I’ve been consuming the work of Dr. Mel Hopper Koppelman on healing chronic health issues, and she brought up a point that is relevant to business systems, too.

Human nature is to pay attention to our current state, without giving much thought to how it came to be.

Lead indicators are measures of inputs into a system. In health, this could be something like the number of vegetables you eat per day.

Lag indicators are things like your weight. That is a measure the result of all your previous experience, genetics, etc.

Lead indicators happen BEFORE lag indicators.

She recommends spending 80% of your measurement on lead indicators.

Maybe this is already causing lightbulbs to go off for you, like it did for me. 

I’ll give examples of how this applies to every stage of business over the next few posts.