Don't Choose The First Measure That Comes To Mind!

The human brain is a pattern recognition machine and this is a very practical skill to make life better – just think about easily we can recognize faces, or sense when our better-half is in a good mood or bad. But the downside of pattern recognition is that we can rush too quickly to conclusions. We draw too readily on past experience and don't open our minds to what else might be possible.

 

Selecting the first measure – or even one of the first two or three measures – that come to mind when you're selecting measures for a goal or performance result is a mistake born of this tendency to draw too readily on past experience. Just because you're familiar with the measure of Customer Satisfaction doesn't make it a great measure for every goal that has the word "customer" in it. It's not a measure of how loyal your customers are and it's not a measure of how engaged they are in your services or products. But it's still the most used customer-related measure.

No doubt part of the reason why people tend to select the first measure that comes to mind is that not enough time has been allowed to consider alternatives. But if you were to give three hours to selecting measures instead of a half-hour, you'd be saving hundreds and possibly thousands of hours wasted in measuring the wrong things.

Instead of making this mistake, allow more time to really think through a wider range of potential measures for your goal or performance result. Don't be afraid to list half a dozen or even more potential measures for a specific result. Overwhelmingly from my own experience, best measures rarely ever come from the first two or three that are suggested. You almost get on a roll, too, and the quality of measures improves as you list ideas, as if building from the first few ideas.

Then, for each potential measure you list, discuss how strongly related it is to the goal or result. Think carefully about what is the best evidence of that goal or result and you may even be able to design your own measures – better measures than the standard and all-too-common measures that everyone's been using, that are familiar and top-of-mind but not necessarily all that useful or powerful.

About The Author

Stacey Barr is the Performance Measure Specialist, helping strategic planners, business analysts and performance measurement officers confidently facilitate their organization to create and use meaningful performance measures with lots of buy-in. Sign up for Stacey's free email tips at www.staceybarr.com/202tipsKPI.html and receive a complimentary copy of her renowned e-book "202 Tips for Performance Measurement".