Metrics, Scoreboards, Dashboards, and Hope
Last week I interviewed Dianne, a wonderful Australian woman who lives in the slums of Bangkok and leads like a Hobbit. She’s running a community health program for Pakistani refugees who live in her neighborhood, and her work is both outstanding and inspiring. Dianne was telling me about her project and how she measures her success; the number of leaders, the number of nurses trained, how many patients go through the clinics.
Then Dianne said, “the heart of what I do isn’t really about those things. The thing I need to figure out how to measure is hope, because hope is the outcome I most desire when this is all said and done.”
How does one measure hope?
We chatted about some options for measuring the mental health of the Pakistani refugees she serves. There are possibilties.
We need to figure out how to measure our vision. Without an expected outcome, vision is no longer vision; it’s a daydream.
Every expected outcome needs a roadmap for getting there. \
The road map is your metric.
Basic productivity is knowing something about the progress you make. This makes you ask questions about your work and how to measure success.
- How many potential clients have I spoken with on the phone this week?
- How many batches of cupcakes did I bake?
- How many words did I write?
- How many hours did I spend working on the project?
- How many miles did I run?
Figure your metric and create a scoreboard (It can be as simple as a check mark on a calendar). Leaders who need to track metrics for their entire team need dashboards, which is basically a bunch of individual scoreboards in one place.
Again — some metrics are easier to figure out than others.
Dianne will track patients served and nurses trained and figure out how to track hope.
Operating without metrics is like driving at random in the general direction of your destination, hoping you get there eventually. You can travel that way — but it’s an inefficient and terrible system.
Know what you’re measuring.
Use a map.
Create a scoreboard.
When necessary, build a dashboard.
