If you’ve attended one of my recent Practical Dashboards workshops, you’ve heard me mention Louise Watson. Louise’s name comes up when we discuss performance dashboards, specifically, when I underscore the fact that dashboards on their own won’t improve organizational performance and that a host of broader strategic skills and tools are required to even know whether an organization is actually improving or not. Louise teaches those strategic skills and tools to organizations using Stacey Barr’s globally recognized PUMP Blueprint and Evidence-Based Leadership Program. While I haven’t evaluated every such program out there, this is certainly the best one I’ve come across.

I was lucky enough to be able to interview Louise recently and have posted a video of that short (19 min) interview below. If you’ve struggled with performance dashboards or choosing KPIs in the past, I’m pretty confident that you’ll get lots of answers from our discussion.

A few gems:

Why a dashboard on its own won’t improve performance (despite the fact that many people assume that it will).
Why the “evidence gap” is the real pain point underlying many leaders’ demands for a performance dashboard.
Why quick fixes, such as choosing KPIs from a standard KPI library, can actually do more harm than good.
Some KPI bad habits that often torpedo performance improvement initiatives.
Key elements that need to be in place for a performance improvement initiative to be successful, beyond just developing a dashboard.

Enjoy!

By the way…

If you’re interested in attending my Practical Charts or Practical Dashboards course, here’s a list of my upcoming open-registration workshops.