Five ways our thinking can shift to lead a measurable strategy that aligns everyone to achieve it.
If we want a breakthrough in how our organisation reaches its goals and makes its impact, it likely requires us to shift our thinking first.
Breakthroughs don’t come by mechanically following the eight PuMP steps, or filling out OKR templates, or dropping succinct strategic objectives onto a Strategy Map. When we follow methods without first aligning our thinking to the principles that gave rise to them, all we do is retrofit, and consequently constrain, those methods to our old ways of thinking.
Our ways of thinking are paradigms. And we can shift our strategic performance management paradigms if they’re holding us back from the breakthroughs we want.
Time and again, we find that leaders are frustrated when the popular strategic frameworks just don’t deliver the breakthrough they promised. Searching for another new framework isn’t always the solution. The solution can be found in shifting the way we think about how to get the most from the frameworks we’re already using.
The paradigms that are most important to shift toward, for a breakthrough in strategic organisational performance, are:
- Focus on the result, before the activity.
- Align results through cause-effect, not copy-paste.
- Use measurement for improvement, not judgement.
- Start measurement with evidence, not data.
- Treat measurement as an integration, not an afterthought.
We’ll introduce the meaning of each of these paradigm shifts in this article, and you can download the full white paper if you’d like to find out more about:
- what it looks like in action
- clues to test if the shift is needed
- ideas for how to trigger that shift
Paradigm Shift 1: Focus on the result, before the activity.
We need to be clear about our results – the outcomes or impacts we want – before we can know what action will achieve them.
This is a shift away from monitoring goals based on “what did we do?” and toward monitoring goals based on “what did we achieve?” and “how do we know?”
This paradigm shift highlights a tension between action and result. It’s about finding a balance between the pressure to act quickly, and the discipline to be result-oriented or result-driven. Of course we need to act, but acting without intended results means actions will waste time, effort and money.
The key to finding balance with this tension between results versus action is to lead with purpose. This means defining our desired performance results and their measures first and then choosing actions to achieve those results by moving their measures in the right direction.
This first paradigm shift means putting action and results in the appropriate order, to get the results we really want. With PuMP, we start this paradigm shift very early in the strategic performance management cycle, in how strategic plans are structured.
Paradigm Shift 2: Align results through cause-effect, not copy-paste.
Organisations are systemic, like living organisms, each part contributing uniquely to achieve the results of the whole.
This is a shift away from wanting to see the corporate scorecard in every team’s scorecard, and toward wanting to see how each team’s goals contribute to the corporate goals, either directly or indirectly via the goals of other teams.
This paradigm shift highlights a tension between consistency and contextualisation. It’s about finding a balance between wanting each team’s goals consistent with the strategic direction, and wanting each team’s goals contributing directly to the strategic direction. We certainly don’t want teams going off on resource-wasting tangents that don’t align to strategic direction, but don’t want to ignore their unique role within the organisation’s operational gestalt.
The key to finding balance between consistency and contextualisation is through strategy alignment: by creating alignment through cause-effect goal relationships. The idea is to design a single story of strategy organisation-wide, in a way that allows each team to play their unique role in that story.
This paradigm shift can be achieved by bringing every team’s results and measures together into a cause-effect map of the organisation’s direction. In PuMP we use the Results Map to help teams set goals based on their unique contribution to achieving the organisation’s overall results.
Paradigm Shift 3: Use measurement for improvement, not judgement.
What people believe a KPI or metric or performance measure will be used for fundamentally affects whether performance will improve or not.
To get the most from people in improving organisational performance, we need a shift away from asking ‘how are you performing based on this measure?’ to judge how someone is performing, and toward asking ‘how are you using this measure to improve performance?’ to encourage them to use measures as a tool for improving their process performance.
This paradigm shift highlights a tension between accountability and learning. It’s about finding a balance between making it psychologically safe to learn from failures, and expecting commitment from everyone to perform. It’s entirely true that organisation improves faster by learning faster, and it’s also entirely true that it’s people who do the work to achieve results. Learning-and-improvement cultures always outperform command-and-control cultures, and the role of measurement is a differentiator.
The key to finding balance between learning and accountability, for performance improvement, is to create a new definition of accountability. And this new definition of accountability should focus everyone on owning results and committing to the behaviours of performance improvement.
This paradigm shift makes it safe for people to use measures to learn what isn’t performing well enough, find out why, and change what isn’t working. In PuMP we use a very deliberately designed definition of accountability, that makes it psychologically safe to learn through measurement.
Paradigm Shift 4: Start measurement with evidence, not data.
We can’t get the data we really need until we start with the information we need to understand the results that matter.
This suggests we need a shift away from defining our measures by asking what data do we have, and what is feasible to measure, and toward choosing our measures based on what is relevant to our results and then finding the most feasible way to get that data.
This paradigm shift highlights a tension between available data and relevant evidence. It’s about finding a balance between making use of the readily and easily available data for reporting, and the need to get the data that truly evidences the results that matter. We absolutely should make use of data we have, but we also need to get the data we need, to inform our decisions about the results that matter.
The key to finding balance between relevant evidence and available data in selecting measures is to start with the real-world evidence of our result being achieved. After that, we consider the most feasible options to quantify this evidence, into measures. Then – only then – we look for the data we need. By starting with evidence, it’s easier to streamline the cost of getting the data we need.
This paradigm shift is about making data choices in the context of information needs. If the data we need already exists in our systems, then we use it. But if that data doesn’t get captured by our organisation, we must decide if its value is worth the cost of capturing it. PuMP helps us assess this value by trading off feasibility with strength of evidence, in the measurement of the results we want.
Paradigm Shift 5: Treat measurement as an integration, not an afterthought.
This paradigm shift highlights a tension between retrofitting measurement and embedding it. It’s about finding a balance between maintaining the strategic management frameworks already in use, and achieving more meaningful measurement than those frameworks are capable of. We absolutely should maintain the strategic planning and execution frameworks that are working for us, but because many lack detailed measurement guidance, we need to fill those gaps with a good measurement approach.
The key to finding balance between retrofitting versus embedding measurement is to integrate a proper measurement approach with what is already in place, and working. And we do this by plugging in the appropriate parts of the measurement methodology to fill gaps in those existing frameworks.
This paradigm shift is about building in an approach to measurement that is consistent across the organisation, and that can support all the existing strategic management processes that need it. Integrating a measurement approach, like PuMP, should feel like an improvement to how we do those other things. It shouldn’t feel like another thing to do.
Download the full white paper “Paradigm Shifts For Strategic Breakthrough” to see how these paradigm shifts look in action, to test if your organisation needs any of these shifts, and to get ideas for triggering the shifts:
