The committee gets forty pages every month and leaves without deciding anything.

Use this today, without hiring anyone

The associated decision test. Take your last committee pack and do this to it page by page:

1. Write in the margin which decision that page supports. If you cannot write it in one sentence, the page supports none.
2. Mark the ones that only inform. Informing is fine, but not in the decision pack: those go into an annex nobody has to read in the meeting.
3. Count how many are left. That is your real report.
4. For every indicator that survives, ask who defines it. If two areas calculate it differently, that indicator will consume half of your next meeting.

Put what demands action first and what is context last. It is the change that pays the most and it costs nothing.

The lead time test, with a spreadsheet and your own data:

1. Pick an operational indicator and your financial result. For example cycle time against margin, or rework against revenue.
2. Put them side by side by month, twenty four months. No averages and no smoothing: the raw data.
3. Shift the operational one forward one month, then two, then three. The shift where the curves look most alike is your real lead, and many times it is zero.
4. Repeat it with the period split into two halves. If the lead shows up in one half and not the other, it was coincidence.

Before you publish a leading indicator on a dashboard, decide who can move it and how you will notice: the one that gets exposed becomes a target.