Four Principles Your Strategy Must Possess To Be Measurable

Most strategies and goals are broad, vague, high-level motherhood statements. No wonder people don’t engage with them, struggle to measure them, and ultimately fail to execute and achieve them. But there are four things to turn this around:

Focus and specificity heads the list. It might seem practical to keep your goals broad and flexible, in case things change. But honestly, if you don’t pin down what difference you’re trying to create, nothing of significance will happen. Time and money will be spent (and very likely wasted). But that’s about all that will be different.

So if you’ve got a goal that reads something like “Enhance the quality of customer service” then you have to make a decision about which aspects of quality exactly need to be enhanced, such as helpdesk response times or service staff friendliness. And ignore the rest for now. Be ruthless!

Short term impact is second on the list. It means breaking down a long term outcome into “crunchy” stages or milestones you can act on and achieve soon. (Crunchy: something to get your teeth into!)

Saving an endangered species, like the Cassowary of northern Queensland, particularly after the vast rainforest damage of Cyclone Larry, is a long term outcome. The numbers of wild cassowaries is important to track, but doesn’t say much in the short term. Today’s strategies should arrest the outcome’s drivers, such as cassowaries forced into urban areas to find food, and diseases that threaten their already diminished numbers.

Clear, descriptive language, funnily enough, is the key to making a strategy or goal measurable. You can’t measure what you can’t observe. And you can’t act on what you can’t clearly envision, either. When people read a goal or strategy, they should easily see in their mind’s eye what that achieved end looks like.

Better than “Enhance the sustainability of farmland” is “The fragile soils of valuable farming land are protected from unnatural erosion and loss of topsoil.” Dare to be poetic!

Use hypotheses to link strategies to their goals. An hypothesis is an assumption that can be tested. Our strategies are assumptions about how to achieve our goals. And linking them together in a kind of hypothesis makes it very clear what to measure to test our hypotheses, to learn what works, and what doesn’t.

The formula is: [strategy] achieves [goal]. For example, “Our strategy to implement an online dog-owners discussion forum achieves our goal of reducing by half the number of abandoned and confiscated dogs.” Good measures can test this. It’s not very hard to be a little bit scientific!

An executable and testable strategy will achieve what matters, sooner and easier!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stacey Barr is the Performance Measure Specialist, helping strategic planners, business analysts and performance measurement officers confidently facilitate their organisation 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”.