A very distraught woman (we’ll refer to her as Vera) recently called the Balanced Scorecard Institute office in panic. Vera:  “Hello?  I need those flags.  Can you please overnight the flags to me?  It’s urgent!” Us:  “Excuse me?  I think you may have the wrong number?” Vera:  “Isn’t this the Balanced Scorecard Institute?” Us:  “Yes, ma’am.  But we don’t sell flags.” Vera:  “Yes, you do.  My boss said so.” Us: “Ummmmm….could you elaborate?” Vera (in an exasperated tone):  “Listen!  My boss just announced that we are going to improve performance using a Balanced Scorecard.  He sent us a memo that said each store is responsible for showing performance by using red, yellow and green flags.  I’m a store manager and I am being held RESPONSIBLE!  I called the other store managers and nobody has the flags.  We all need to order those flags NOW!  You ARE the Balanced Scorecard Institute, are you not?!?” I really am not sure we ever adequately explained to her that the “flags” are a term meaning a visual representation of the level of performance around a target value for a strategic objective or measure, with green generally indicating good performance, yellow generally indicating satisfactory performance, or red indicating poor performance.  And I’m pretty sure she thinks we are idiots for giving a complex response to a simple request to order some flags that she can wave. For the record, I am not making fun of the caller herself.  She was an intelligent woman and obviously a dedicated worker.  But she was dreadfully misinformed and the source of the misinformation is the point of this blog. My point is that her boss created angst and confusion in his organization by making an announcement with no explanation and no context.  HE knows his strategy, HE knows how he wants to measure performance on it, HE created a balanced scorecard to do so (without teaching anyone what that means), and HE announced it to the world and then said “YOU are responsible!” Don’t be that guy. Many bosses / executives / leaders are really smart.  They have a well-thought out strategy in their heads and they can make the leap from planning to execution…in their head.  But they are better at internal conversation (in their own head) than they are at communicating with others.   If this sounds familiar, let us help you bridge the gap between what you say and what your employees hear. I’ve written another blog about this topic (Are Strategic Leaps of Logic Leaving You Dazed and Confused?), because this problem comes up over and over again. Please contact us and let us help. Or to learn more about how to translate your strategy into something that is clear to communicate in a way that employees can understand and effectively contribute to, we invite you to explore The Institute Way:  Simplify Strategic Planning & Management with the Balanced Scorecard.

Umiaq is defined as a large open Inuit or Eskimo boat made of skins stretched on a wooden frame, usually propelled by paddles. I looked it up only because my Words with Friends opponent just played that word. There are several possible explanations for this move. Maybe my friend of many years has recently become an expert in the Inuit culture. Maybe his linguistic genius is finally starting to gel, although that seems unlikely after years of unexceptional Scrabble play. Or more likely, he randomly guessed over and over until something was accepted. Much has been made about “plugging”, the practice of guessing randomly until you stumble upon a word. To a Scrabble purist like me, this is cheating, pure and simple. To seemingly everyone else, this is just part of the game and I need to shut up and stop being a sore loser. My point here is not to rant about the game. My point is that, for better or worse, sometimes your strategic competitive environment changes. Your favorite political party loses. Your competitors merge. Technology enables your customers to replace your cash cow service for free. A small new competitor comes up with a disruptive new technology that changes the rules in your industry. This seems almost unfair in the strategic planning and management world because you spend so much time and energy designing and executing a comprehensive strategy around certain assumptions. Just when you think that the initiatives that you are implementing are closing the gaps on your targets, the rules change and you find yourself on the Blackberry end of the iPhone revolution. There are a few guidelines you can follow to make sure that this doesn’t happen. First, don’t skimp on your external environmental scan during the Assessment step and be sure to go back and update that analysis periodically. Some of us work in industries that change abruptly from quarter to quarter, but in most industries, change happens gradually enough that an annual update will be adequate. Second, use scenario planning to help identify strategy alternatives. Scenario planning helps recognize the many factors that combine in complex ways to affect future success, and tries to make sense of how these factors interact and how they drive change, leading to a deeper discussion on better business strategies. Finally, sometimes planners get too attached to their product and have to be reminded that a dynamic strategy needs to be continuously evaluated to enable the organization to nimbly adapt and change. Evaluation helps organizations understand how well strategies accomplish desired results and how well the strategic management system improves communications, alignment and performance. A more formal evaluation process is usually conducted once a year, although if your organization is in a sector that changes more rapidly than that, more frequent evaluations are needed. If I don’t like plugging in Words with Friends, I can simply stop playing out of principle. But if my livelihood depends on my ability to adapt to a changing world, I have to be able to quickly and systematically adapt my strategy.  If I am too stuck in my ways, my organization will have a serious problem.  Sort of like being in an umiaq without a paddle. For more about how to adapt your strategy to a changing world, see The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard.

During the years we lived in Canada, my family became fond of Canadian Heritage Moments.  These were sixty-second vignettes that depicted formative moments in Canadian history. One of my favorites has the intrepid French explorer Jacques Cartier arriving in the valley of the St. Lawrence River in the year 1534 and encountering a group of Iroquois. The leader of the tribe approaches the French party and invites them to visit his nearby village.  The viewer, having the benefit of English subtitles, learns that the word for village in Iroquois is “kanata.” Cartier turns to the priest on his right and asks “What is he saying, father?” The priest hesitates a moment and then announces confidently: “He is saying that the name of this nation is Canada!”  A helpful and obviously intelligent young man steps up behind Cartier and says “Begging your pardon, sir, but he’s inviting you to visit him in his village. Canada is his word for village.” The priest asserts his authority, dismissing the young man, and off they go.  And the rest is history! Enjoy the story at http://tinyurl.com/k84fsdk When exploring new territory, it’s best to draw as much as possible on the collective intelligence of the group when assessing the situation. This is truer than ever in our organizations, and at least as true as it was in Cartier’s time.  Cartier, after all, thought he was in Asia. One of the biggest mistakes we make in strategic planning is assuming that the future will be more or less like the past. It won’t. It’s critical to articulate – and question – our assumptions about the environment we operate in, in terms of what our customers value, what our competition is offering, and the impacts of big forces like technology and the economy. Many of our organizational ways derive from a simpler time, when we could rely on the experience of people who’d been around longer for an accurate assessment of the situation. In one of my classes, a student raised his hand and said “That’s what we call the HiPPO principle.  It means that decisions are made based on the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.” In rapidly changing times, making strategic assessments and decisions based on what worked in the past may prove short sighted. A well-managed system for tracking and reporting strategic metrics is the compass that leaders and staff throughout the organization can use to learn from experience and align their actions in pursuit of better value for customers. We recommend that you:

• Schedule periodic reviews of your assumptions about your macro-environment and stay tuned for new information that may challenge these assumptions
• Agree on the strategic performance metrics that matter to you as an integral part of your planning process – not after the fact
• Maintain an especially acute focus on tracking customer experience and value
• Incorporate those metrics into your scorecard and make scorecard review a regular item on your leadership meeting agenda

Have you heard the common legend that scientists have proven that bumblebees, in terms  of aerodynamics, can’t fly?  This is a myth that came about because about eighty years ago an aerodynamicist made this statement based on an assumption that the bees’ wings were a smooth plane.  It was reported by the media before the aerodynamicist actually looked at the wing under a microscope and found that the assumption was incorrect.  While the scientist and the media issued retractions, the legend lives on.

Unfortunately, in the management world, decisions are made every day based on “legends” rather than on real evidence. At a manufacturing company I once worked for, it was a well-known “fact” that it was more profitable to discount prices to increase volume in a particular market.  Even after a team of business managers proved discounting was a money loser, certain sales managers continued to rigorously advocate for the discount strategy for years.  I like to refer to any ongoing argument like this as the “Fight” of the Bumblebee.  This fight is the most difficult when the bumblebee argument is emotionally compelling (they’re not supposed to be able to fly!) and the truth is difficult to convey (bumblebees’ wings encounter dynamic stall in every oscillation cycle, whatever that means). Everyone loves a discount and can see pallets of product going out the door.  Not everyone understands some of the indirect nuances that contribute to profit.

Winning the fight of the bumblebee is dependent on making sure that you are interpreting, visualizing, and reporting performance information in a meaningful way.  People have to be trained to appreciate the difference between gut instinct and data-driven decision making.  Once they see analysis done well a couple of times, they will start asking for it.

The key to interpreting a measurement is comparison. And the trick is to display the information in a way that effectively answers the question, Compared to what?  Visualizing performance over time identifies trends that show data direction and development and provide context for the underlying story relative to strategy. The simplest and most effective way I’ve seen for consistently visualizing data is with a Smart Chart (or XmR chart), a tool showing the natural variation in performance data.

Once you have a better idea of how to interpret your data, reporting the information in a way that is meaningful is important.  Reports should always be structured around strategy, so that people have the right context to understand what the data is about.  Reports should answer basic questions you need to know, such as what is our current level of performance?, why are we getting that result?, and what are we going to do next?

For more about how to interpret, visualize and report performance, see The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard.

Some of our clients use Franklin Covey’s methods to improve human and organizational performance, including the use of WIGs (Wildly Important Goals). I’ve wrestled with how to integrate Covey’s approach, which is sometimes loosely or creatively applied, into the balanced scorecard framework in a way that is disciplined, consistent, and simple to understand. Recently, it dawned on me that WIGs are really based on the concept of contribution – a concept we use when measuring performance in the balanced scorecard framework. So first, I need to explain the concept of contribution. I recently wrote a blog (Skinny Jeans and the New Math) in which I was trying to watch my weight but could not directly measure my weight via a scale, so I used a correlate measure based on a pair of skinny jeans in my suitcase.  A different technique to measure something indirectly is to use a contributing measure.  A contributing measure is something you can measure directly and which you believe will influence the results on the thing that you cannot measure directly (in this example, my weight). I actually have two contributing measures that I use while traveling, but until now I haven’t told anyone my secret. Science has shown that several things contribute to weight gain or loss. I have chosen two that are within my control and are easily measurable: (1) How often I eat sweets while on a trip, and (2) How often my gym shoes actually get removed from my suitcase for a brisk walk around the hotel. By setting goals of one or fewer desserts per week (chocolate is my weakness) and using the gym shoes at least once a week, I can keep track of these two contributing measures, both of which will influence what the scale will say when I finally get home. And that’s exactly what Franklin Covey’s WIG approach is.  It’s a series of contributing goals/measures in which one action influences resultant performance on another. So, how can the Covey methodology effectively integrate with the balanced scorecard framework?  Here’s how:  An executive’s WIG must be based on either a strategic performance measure / target or on a strategic initiative.  These are two scorecard elements that are most likely to have actionable contributing factors that an individual can relate to.   The contributing WIGs (which individuals are tasked to create to support the executive’s WIG) are the individual activities or measurable milestones or measurable contributing indicators that ensure individual performance contributes to the overall executive WIG, thereby contributing to the execution of organizational strategy. To further align the Covey execution methods to the organization’s strategy, a disciplined process should be deployed at Tier 3 (individual and team performance objectives for the scorecard system) to ensure that the individual understands the strategic context of their personal and team WIGs. To learn more about how different frameworks integrate into a logical, holistic system to improve organizational performance, we invite you to explore The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning & Management with the Balanced Scorecard.

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” – Roy E. Disney

Values can sometimes seem like the stepchild of strategic planning.  The guts of a strategic plan can include a results-oriented vision translated into specific objectives, measures and initiatives that will support it.

Values, on the other hand, can feel a bit fuzzy. Often, people think of values as a “do-gooder” thing. The exercise of defining values may feel like an exercise in identifying lofty sentiments rather than guiding day-to-day behavior.

Edgar Schein, who has made a career of studying organizational culture and values, makes a distinction between “espoused values” – the things we say we believe in – and “shared tacit assumptions” – the often unspoken assumptions about “the way things are” that actually shape our behavior. All organizations have values, whether these are explicit or not.

This last point is important. For example, Enron had a list of four values that sounded very convincing: respect, integrity, communication and excellence. There also were a number of other values, such as “consistent profits quarter over quarter no matter what,” that weren’t stated, yet were the primary drivers of management behaviors – hidden from public view until it was too late.

These kinds of values – stating things that sound nice but don’t really guide our behavior – are what we call “lobbyware.” They look good on a plaque but don’t really say anything about how we make decisions.

There’s nothing wrong with having a value based on profit—this is how businesses grow and sustain over time. I was working with the executive team of a privately-held company, defining values as part of Step 1 of the Institute’s Nine Step process, and the CEO proposed a value of “profit.” Some of his executives were mildly horrified, to say the least.  They were coming from the paradigm that all values have to be “nice,” and felt that somehow focusing on profit just wouldn’t be very motivating to most employees.  The CEO’s response was telling – “If we don’t make a profit, we’re out of business. And we’re all out of a job.”  Similarly, in the non-profit world, we hear the slogan “No margin, no mission.”

And, all values aren’t necessarily “humanistic” attributes like teamwork, respect, or public service. Values create both an ethical and a practical compass that influences actions and decision in every-day situations. In a “lean” company like Toyota, for example, values include “Go to where the work is done and find the facts,” “Encourage Consistency,” and “Reduce Waste” – all part of a rigorous emphasis on continuous, measureable process improvement.

Ultimately, values reflect the personality of the organization, and are an important component of the organization’s culture – part of the foundational perspective we refer to as “Organizational Capacity.” As part of this, well-articulated values can be a powerful way to attract and screen new employees who are compatible with the culture of your organization.

Finally, the assessment of an organization’s strengths and weaknesses may show that the current values of the leadership or workforce are incompatible with what is needed to move forward, seize opportunities, or adapt to change.  In that case, a strategic theme addressing cultural transformation may be called for.  This cultural transformation may be essential to achieve other goals of the organization.

Read more about Values in The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard.