Strategic planning metrics: lag, owners and triggers

The measures attached to a plan are usually chosen for a reason nobody says out loud: they are the ones already being collected. That is why the same handful appears on every plan regardless of what the plan decided, and why the review meeting can be full of numbers and produce no decision.

A measure earns a place in your strategic planning metrics only if you can state three things about it before you publish it: when it will move, how it will be distorted, and who has to act when it does something unexpected. This page is about getting those three right.

What to take away

Lag is the property everyone skips

A plan usually mixes four kinds of measure with wildly different response times, and putting them on one page without labeling the lag is how review meetings go wrong.

Plan measures usually fall into recognizable families: leading indicators, chosen because they move early; lagging indicators, the outcomes the plan is actually betting on; and execution counts that sit between them. Named frameworks bundle them differently. Objectives and key results, or OKRs, hold each objective to a small set of leading and outcome measures. The Balanced Scorecard, from Robert Kaplan and David Norton, pairs financial lagging measures with customer, internal process, and learning measures that are meant to move earlier.

Give each row a real measure before anything goes on the plan. For the “did the thing happen” row, count onboarding steps completed: it moves in days and confirms only that work is happening. For a weeks-long use row, measure how often a new process is used after training. Customer retention and cost per order are outcome measures that move over a quarter or more; market share is slower still. The row a measure sits in decides which review can honestly ask about it.

Ignoring this causes two failures. First, impatience: an outcome measure checked monthly wobbles for unrelated reasons, and the initiative gets amended on noise.

A control chart, a tool in statistical process control (SPC), helps separate movement a measure produces anyway from meaningful movement. The NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods describes this practice. That reasoning transfers to plan review even without the chart.

The second is complacency: only slow measures are chosen, nothing is expected to move for two quarters, and by the time it does not move, the year is gone.

The fix is to carry one fast measure and one slow one, labeled, and to say plainly which question each can answer and when. Then agree in the room that the fast one is not evidence of success and the slow one is not available yet.

Name the distortion when you adopt the measure

Any measure that carries consequences will be optimized, sometimes in ways that damage what it was standing in for. That is not cynicism about people. It is Goodhart's law.

That is no reason to avoid measuring. At adoption, write down this sentence: "the cheapest way to make this number look good without doing the work is ..."

That sentence is usually easy to write and almost never written. Once it exists, two things follow. You know which second measure to watch alongside it, because the cheap route always degrades something. And when the number improves, you have a stated alternative explanation to rule out rather than a celebration to interrupt.

The rule is not that both must improve, but that you look at both, always, in the same breath. The quality management side holds the paired number and often belongs to another team, which is why it gets omitted.

Measure the decisions, not only the results

A plan's outcome is unavailable for months. Its execution is visible now, and it is what you can actually correct.

Things worth counting that are available immediately:

None of these tell you whether the bet was right. All of them tell you whether the plan is being executed, and a plan that is not being executed cannot be evaluated at all.

When the measure you want does not exist yet

Frequently the right measure needs data you do not collect, and the honest options are worse than people admit.

You can build the collection, which takes months and delays the answer. You can pick a proxy, which is available now and is not the thing. Or you can go and look, which does not scale and is more informative than either.

If you take a proxy, write down what makes it a proxy in the plan, next to the number.

"Sign-ups stand in for adoption, and will overstate it if the trial is easy to start" saves an argument nine months later. The proxy has moved; the real thing has not.

Proxies drift from what they stand for over time, always in the flattering direction, because people learn what is counted.

Where the volume is too low for any number to mean anything, stop looking for a measure and go and examine the individual cases. Ten cases read properly beat a percentage calculated from twelve.

How many, and who owns each

Small numbers of measures are not a stylistic preference. A page with fifteen numbers has no priority on it, so the review discusses whichever moved most, which is usually the noisiest rather than the most important.

Two or three per initiative, each with a named person who is expected to explain it. Not to defend it: to explain it, which means saying what caused the movement and what they intend to do. For example, the initiative lead can own assumption tests run by their stated date, reporting whether each ran, explaining any miss, and recommending the next action. The operations lead can own the count of work blocked on another team, identify the blocker, and bring an unblock request. A measure with no owner produces a discussion in which everyone offers a theory and nobody is accountable for the next step.

Write a trigger as a threshold plus an action before the review begins. For example, if fewer than two assumption tests run by their stated date in a weekly review, the initiative lead brings the blockers to the review and assigns a recovery action and date before accepting new plan work. Set the threshold to fit the plan; this is an example, not a universal target. Decide in advance what number triggers an action, and which action. “We will keep an eye on it” is what everyone says; it means the number is read as commentary for as long as the initiative lasts.

The strategic planning pillar sets out how to write that trigger before anyone is attached to the outcome. That is the only time it can be written honestly.

Retiring a measure

Measures accumulate. Almost nothing is ever removed, so dashboards grow until nobody reads them, at which point the organization is measuring a great deal and noticing nothing.

One bad reason: it is embarrassing. A measure that is telling you something you do not like is doing its job, and removing it is the most common way a plan stops being falsifiable.

Put a review date on each measure when you adopt it, as you would with the rest of the plan.

The practice of rewriting plan lines so they can be acted on, covered in strategic planning examples, applies to measurement lines too. A number with no trigger and no owner is another sentence nobody can act on.

Where a plan measure ends up feeding an individual's evaluation, treat that as a separate decision with separate consequences. Numbers designed to steer an organization behave differently once someone's standing depends on them, as performance management sets out, and anything with formal consequences for a person should go through your HR function rather than through a dashboard.

Common questions

Should plan measures be the same as operational measures?

Rarely. Operational measures answer "is the work running normally," and they are chosen for stability. Plan measures answer "is this change working," and they should be chosen for sensitivity, which usually makes them noisier and shorter-lived. Using one set for both purposes gives you numbers too slow to steer the plan and too jumpy to run the work.

What if the honest answer is that we cannot measure this?

Say it in the plan. Then name what you will look at instead, whether that is a small number of cases examined in detail or a scheduled conversation with the people closest to the work. An acknowledged gap is manageable. A number invented to fill the gap will be quoted for years.

How do we stop the review turning into a defense of the numbers?

Ask for the explanation before the judgment, and separate the two meetings if you can. When the same session decides both what the number means and what it implies for the person presenting it, you will reliably get a well-argued explanation and no useful information.