CHAPTER 12

• The hype surrounding scorecards has probably peaked. Those who introduced BSC because it was the modern thing to do are hopefully leaving the arena. Those who remain should persevere, because BSC is no quick fix. We find indications that, with patience, scorecards will enable organizations to work in new ways. We cannot prove that this always will be more profitable, or more effective. Maybe business success depends largely on short-term manoeuvring, or sheer luck. But if you believe that strategies, coordination and focused, yet flexible, execution of agreed intentions is of any importance, and that more than a handful people need to be involved in constantly keeping strategies relevant, then scorecards is a good idea for you. It is time now for the payoff from the hype - if we manage to design BSC use right!
• Failures are giving BSC a bad name among those who have not bothered to find out what it really is about. That's why we wrote this book: to explain in detail what it takes, and also warn that it is no quick fix.
• Organizations need controls, because organizing is about coordination. Even short-term, adaptive control in a highly operative context usually needs a long-term basis consisting of ideas about the world you are operating in. People in an organization need to arrive at those ideas together, and a shared understanding of their consequences, because only then will they be able to act as quickly and wisely as they inherently are able to do. Some of those ideas will concern how this organization shall become successful in what it is doing. Strategic control essentially is making sure everyone knows about this, and acts on it. Control is about realizing intended strategies.
• The ideas and shared understanding we just mentioned are hypotheses: "if-then". If we develop our skills, then we will be able to provide improved services. If we do that, customers will like it. If customers like that, there will be one zillion more people who are willing to become our customers. Et cetera. Some of these hypotheses will be "almost-truths", fact-based, and proven by experience. Others will be conjectural, because no one ever tried it before. Most will fall somewhere in between. We call them strategic bets. Strategy maps and scorecards document them for us, to make it easier to agree on them, question them, find support for them, or refutation. To use them in our daily activities, as a guide for what to do. And to give them adequate time to be tested. But never believe them to be eternal truths. (61)
• We need to involve many members in our organizations to discuss these hypotheses. They need to know about our strategic bets, and understand their role in trying to realize the intentions. They may also contribute their knowledge and improve on them.
• · All of this provides the backdrop to BSC and explains why we need to use strategy maps and scorecards to visualize strategy: not for multidimensional performance measurement as such, but to enable communication. Our "challenges" in Chapter 5 were about providing adequate motivation and resources for the application of BSC that we attempt in our organization. Application, motivation, and resources have to be matched.
• · We advise you do this through a systematic design of your BSC process. The six "design issues" that we introduced must in themselves be balanced. There is no such thing as a best design for strategy maps, a best set of roles, or the best BSC software. How these and the other issues are tackled depends on the situation: what you want to achieve through BSC; other types of controls; organizational culture, etc. By learning from our cases it is possible to identify the issues to be tackled, and get an idea of the range of possible designs.