The Scorecard Problem.

If the first essay in this series named the borrowed word that has been quietly reshaping the Church — flourishing — and the second named the mechanism by which a misaligned aim drifts an organization away from its mission, this one is about the single most powerful instrument of either drift or recovery you have at your disposal: the scorecard.

It is also the instrument leaders are most likely to underestimate. Strategy gets the boardroom. Structure gets the consultants. The scorecard, in most organizations, gets a fancy UI or perhaps just a simple spreadsheet, then a monthly or quarterly review, and very little serious theological or strategic attention. To put it bluntly, that is a mistake of historic proportions.

I grew up in an incredible Fortune 500 company whose CEO famously ingrained in all of its young leaders, “What gets measured gets attended to and what gets attended to gets done.” A nice rendition of a management doctrine largely attributed to Peter Drucker. But here is the part of that line — which Drucker probably never said, though it sounds enough like him that the attribution has stuck — that very few leaders sit with long enough: what gets measured gets managed is true, but it is only half the truth. The British economist Charles Goodhart, writing in the 1970s, named the second half more accurately, in my opinion: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In a sense, both lines describe the same gravitational pull. And both stop short of the third truth, which is the one that is likely the most dangerous: what gets measured long enough eventually gets worshipped. You’ve heard the phrase “you are what you eat”, and likewise, whatever the organization counts or measures, the organization slowly becomes. The dashboard is far more than just a reporting instrument. It is a forming instrument. And while you may not agree with me, I believe that it is, in the truest sense of the word, a discipleship document. Why? Because it literally teaches and disciplines the team on what to chase, what to celebrate, and over time, what or who to be.

So the question for any serious leader is not whether the scorecard is forming the team. It is. The question I’d encourage you to ask is — what is it forming them into.

Where most scorecards actually come from

Most organizational scorecards are not designed. They are inherited.

They are inherited from the consulting firm whose previous engagement was a SaaS company. They are inherited from the executive who joined two years ago and brought their last company’s KPI deck with them. They are inherited from the board chair who serves on three other boards and is fluent in the language of those organizations. They are inherited from the funder, the investor, or the denomination whose reporting requirements quietly become the operating system, regardless of intent.

This is not a moral failing. It is the natural physics of organizational life. A scorecard, like any tool, follows the path of least resistance. The marketplace has spent forty years polishing its scorecards. The mission, by contrast, has rarely been forced to articulate what it actually counts. So when the moment comes — and it always comes — and the leader needs a scorecard for the all-hands meeting on Monday morning, the marketplace’s scorecard is the one within reach. It gets borrowed. Then it gets institutionalized. Then it becomes the organization.

The Church, in my experience, is the worst offender — and not for the reason most critics name. It is not that ministries are using metrics. They are. The problem is that they are using the wrong metrics, borrowed from corporate America somewhere around 1995, with a few spiritual labels applied on top to make them feel native. Discipleship pipeline. Member engagement funnel. First-time guest conversion rate. These are not, in most cases, theologically considered. They are the marketing analytics of a 1990s software company with the words swapped out. Whatever the dashboard is teaching your church to be, it is unlikely to be what Scripture had in mind.

The three properties of a faithful scorecard

A scorecard worthy of the mission has three properties. They are easy to name and difficult to build, which is why they are so rare.

What each kind of organization actually ought to count

The properties above are universal. The application is sectoral. Below, in compressed form, is what I have found to be true after thirty years across very different kinds of institutions.

The meta-point, across all three: the most important thing every scorecard must measure is the integrity between what the organization counts and what the organization says it is for. That gap, more than any other single number, predicts whether the organization will still be the organization it was built to be ten years from now.

The most important question a leader asks each January

Most leaders, in the first week of January (or whenever you do your planning), sit with their team and ask the version of the question they have been trained to ask: What is our number for this year? It is a reasonable question. It is also the wrong first question.

The right first question is older, harder, and considerably more revealing. It is this: Is our scorecard forming us into the kind of organization we said we wanted to build?

If the answer is yes, set the number with confidence. If the answer is no, set the number anyway — because budgets must be made and someone has to lead — but understand that you have just announced a target that will continue to form your team into something other than what you said you were trying to build. That is, to use the language of the previous essay, a year of further drift, by design.

The leaders I respect most are the ones who hold that question with the seriousness that it truly deserves. They redesign the scorecard and think deeply about the “why” before they set the target. Unfortunately, in my experience, this is rarer than it really should be. It is also the single discipline that most consistently separates organizations that survive their second decade from those that don’t.

Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life. Psalm 39:4

Even the psalmist asks to be measured by the right thing. The leader who has not asked God what to count is a leader who has, by default, accepted the marketplace’s answer.

The recovery

If the scorecard is going to inevitably be the architecture of your second decade, then whatever you measure now, your team will spend the next ten years becoming. That is not meant to be a metaphor, rather a description of how organizations actually work. There is no exemption for ministry or for sincerity of intent. The dashboard does not care what you meant. It simply forms what it forms.

The good news is that the scorecard is the most malleable instrument the leader holds. The strategy and the structure are heavy. The culture is heavier still. But the good news is that the scorecard can be redesigned in a single planning cycle. That is the leverage. That is why this work is worth doing now, before the next set of targets are set.

Choose, then, with seriousness and intentionality — not convenience or tradition. Choose with the awareness that what you count is what you will, in time, become. And choose, finally, with the recognition that the scorecard is one of the most theologically loaded instruments in the modern organization — and that the leader who treats it as a spreadsheet exercise is, inadvertently, allowing a spreadsheet to disciple their team.

There is a better way to lead than that. There always has been.

— Brandon Harvath