Establishing a meaningful way of measuring, tracking, governing, and reporting provides necessary discipline to stay the course and make adjustments for successful execution.
This is the fourth area of the Middle Ground®. And the pattern should be clear by now: you cannot establish meaningful measurement beyond the usual lag indicators without first having built out the plan that preserves your competitive strategy.
The process and practice for supporting execution needs thought. Too often, tracking processes become mechanistic and are not sensitive enough to identify the dynamics of performance.
Too often, lists of lag metrics are over-weighted in assessing performance. Organizations track revenue, EBITDA, NPS—important outcomes, but they’ve already happened. By the time these numbers move, it’s often too late to adjust course effectively.
Early insight using early progress markers, lead indicators and observations allows organizations to address challenges ahead of the curve and to amplify those aspects that are going well and could be accelerated.
But which lead indicators matter? You cannot answer this without the architecture of your Middle Ground® plan.
When you’ve built your plan with strategic pillars and initiatives clearly defined, the question becomes: What are the early signals that will tell us whether this pillar is gaining traction? Whether this initiative is working?
If you have a pillar focused on “Establish market leadership in a key segment,” what are the lead indicators? Perhaps it’s qualified leads from target customers, or conversion rates in pilot programs, or partner commitment to the offering. These indicators emerge directly from understanding the initiatives under that pillar.
If you have an initiative within that pillar to “Build strategic partnerships with major industry players,” what tells you early whether that’s working? Perhaps it’s the number of meetings secured with senior players, or proposals requested, or pilots agreed to. You can only identify these by looking at what the initiative is designed to accomplish.
When teams are more able to directly connect their activity to the strategic intent of their work through a well-articulated plan, they are better able to measure the effectiveness of the activity and forecast the outcome.
One of our clients struggled with measurement until they built out their plan completely. Only then did they realize their “customer satisfaction” metric wasn’t sensitive to their customer-intimate strategy. They needed to measure responsiveness—time from customer request to solution delivered—because that’s what their strategy promised and what their initiatives were designed to improve.
The plan made the disconnect visible. Without it, they were measuring the wrong things and wondering why performance wasn’t improving.
Increasingly important is getting a baseline measure on strategy execution itself. Measuring this over time will serve as a predictor of future performance and is likely to be an important driver and indicator of the organization’s market value.
But how do you measure “strategy execution”? The easiest and most accessible for you is to measure the health and progress of your Middle Ground® plan:
Strategy execution can be measured objectively as well and can position you to increased certainty of future performance.
Ongoing refinement of the appropriateness and currency of measures themselves is as important as the results of measurements.
The plan provides the framework for this refinement. As you execute, you learn which lead indicators truly predict success in each pillar. You adjust. The plan makes those adjustments coherent rather than reactive.
The Bottom Line
Without the Middle Ground® plan providing structure, measurement becomes a shopping list of metrics that may or may not matter. With the plan, measurement becomes a disciplined system that gives you early insight into whether your strategy is working.
The plan is the foundation. Measurement brings it to life with accountability and learning.
Have you built your plan with enough clarity to know which lead indicators will tell you whether each strategic pillar is working?
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