If behavior did not change, the business did not change. Effort is not work.

The Measures listed here are how I propose to distinguish actual movement from theatrical activity. They are leading or lagging. They are about observable behavior, not about effort expended. They are the language I think capable organizations need to adopt if they want to know whether their change work is producing change.

This list is a work in progress. It will be refined as I run these measures through real engagements and find out which ones hold up. Where Day 0 to Day 100 measurement exists across enough partner organizations to publish aggregate results without compromising anonymity, those results will appear here as the data accumulates. Until then, this page is the vocabulary, not the scoreboard.

Leading measures

These are early signals that an organization is building Change Energy. They show up before business outcomes do.

• Time from belief to test. How long does an idea wait before someone designs the cheapest possible way to falsify it?
• Time from test to decision. How long does evidence sit before someone is willing to act on it?
• Reduction in idea wait time, Day 0 to Day 100. Compare the first 30 days of the engagement to the most recent 30. Is the system getting faster at converting belief into evidence?
• Wrong ideas explored and terminated per week. Killing bad ideas early is the most expensive thing organizations consistently fail to do.
• Ideas killed before software was built. The cheapest moment to kill an idea is before any technology investment has been made.
• Unsupported beliefs retired. Beliefs that were treated as fact and have now been named as unsupported and removed from the operating assumptions.
• Decisions reversed because evidence changed. This runs counter to organizational culture in most places. The willingness to reverse a decision is a leading indicator of organizational honesty.

Lagging measures

These are proof that the leading measures produced actual movement. They show up in changed behavior of people, teams, customers, or partners.

• Customer behaviors that changed. Not “customer satisfaction.” Specific, observable behaviors customers do differently because of the work.
• Employee behaviors that changed. Same standard. What are people in the organization doing differently on Monday morning that they were not doing on Day 0?
• Reduction in dependence on heroic individuals. Tasks that previously required a specific person can now be performed by more than one person, or by the system.
• Unnecessary escalations removed. The number of decisions that used to require senior intervention and now do not.
• Unnecessary handoffs removed. The number of organizational seams between “this is mine” and “this is yours” that have been simplified or eliminated.

What does not count

The following are activity metrics. They get used as substitutes for Change Energy measurement because they are easier to count. They measure effort, not work.

• Interviews completed.
• Workshops held.
• Tickets closed.
• Experiments run.
• Features shipped.
• Plans created.
• Decks delivered.
• Meetings held.
• People trained.

None of these prove that a business changed. A team can do all of these and still produce no movement. The Measures above are about observable behavior at the end, not effort applied at the start.

What you can do with this

Take a current change initiative inside your organization. Pick one leading measure and one lagging measure. Build the simplest possible way to track them, even if it is just a spreadsheet or a Friday email. Watch what happens over 90 days.

If the leading measure does not move, the change initiative was never going to produce movement. You have just bought yourself the cheapest possible price to find out.