I am delighted that Mike has asked me to put up some of my newsletters on this forum. When you want to have a chat to me about any of the content, drop me a line at phil@excitant.co.uk.

What do you notice?

Have you noticed how you notice what you are paying attention to? Are you paying attention to the letter t in this newsletter? I doubt you were, but you are now, and you can stop if you want. Likewise, when you get a new car that you thought was unique in colour and model, suddenly every other car you see seems to be the same.

The opposite is also true. You tend not to notice what you are not paying attention to, unless it catches your attention. You probably didn?t think about the punctuation in the last paragraph. You just read it and it passed you by. It didn?t try to attract your attention.

You have probably noticed how the same is true with performance measurement and management. Recently we were working with a City Council, which involved helping them improve their planning processes and pay more attention to the quality of their thinking about strategy. As a part of the work, we took a look at the existing strategic plans and cast them as a strategy map, with interesting results.

Two things quickly became apparent: Firstly there were plenty of measures and activities around what they did. There were also many measures of how the council would tell whether things had changed for their community. There were, of course, plenty of financial measures.

Something was missing, though. We found few statements, let alone measures, of how the council would change. How would they change? What would make the difference? This was a council that was trying to improve the way it worked. Yet evidence of what they were going to do differently was sparse. In fact we had a completely blank ?Learning & Growth? perspective.

Now, no doubt, they had been thinking about how the organisation needed to develop and how this would change overall performance and make the strategy happen. Yet that thinking was not clearly nor explicitly captured. They were not paying attention to it. Guess what. It wasn?t happening much either. As the Chief Executive put it, ?What is happening with our change programme? We seem to have forgotten it?

As you think about your organisation, you?ll start to notice what it might not be paying attention to.

Phil Jones
Strategy & Performance Specialist
Author of "Communicating Strategy"
Strategic Performance Management Specialists
Communicating Strategy: The book and consultancy services