Tom Critchlow on executive dashboards

Tom Critchlow has some interesting thoughts on dashboards in businesses, which in his experience (and mine) tend to suck. That’s mostly because they’re backwards-looking:

“Company dashboards are designed around metrics and measurement of results - they’re trying to measure what has happened.

“Measuring what happened is important, obviously. But it’s a bit like driving a car only looking in the rear view mirror…

“It’s also important, however, to measure what is happening.

“Unfortunately in my consulting work most companies don’t have any kind of measurement in place for the left hand side of the equation.”

There’s some great practical advice for what to do about it, too.