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Comparing Outcomes With Goals and Objectives

Okay, so you’re ready to face the music of your decision. Where do you begin?

Start with a trip down memory lane: What goals and objectives did you set as a result of your decisions? How were you going to measure success?

If you made these determinations upfront, as part of your strategic-planning process, you will have a turnkey measurement to determine if your outcomes were aligned with what you set out to do in the first place.

Be careful of mistaking outcomes with outputs. The latter is easy to measure, such as how many units of new product you pushed into the market. But an outcome is how much revenue you recouped from product sales.

According to Dr. Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton, founders of the Balanced Scorecard theory, this tendency to measure what’s easy is a weakness in many organizations. As a result, they tend to measure output, such as how many product units were pushed into the market in a given time frame. But remember, the outcome is the result of the outputs.