Habit 5 – Use future-focused measures
| Habit 5 requires you to use future-focused measures that are controllable and predictive in achieving your goal. |
Measurement is a critical ingredient of action. It drives value creation. Measures keep you focused.
If you can’t, don’t or won’t measure performance, you can’t, don’t or won’t improve on it.
This where Habit 5 of effective execution comes in – Use ambitious future-focused measures that are controllable.
Using measures to drive behavioural change
The attainment of a goal can be measured by past, current and future-focused measures. But measure the wrong things, you will likely get the wrong behaviours.
Using the airline example, there are three types of measures that are related to the goal of increasing the percentage of planes departing on time from 80% to 90% by December 20XX:
- A past measure (or lag measure) is the number of late planes last week – This backwards looking measure tells you if you have achieved attain the measure (or goal) over the past week. A lag measure is, therefore, a measurement of the result that you were trying to achieve.
- A current measure is the number of planes that are more than two hours late. This measure is continuously being updated, and it is current.
- A future-focused measure (or lead measure) is the number of projects completed over the next two months targeted on areas that are causing late plane departures. This forward-looking measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the measure (or goal). The achievement of this measure should be within your control (see below). If this future-focused measure changes, you can confidently predict that your lag measures will also change when it is measured the following week.
Future-focused measures are most connected to achieving your goal and foretelling your results if chosen correctly. Identify the most important activities that will influence or move these future-focused measures towards goal attainment.
Unfortunately, it is easier to focus on lag measures because data on lag measures are easier to obtain. It is also more visible than data on lead measures.
Ambitious but not overly stretch
Find ambitious and challenging measures that motivate and improve your performance rather than implementing stretch measures that cause burnout, unnecessary risk-taking, and unethical behaviours.
By design, stretch measures are supposed to be aggressively or overly ambitious, aiming for results that are radically beyond your current capacity and output.
Measures must be controllable by the accountable person
The controllability principle states that people should be held accountable only for the actions and results that they can significantly influence and are able to control. This is where the accountability of actions should not exceed controllability.
When the accountable person does not have the power to sufficiently influence an activity or decision making, the measure used will not supply the right information about that person’s performance. The lack of controllability has negatively impacted performance measures. We, therefore, cannot hold anyone to account (Habit 7) when they do not have any control over the performance of the measures.