Strategy and analysis
Balanced Scorecard
Rank performance drivers across the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives — Financial, Customer, Internal Process, and Learning & Growth.
What the framework is
The Balanced Scorecard looks at an organisation from four perspectives: Financial, Customer, Internal Process, and Learning & Growth. Robert Kaplan and David Norton introduced it in 1992, so that performance would not be judged on money alone. Each perspective gets a few objectives, and each objective a measure.
What the result looks like
Financial
Customer
Internal Process
Learning & Growth
When it earns its place
Use it when setting annual objectives, when a strategy needs turning into measures, or when an NGO or member organisation must show more than its budget. The hard part is not filling four boxes. It's choosing the few objectives per box that the organisation will actually track.
The usual failure is twenty objectives per perspective, none of them measured by the following year.
How to run it with a group
- List three to six candidate objectives in each of the four perspectives.
- Participants work through the perspectives one at a time. In each, they compare objectives two at a time. Participants do not need an account to respond.
- Invite people from each part of the organisation, since each perspective belongs to someone different.
- Keep the top two objectives per perspective, and give each an owner and one measure before the session ends.