Five principles of successful organizations emerged from Kaplan and Norton’s research on successful Balanced Scorecard adaptors. Hence, the five principles describe the key elements of building an organization that can focus on strategy while delivering breakthrough results. Additionally, high-performance groups depend heavily on effective facilitation and participant ownership.

The nineties are arguably the most worldwide productive in economic history. Because productivity accelerated, market values rose, and unemployment fell to record lows. However, in a Zook survey, only 13 percent of organizations achieved shareholder returns greater than the cost of capital. Therefore setting up the need for a return to strategy, such as the Balanced Scorecard. History will show a pattern of

“excessive exuberance”

to quote Alan Greenspan, and a shift from strategy to tactics, such as:

• First to market
• Operational excellence
• Customer relationship management

As companies abandoned strategy, they began to pay the price—proven by the implosion over the next fifteen years, leading us to, today. Compound that abandonment with a shift from a manufacturing era to the age of knowledge. Notice the transformation in the workplace . . .

Five principles of Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard include . . .

1. Align the organization to the strategy—Nobody is smarter than everybody and robust alignment requires multiple perspectives. An effective, neutral facilitator is the best choice for securing alignment among a group of people.
2. Make strategy a continual process—The journey is more important than the destination, and there is no better guide on a journey than a well-prepared facilitator using an appropriate methodology.
3. Make strategy everyone’s job—Ownership is key and facilitated sessions can secure individual commitments that must be met to save face. The key output of any facilitated session is agreement on WHO does WHAT and WHEN.
4. Mobilize change through executive leadership—Big egos demand great skill and facilitators earn their income over and over when forced to deal with executives, who many times embrace being rational as what is best for them, rather than the entire group. Facilitation helps avoid such a fallacy.
5. Translate the strategy into operational terms—Requiring a life cycle of activities as ideas are transformed from the abstract to the concrete.  Hence, no better leader can be found than one who manages context on behalf of the subject matter experts.

The message becomes clear. When you want to accelerate results, you better place a high value on the role of facilitator. They can pay for themselves many times over. They may generate more economic value for the organization than other roles, even the CEO. The CEO who has the answer but is unable to realize these five principles within their own organization will likely generate sub-optimal returns.

Balanced Scorecard

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Register for a workshop or forward this to someone who should. MGRUSH facilitation workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each participant practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International^®, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop descriptions for details.)

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Facilitation Expert

Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.