KPIs That Actually Drive Performance
The KPI Crisis in Modern Business Most organisations are drowning in metrics while starving for insight. According to research by MIT Sloan Management Review, over 70% of executives believe their KPI systems don’t provide the strategic guidance they need (Neely & Bourne, 2020). This disconnect illustrates a fundamental problem: despite the prevalence of performance measurement systems, few organisations have metrics that genuinely drive improvement. As David Parmenter explains in his seminal work “Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs” (2015), “Most organisations have been measuring the wrong things in the wrong way.” The result is what he calls “measurement dysfunction”—where metrics create perverse incentives, drive suboptimal behaviors, or simply fail to influence performance at all. ...