Over the years, scorecards have progressed through many changes, good and bad. Although scorecards often evolve into a meet-the-numbers game, regardless of the consequences to an enterprise as a whole, restructuring can produce dramatic improvements for any organization. This results in counter-productive initiatives, 24/7 firefighting, the blame game, and proliferation of fanciful stories about why goals weren’t met. 

Scorecards that show raw numbers—with no trend lines and only how well the latest response is in tracking against a goal—often of questionable origin, can be very misleading. Most scorecards fail to distinguish between common cause and special cause variability. That doesn’t produce true remediation of systemic problems.

Some scorecards use a single index for factors that should be tracked separately. The opposite can produce metrics overload with so many factors being measured that what’s truly meaningful is buried in a sea of numbers.

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