How to Achieve any Goal:  Supercharge the Lead Measure

Businesses are constantly trying to tackle big goals.  These are goals that they may be struggling to achieve.  Focus is often placed on the goal and how it was tackled in the past, but that is not always helpful.  In fact, that may very well be the problem.  Instead of focusing on the outcome, researchers have found that it’s much more effective to focus on actions most connected to achieving that goal and most likely to predict future performance.  Just supercharge the actions on the front end most likely to achieve the ultimate goal. 

Experts in the field of strategic management look at these efforts as the lead measures and the lag measures.  Lead measures are those that can be used to predict future performance. They are often used to track progress towards a goal or objective. Lagging measures, on the other hand, measure past performance. They can be used to assess the success of a strategy or initiative.  The problem is that managers often focus on lag measures in order to hit a goal — doing more of what’s been done in the past – instead of focusing on the lead measures that might predict future results. But, as the saying goes, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.

Case in point.  In the 1950s, children in the U.S. were scoring alarmingly low on reading tests.  Basically, kids could not read.  And post-World War II Americans needed to have a literate workforce.  The goal was to improve the reading scores of children.  And the approach was to have kids learn to read the way they had always learned to read.  Schoolteachers had been parking young students in front of these very basic books called “basal readers or primers”, such as the Dick and Jane series. The instructional approach of these primers was that beginning readers learned new words best by associating them with pictures and memorizing them through repetition.  It was a “look and say” method… and it was BORING.  The stories about Dick and Jane were duller than watching paint dry.  The books had no plot and were littered with mind-numbing, repetitious mini-sentences, such as “Look, Jane. Look, look. See Dick. See Spot run. Oh, see. See Dick and Spot.”  Not only were the stories terribly literal and had no plot, but the illustrations were stuffy and bland.  They were so uninspiring and tiresome that kids hated reading them.   As a result, reading test scores were dropping lower and lower.  And yet schools kept trying to improve reading scores by having kids spend even more time reading basal readers. 

As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  Teaching reading the way it had always been taught was to focus on the Lag Measures instead of on Lead Measures. 

So how did educators go about trying to achieve the goal of raising reading test scores?  Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey began to really look at the problem.  He read the children’s books that kids were expected to read.  He met with experts.  He visited schools to observe the teaching of reading.  And it did not take long for Hersey to spot the problem:  children’s books were boring, pointless and not engaging in the least.  They simply weren’t interesting.  Reading troubles came from a failure to help children want to read.  Hersey understood that reading – as an activity — needed to compete with radio, movies, toys, comic books, magazines, sports and other pastimes that were a lot more fun.  To be able to compete and help children to want to read, Hersey understood that children’s books needed to be more interesting and engaging. 

Hersey published an article challenging book publishers to come up with books that were interesting to kids.  An editor at publishing house Houghton Mifflin asked illustrator Theodore Seuss Geisel to come up with a children’s book that a first grader would not want to put down.  It needed to use a vocabulary list of 300 “accepted” words at a first grade level.  Mr. Geisel played around with the list of 300 words and looked for words that rhymed and made sense.  From the list, he chose cat and hat.  Less than three years later, Houghton Mifflin released Mr. Geisel’s book titled “The Cat in the Hat”.  Using 236 unique words, the book was amusing, engaging and just plain fun.  The character was likeable yet also a bit of a rebel, the verses had a deliberate sense of humor and the illustrations were colorful and zany.  It was the exact opposite of the Dick and Jane Primers.  The Cat in the Hat not only proved that reading could be fun for millions of children, but it transformed children’s reading forever and raised reading test scores. Following the success of The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss went on to write a series of bestselling children’s books including Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hears a Who, and countless others.

To achieve the goal of raising the nation’s low reading test scores was to make children’s books more interesting.  The lag measure was that millions of kids were struggling to read as reflected by their low test scores.  The underlying issue was that the books were boring.  So the lead measure was to write books that millions of kids could not put down because they were so engaging.   

So what does this have to do with achieving a goal in business?  Nothing and everything.  The rules apply.  First, the goal must be identified.  Then the issue must be reviewed to spot the Lag Measure.  And then new ideas must be generated – Lead Measures — that tackle the Lag Measure and ultimately achieve the goal.  It is a formula that works for any kind of goal. 

For example, an online business might track the number of website visitors as a lead measure and use revenue as a lag measure. The number of website visitors can help the business predict how much revenue they will generate.  If the lead measure is website visitors, then the marketing team must hyper focus on ways to drive traffic to the website, such as sales, discounts, coupons, or useful information.  By focusing on the lead measure, it boosts the lag measure used to gauge the goal.  

Or, a sales team might track the number of sales calls made as a lead measure and the number of sales closed as a lag measure in order to achieve the goal of raising sales YOY by 20%. The number of sales calls made can help the sales team identify which leads are most likely to convert into sales.

Or, a customer service team might track the number of customer complaints as a lead measure and the customer satisfaction score as a lag measure. The number of customer complaints can help the customer service team identify areas where they need to improve.

By understanding what is the lag measure and what are the lead measures, the leadership can then apply a disproportionate energy to the lead measures in order to achieve the goal.  So how does a manager or company owner identify the lead measures?

Steps to Achieve a Goal

1. Define the lag measure. What is the ultimate goal to be achieved? This could be something like: increase revenue, reduce costs, or improve customer satisfaction.  The more specific the goal, the better.  In the case study above, the goal was to improve children’s reading scores on tests.
2. Identify activities that lead to the lag measure. What are the things that need to happen in order to achieve that goal?  Why would those activities produce that result?  Those are the lead measures.   In the case study, the activities was to create books that were more engaging and visually stimulating. 
3. Assess the validity of the lead measures. Do they have a direct and measurable impact on the lag measure? Are they within the team’s control?  In the case study, how many children wanted to read The Cat in the Hat had a direct and measurable impact on reading.
4. Select the most important lead measures. It is not necessary to track every lead measure. Choose those that are most important to achieving the goal.  In the case study, once it was clear that fun, plot-driven books with engaging characters and colorful illustrations made kids want to read, it was not necessary to track the sales of all such books. 
5. Track lead measures over time. This will help determine the progress being made toward the goal.  In the case study, once it was clear that interesting books made kids want to read, then what was measured was how well children did on reading tests nationwide.  That was tracked over time to ensure that scores continued to improve.
6. Make adjustments as needed. If the lead measures are not moving in the right direction, make adjustments to the strategy.  In the case study, if reading scores had not improved, then other kinds of strategies would have been needed to help improve reading such as flash cards, games or other activities.

Whether in the business of education, technology, real estate or finance, it doesn’t matter what the goal is.  What matters is understanding and identifying the measures most likely to affect the goal and then apply a disproportionate energy to the lead measures in order to achieve the goal. 

Quote of the Week

“The key to success is to focus on the process rather than the outcome.”
Peter Drucker

© 2023, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.

The post How to Achieve any Goal:  Supercharge the Lead Measure first appeared on Monday Mornings with Madison.