The Scoreboard Is Lying to You (Sort Of)
Capstone Newsletter · Issue 1
I’ve sat across the table from a lot of CEOs. Different industries, different sizes, different problems on the surface. But almost every one of them has the same dashboard.
OKRs. KPIs. CSFs. Whatever acronym their consultant sold them on.
And every single one of those dashboards has the exact same flaw. Nobody wants to say it out loud, so I will.
You don’t know you hit the number until you’ve already hit it.
Revenue grew 40%? Great — you find that out after the quarter’s closed and there’s nothing left to steer. Churn dropped? Confirmed once it’s already happened. You’re reading a rearview mirror and calling it a windshield.
That’s not a knock on OKRs or KPIs. They’re fine frameworks. The problem is how people use them: staring at the number like watching it harder is going to move it. It won’t. The number moves because of what you did weeks before it changed.
So here’s the real question. Forget the number you report to your board. What should you be watching this week that tells you the number is already headed the right way?
A story from the field
I had a client find out the hard way… well, the easy way, actually, because we caught it early. Services company, moving into the dental practice market. Selling to private equity roll-up owners and independent docs both. New territory, real money on the line.
The outcome everyone cared about was signed contracts. New revenue. But that number wasn’t moving for months — that’s just how sales cycles work in that space. If we’d sat around waiting for the scoreboard to tell us whether the strategy was working, we’d have found out too late to fix anything.
They would have waited. I pushed for a new way of looking at it — and coaching made the difference, because I could see what was in their blind spot. Every week, we tracked something else entirely: Are we identifying the right accounts? Are touchpoints stacking up toward the six to seven touches it typically takes before a prospect in this space actually engages? Are case studies and referrals landing at the right stage of the funnel?
We weren’t asking “did revenue move.” We were asking “is the thing that causes revenue to move, moving.” Long before the first contract closed, we already knew the trajectory was right. When that deal finally landed, nobody on the team was surprised. The lagging number had just caught up to what the leading indicators had been telling us for months.
The four-step version
Here’s what we did, if you want to steal it:
- Locate the lagging outcome. Name the actual number you’re accountable for. Not “grow revenue” — I’m talking “$2M in new-vertical revenue by Q4.”
- Engineer the leading activities. Work backward from that number to the specific actions that cause it. Not busywork — activities with a proven line to the result.
- Align cadence and thresholds. Set targets for the activities themselves, at a frequency that makes the outcome statistically likely, not just theoretically possible. Most plans skip this step completely. It’s the whole game.
- Drive on the leading indicators. Track the activities weekly. Watch the gap close. You’ll know you’re on trajectory long before the lagging number can prove it to you.
That’s it. That’s the whole discipline.
Stop staring at the scoreboard. Build the business around the activities that cause the score to move, track those relentlessly, and the outcome takes care of itself. You still won’t know you’ve hit the target until you hit it. But you’ll know you’re headed there a long time before you arrive.
— Lew
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