Bill Gallagher explains how to build dashboards that actually work: keep them simple with 10 metrics max at the top level, use red-yellow-green status colors, and make them visible everywhere. The key move is having each person update their own numbers before meetings instead of centralizing it.
Well, let's talk about what makes for great dashboards or scoreboards. Dashboard, scoreboard, kind of the same thing. Your dashboard tells you how your vehicle's doing, where you are. Your scoreboard is the same kind of thing. Your panel on an airplane, all of these things are giving you indications of how the business is performing. So the analogies are all kind of the same thing. How are things progressing? So dashboard scoreboard, use whatever term you, you like for it. We have our scaling up scoreboard and people think about creating CEO dashboards. It's all the same idea. So what makes for great ones, that's the key. So a couple of things make for great ones. The first principle is, first principle of a couple. The first one is not too many things, not too many priorities, not too many numbers like that. So let's have a few critical numbers, let's have additional. You could run the whole business with 10 numbers and then double click into additional things that you need to know. So Top level dashboard, 10 numbers, any particular role, four things probably gets it done. Role or function, three or four can tell you whether or not things are good. And then you can have things that you drill into under that. So first thing is few things. Same with priorities. A few priorities, a few numbers. Very simple dashboards. They've done lots of studies about high performance, highly trained, top notch combat pilots in stressful situations. And they can only process so much information. So they can process very limited amount of information and it needs to be presented in effective ways. So the second thing is the design of it. And here's the fundamental principle that makes a huge difference for us mere mortal CEOs and business leaders. Red, green, yellow. Don't use brand colors or other fancy designs, thematic kinds of things. For your dashboard scoreboards, use red, green, yellow. We all understand that red is a danger, red is we've gone way too far, we have an emergency. Yellow is a caution that's pretty clear. And then green is we are good and getting better, right? So red, green, yellow is your color code. Now we have some teams and people who love to do super green, like a darker shade of green to indicate like we're really going for it. And in truth, you ought to organize your actions around kind of exceeding things so that you're coming up a ahead of things. So you're beyond green. So red, green, yellow and a few numbers is the critical thing. Then beyond that, not a whole lot matters. The other thing that makes a difference in terms of the design is that it's like visible and accessible to People when and where they need it. So for example, if you had a whiteboard that used to use and then you had a pandemic or you went to a virtual office and everybody's out, it doesn't work so well. So you got to move that, whatever dashboard it is to some software, some online version. So you got to think about how and where that dashboard occurs and where you can get to it. Here's the last thing that I think is really useful. Don't have you or one person on your team updating the dashboard. Have everybody updating their own numbers and status as is relevant to the things they're working on. So if you own a number or if you own a priority, you, you should update that sucker before the meeting. Sometimes you might want to leave it for in the meeting that you go and update the thing. But whether you're working with an online system or a whiteboard in an office, have the people that are working on things pick up the pen, move the mouse cursor, make the changes, that makes a big difference. That's even more useful than automating things. An overly automated dashboard like a, like a system that is color coded with brand colors. Both of them get in the way and create sort of digital wallpaper or just like they disappear into the background. So I have to update it and I use red, green, yellow. And individuals update things, not just the senior leader of the company. So those are the things that make for really great dashboards. And you could actually have multiple. You could have an Overall Company 1. You could have one for each department or group within the company. One thing that really helps, that could be useful if you got no other system. You're not using our scaling up scoreboard system. You could just take our vision summary and then create a poster size version of that and laminate that thing and work on it with pens in a work area. We've had many teams create poster size version of our vision summary. So there's a first kind of version of it. You could do a Google Sheet version where people collaborate together. Those are the things that make for really great, great, effective scoreboards that help keep you on track. Hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again soon. Keep scaling.
