding. Executives give up the precious little time they have for their families to instead paw through piles of strategic reports often more than an inch thick (or several drilldowns deep). Or they leave the pile of reports on their desk, or give their performance dashboard a quick glance, but then make decisions from their guts inst...

We almost all do it: hang on to performance measures that we really don't need. Believe me, measuring what doesn't matter does more harm than good! When you're measuring what doesn't matter, you're using up resources better spent analysing and improving, rather than reporting. And people's focus will be fractured by the sheer volume of data that's put in front of them.

Measuring performance takes time, effort and money. You have to stop your "real work" to figure out what's worth measuring and set up the data capture and reporting to measure it. So in times like these, when everyone's cutting budgets, downsizing and cancelling non-core projects, should performance measurement go on the backburner too? Imagine that you do stop investing in performance me...

M William (Bill) Sermons, Director of the Alliance’s Homelessness Research Institute, specializes in cross-disciplinary research and program evaluation. As Director of the Homelessness Research Institute, he is responsible for advancing the Institute’s aim of building and disseminating knowledge that informs policy and practice.

Don't even try and work out how much time, effort, money and opportunity we waste by investing in business strategies that don't truly work. Let's instead talk about how exactly we can go about executing our strategies in a way that tests if they're working, by isolating their effect on our desired performance results.

There are some very good reasons why managers and executives DO give time and resources to performance measurement. And understanding these reasons is your key to reframing the value that performance measurement can have for the manager or executive who so far has no interest in supporting it.