Performance Beyond Productivity: What 74% of Leaders Say They Need to Measure Differently

By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy

Seventy-four percent of leaders say they need better ways to measure performance beyond traditional productivity metrics.

Read that again. Not 74% of academics. Not 74% of consultants. Seventy-four percent of the people literally running these organizations are telling us that what they’re measuring isn’t giving them what they need. And yet, most of them are still measuring the same things they were measuring five years ago.

Revenue. Market share. Overhead ratios. Quarterly targets hit or missed. The scoreboard hasn’t changed, even as the game has fundamentally transformed beneath it.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: if the people at the top already know the measurement system is broken, why hasn’t anything changed?

We’re Measuring Outputs. We Should Be Measuring Health.

The performance measurement problem isn’t about finding better KPIs. It’s about a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives results in the first place.

Traditional performance measurement treats the organization like a machine. You input resources, you measure outputs, and the gap between the two tells you how well you’re doing. It’s clean. It’s linear. And it’s dangerously incomplete.

Organizations are not machines. They are living complex adaptive systems—webs of relationships, energy, and influence that behave according to the laws of nature, not the logic of spreadsheets. And you cannot measure the health of a living system by counting only what it produces.

Think about it this way: if you measured your own health exclusively by how much work you got done in a week, you’d miss every warning sign that mattered—stress fractures, burnout, declining immunity—until the system failed catastrophically. That’s exactly what most organizations are doing with their performance models.

They’re measuring productivity while the organism is deteriorating.

The Three Blind Spots in Traditional Performance Measurement

When I work with leadership teams on strategy, the performance conversation almost always reveals the same pattern. They’re measuring some things very well—typically the things tied to growth—while leaving massive gaps in two other critical areas.

1. Purpose Is Unmeasured

Most organizations have a vision statement, a mission, maybe a set of values framed on the wall. But ask the leadership team how they measure whether the organization is actually delivering on that purpose, and you’ll get silence. Or worse, you’ll get revenue figures repackaged as purpose metrics.

Purpose is not about revenue. It is about contribution. And contribution—internally to the people who make the organization run, and externally to those it serves—requires its own set of measures. When purpose goes unmeasured, it goes unmanaged. And when it goes unmanaged, it becomes wallpaper. Less than 5% of employees have a basic understanding of their company’s strategy, according to Kaplan and Norton. That’s not a communication problem. That’s a purpose problem.

2. Internal Capacity Is an Afterthought

Growth dominates most strategic plans. Revenue targets, market expansion, customer acquisition—all externally focused, all financially measured. What almost never shows up with equal weight is the internal growth required to sustain it.

I had a board director once describe the aftermath of unchecked growth with a line I’ve never forgotten: “We grew so fast that broke everything in our wake.” Plummeting customer satisfaction. Key employees walking out. Internal systems held together with duct tape and desperation. Every indicator had been there—in the SWOT assessments, in the culture surveys, in the operational data—but none of it was connected to the top-level strategy in a meaningful way. It would be a painful journey back to sustainability.

Growth is not about revenue. Revenue is simply a metric of how well growth is planned, balanced, and executed. When internal capacity doesn’t keep pace with external ambition, the whole thing collapses. And if you’re not measuring that balance, you won’t see it coming until it’s too late.

3. Evolution Is Invisible

Of the three—Purpose, Growth, and Evolution—evolution is the one most consistently absent from strategy and, by extension, from performance measurement. There’s a perception that evolution is too far on the horizon to matter in shortened planning cycles. That’s a mistake.

Evolution is not about the future. It is about the decisions you make now. It’s about actively anticipating the changing needs of the people you serve and the people who serve your organization. It’s the difference between being disrupted and being the one who sees it coming.

Yet most organizations have no mechanism for measuring how well they’re anticipating and adapting. They react. They restructure. They “transform.” And when the next disruption hits, they do it all over again, spending energy and morale on cycles of upheaval that could have been prevented with intentional strategic foresight.

The Measurement Framework Nobody Is Using

Here’s what I’ve found in over thirty years of working with organizations across every sector—for-profit, non-profit, tribal entities, government agencies, publicly traded companies: the ones that sustain real performance don’t just measure outcomes. They measure for balance.

Purpose, Growth, and Evolution in Equilibrium. That’s the frame. Not as abstract philosophy, but as a practical mechanism for defining what to measure, why it matters, and how to know when you’re drifting.

When strategic imperatives are organized around these three pillars, performance measurement becomes holistic by design. You’re not just asking “did we hit the revenue target?” You’re asking whether the organization is thriving internally while delivering externally. Whether growth is building capability, not just consuming it. Whether you’re evolving toward relevance or reacting to obsolescence.

The Equilibrium Rule—the fourth pillar that holds the first three in dynamic balance—is what turns this from a nice idea into a decision-making discipline. It’s the mechanism that ensures you don’t sacrifice purpose for growth, or growth for evolution, or any combination that leaves the system out of balance. Equilibrium isn’t conceptual. It’s a tool for making better decisions.

What Better Measurement Actually Looks Like

I’m not suggesting you throw out your financial metrics. Revenue matters. Margin matters. Cash flow matters. But financial performance is a lagging indicator of organizational health, not a leading one. And if you’re only looking at lagging indicators, you’re driving by staring in the rearview mirror.

Better measurement means adding leading indicators tied to what actually drives sustainable performance. It means asking different questions at the strategic level.

How well does our workforce connect to our vision? That’s a purpose measure. Are we building capabilities at the pace required to support our growth targets? That’s a growth measure—an internal one. How effectively are we anticipating shifts in what our customers, employees, and market need from us? That’s an evolution measure.

These aren’t soft measures. They are strategic intelligence. And the organizations that treat them as seriously as they treat their P&L are the ones that don’t end up as a case study in what went wrong.

Eighty-five percent of leadership teams spend less than one hour per month on strategy. That’s not a time problem. That’s a relevance problem. When your measurement system doesn’t connect to what actually matters—to the real health and trajectory of the organization—no one engages with it. Build a performance model worth paying attention to, and you won’t have to beg for the time.

The 74% Already Know

Those leaders who said they need better performance measures? They’re not wrong. They’re feeling the gap between what they’re tracking and what they need to understand in order to lead well.

The problem isn’t awareness. The problem is that the traditional strategic planning framework doesn’t give them a structure for measuring what matters. It wasn’t designed for it. It was designed for a predictable, controllable, machine-like organization that doesn’t actually exist.

Organizations must thrive within before they can deliver to those they serve in a sustainable way. If your measurement system only looks outward, you are flying blind on the very things that determine whether your strategy lives or dies.

Purpose. Growth. Evolution. In Equilibrium.

Measure those, and you’ll finally be measuring what matters.

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Erin Sedor is an executive advisor and strategic performance expert with 30+ years helping organizations build strategy that actually works. She is the creator of Essential Strategy and the Quantum Intelligence framework for conscious, adaptive leadership.