Design Measures For One Result At A Time

An easy mistake to make with PuMP’s Measure Design template is to put all the performance results derived from the same goal together into the template, and then try to design measures for all of them at the same time. Here’s why that’s a problem…

Often, a Measurability Test creates more than one result from a single goal. Especially if the goal is weasely, and most are, you can end up with a multi-focused goal. And that means you’ll have two, three, or sometimes more individual performance results at the end of your Measurability Test template. Consider this goal, for an executive health consultant:

“Launching our new health program for C-level executives helps our clients reach and maintain peak performance and guarantees financial sustainability for our company over both short and long term.”

You can quickly see that it’s multi-focused. After working through the PuMP Measurability Tests for this goal, these are the three performance results that the company felt summed up their intent:

And sometimes what follows is this: all of the performance results from that one Measurability Tests template get copied and pasted into the top of the Measure Design template. Just like this company did:

And can you guess what happens in the next step of Measure Design, listing the sensory evidence?

That’s right; there is confusion or overwhelm. Or both. Effort needs to be made to keep the sensory evidence specific to each separate performance result. And trying to keep a team focused on designing measures for three separate performance results concurrently it very tiring.

The solution is simple: each individual performance result gets it’s own separate Measure Design. If your Measurability Test produces two results, you’ll have two Measure Design templates filled out. If it produces three results, you’ll have three Measure Design templates to fill out.

It isn’t more work – it actually saves time. Research has found that “even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.”