Keeping Your “Eyes on the Prize”: The Power of Radically Informative Indicators
In today’s data-saturated business environment, organizations often find themselves drowning in metrics while still struggling to understand their true performance. Many companies measure everything they can, creating complex dashboards that ultimately obscure rather than illuminate. As one executive lamented while pointing to a 40-slide deck: “I have a staff member spending almost all of their days collecting this information!”
Less is More: The Case for Radically Informative Indicators
What if the solution isn’t more measurement, but better measurement? This is where Radically Informative Indicators (RIIs) come in. RIIs are a few key measures that describe the overall health of an organization by tracking aspects of performance that matter most and have the greatest impact on the organization’s competitive strategy.
Think of RIIs as the “kings” of measures; they provide a clear line of sight to strategic outcomes. Much like the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule), a small percentage of your measurements will yield the most significant insights about organizational performance.
Why Measurement Is So Difficult
Before diving into creating RIIs, it’s important to understand why measurement itself is challenging:
- Measurement invokes power and creates anxiety. When we measure something, we change the system we’re measuring.
- What we measure gets attention – often to the exclusion of other important factors. As Steven Kerr noted in his famous article “On the Folly of Rewarding A, while Hoping for B,” people tend to focus exclusively on what’s being measured and rewarded.
- Sometimes measurement interferes with success, particularly in creative processes or emergency situations where the act of measuring can be a distraction.
Creating Effective RIIs
Strong RIIs serve three primary purposes:
- They provide organizational motivation by highlighting performance gaps
- They offer clarity regarding strategic goal achievement
- They enable strategic learning by showing the impact of different courses of action
For RIIs to be effective, they must be:
- Directly connected to the organization’s strategy and mission
- Be reliable indicators of long-term organizational health
- Easily verified and reported
RIIs in Action
Consider the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), which identified four key metrics that would drive their strategic vision:
- Deep and wide engagement: Measuring meaningful experiences across different levels of interaction
- People: Tracking attraction and retention of expert staff
- Buzz: Measuring recognition in the larger field
- Passionate giving: Tracking donations of art, funds, and time
In the corporate world, a pharmaceutical company and its travel agency partner were on the brink of severing their relationship due to performance issues. By analyzing dozens of metrics, they distilled their focus to just five performance dimensions that predicted the one RII that mattered most: customer satisfaction. This focus allowed them to save their partnership and improve service.
The OD Professional’s Role
Organization Development professionals play a crucial role in helping organizations identify and implement RIIs. They bring data collection expertise, facilitation skills, and the ability to build consensus around which metrics truly matter. In an increasingly volatile world, the ability to focus on what truly drives organizational success is invaluable.
When organizations effectively implement RIIs, they can focus on “what really matters,” understand when they’re on track, and help all organizational members grasp how their work connects to the organization’s vision and strategy.
The challenge—and opportunity—is to find the few key indicators that truly illuminate your organization’s path forward, keeping your team’s “eyes on the prize” rather than lost in the forest of data.
(adapted from “Leading with Radically Informative Indicators: Understanding Business Impact”, OD Practitioner; by Laura Freebairn-Smith, Patrice Murphy, and Ross Tartell; 2017)
