Reviewing the performance of your organization

If you participate in board meetings or functional meetings where the performance of your organisation is being reviewed, you may well be familiar with factors that can make these meetings ineffective.  Sometimes, the meeting is a little more than a status chat, a voice-over with an ever-expanding slide deck. Measures being reviewed consist mainly of lagging financial indicators, and the validity of the numbers is discussed repeatedly. The meeting results in few, if any, decisions or actions and the environment is one in which participants explain whether or not they are hitting their targets whilst desperately defending their functions.  Too often one person dominates the discussion.  

While the problem might be familiar, the solution might be less obvious. Therefore we have identified practices that enable teams to better review and improve their organisation's performance. Our common theme is to focus on how the review is being conducted; changing the meeting dynamics and behaviours, with the aim of building learning capability for continuous improvement.