May 2009 Deep Insights

If you don’t know where you are going you could easily wind up someplace else. To avoid “some place else” organizations must do more than use goals to keep urgency and energy focused on results. Organizations must capture learning through the use of leading indicators tracked with dashboards.

The pace of business has gone from years, months, weeks, days, minutes and now nanoseconds. In the past lagging indicators were sufficient because speed was not an issue. Today speed is the catalyst for innovation. Organizations must focus on goals measured by dashboards that indicate to everyone we are going in the right direction, that outside influences have not made our strategy obsolete. Traveling at warp speed without dashboard indicators could cause insurmountable damage to an organization. Blotted inventories, massive consumer defections, employee dissatisfaction and unnecessary cash drain. This damage can only be avoided with the construction of navigational dashboards indicating an abrupt course correction is required, now.

Dashboards are an integral warning system used to catch issues before damage is done but they are at best a warning system. When the warning light or alarm indicates an emergency, PEOPLE must act. They must quite the alarm, verify the emergency and have the ability to generate urgency from those who can make decisions. Damage control must be focused; What has/is happening? Why is it happening? What are we learning and Who should we tell? Answering these questions directs people to act, keeping their goal in mind and focusing on results not effort. Learning is the reward of following processes that lead us to a goal. Rewards that are ahead of damage control, that prompt employees to grasp urgency and take action, without waiting for management to take control. Organizations that achieve this state have created transparency of information leading to many informed decision makers not just a few.

Learning captured, transferred, and shared becomes the process by which future indicators can be built. Indicators are forever changing because problems occur that are immune to old dashboards. The alert sounded will seldom repeat itself. Speed helps everyone realize tomorrow is another sunrise never seen. The new day will not be yesterday nor will tomorrow be like today. The only road that will lead us there is a process capturing learning for immediate action.