Your dashboard says 73 %.
Ask yourself one question before you show it to anyone: where does that number come from?
In most organizations, it comes from an average. You count the actions attached to an objective, you add up the percentages each lead estimated, you divide by the number of actions. Nobody decides to do this. It is simply what a spreadsheet does when you ask it for an average.
And it is close to the worst possible calculation for steering a strategic plan.
The calculation, run in full, in front of you
Take one objective with four actions. The numbers below are a worked example, not measured data, but the mechanics are the ones you will find everywhere.
Action 1: rebuilding the water filtration plant. Progress 0 %.
Action 2: updating an internal policy. Progress 100 %.
Action 3: training twelve employees. Progress 100 %.
Action 4: writing a tender specification. Progress 92 %.
Simple average: zero plus one hundred plus one hundred plus ninety-two, divided by four. Seventy-three percent.
There is your 73 %. It is arithmetically correct and it is completely wrong.
Because rebuilding the plant is eight months of work and most of the result you were aiming for. The internal policy is an afternoon of writing. The calculation just treated the two as equal in weight.
Give the plant the weight it actually carries, say 80 % of the result, and spread the rest across the other three. The same objective drops from 73 % to 20 %.
Same plan. Same actions. Same day. A gap of fifty-three points, purely because someone told the tool what each action was worth.
The 100 % nobody ever checked
There is a second problem, and it is more awkward than the first.
Where do the 92 % on action 4 come from? From the lead, who eyeballed it on a Friday afternoon, in a spreadsheet cell, three days after a reminder.
This is not bad faith. Nobody gave them a rule. Is a specification that is written but not reviewed 92 % or 60 %? Two reasonable people will answer differently, and both will be right inside their own head.
The result is that you are adding up numbers that do not share a definition. The total looks like a measurement. It is a collection of impressions.
The fix is not to ask for more precision. It is to break the action into tasks that can be answered yes or no. The specification is written: yes. It is reviewed: no. It is approved: no. Progress then calculates itself, and it no longer depends on anyone's Friday mood.
A snapshot, never a trajectory
Third problem. The 73 % does not say where it came from.
Was it 55 % last year, or 81 %? In the first case you have an organization that delivers. In the second you have a problem nobody has named yet. The number on the page is identical.
A spreadsheet overwritten at every update keeps today's value and loses everything else. It is the most expensive flaw in the method, because it cannot be repaired afterwards: history you did not keep cannot be reconstructed.
What a council hears when it reads 73 %
A board or a council that sees 73 % hears that you are nearly there. That is a perfectly normal reading.
It is not what the number says. In our example, the real message would be this: the action carrying most of the result has not started, and the three small ones are finished.
That sentence calls for a decision. The 73 % asks nothing of anyone. It reassures, and it pushes the conversation out another six months.
That is where the number becomes expensive. Not because it is inaccurate, but because it prevents a trade-off that should have happened.
Why almost nobody fixes this
It is not a competence problem. The people keeping these spreadsheets are often the most rigorous in the organization.
The real obstacle is that weighting forces you to say out loud that one action matters more than another. Which means one department matters more than another, that year, on that objective. Plenty of organizations prefer the simple average precisely because it offends nobody.
An unweighted average is a polite way of not choosing. It has a price, and that price is paid later, when the action carrying the result runs late and everyone finds out at the same time that the 73 % never meant what it was being asked to mean.
Three repairs, in order of return
None of this requires reopening the strategic plan. All three fixes live in the tracking layer.
- Weight them. Give each action the share of the result it actually carries. Half a day per action plan, and it is the single change that moves the most numbers.
- Break them down. Turn each action into tasks that answer yes or no, with a named owner and a date. Progress stops being an estimate.
- Keep the history. Store every value with its date instead of overwriting the previous one. You will not notice the difference in the first quarter. You will not be able to work without it by the fourth.
In Planivore, those three things are how the platform works by default: weighted actions attached to a plan element, actions broken into tasks with an owner and a deadline, and history kept for every indicator.
The gain does not really come from the tool, though. It comes from the moment someone in your organization agrees to write down that action A is worth forty times action B. That conversation is uncomfortable. It is also the only one that turns a percentage into information.
In the end, a number that never triggers a discussion is not doing any work. It is decorating a report.
Putting weight behind your progress numbers
Our guides on strategic plan execution cover weighting, breaking actions into tasks and keeping indicator history.
Free Guides to Execute Your Strategic Plan
To see what your own numbers look like once they are weighted, book a 30 minute demo.
