Glossary
Trailing 13-week view
A trailing thirteen-week view keeps a quarter of history beside the current number, so one bad week reads as noise and a repeated miss reads as a pattern. Thirteen columns is short enough to fit on a screen and long enough to show a season inside a season. It is also the window worth setting your goals from.
01
What thirteen columns of history tell you that one week cannot
The Scorecard is built to be read across rather than down. Each row shows thirteen weeks, so the meeting can see whether a red week is the third in a row or the first since March. The rule that follows is simple: one miss gets a sentence, three in a row becomes an issue and gets a share of the hour.
Without history, every red row looks equally alarming and teams overcorrect on noise. Thirteen weeks is also the cheapest way to set an honest target, because your own past is the one benchmark whose definition you control. When somebody asks where a goal came from, the trailing quarter is a better answer than a survey nobody in the room has read.
Worked example: A dental group panicked when new patient bookings fell to nine in a week against a goal of fifteen. The thirteen-week view showed the same dip the previous July and the one before that, both recovered by mid-August. The team left it alone, watched two more weeks, and spent the meeting on collections, which had been quietly red since May.
Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Data; kpi.org/kpi-basics/dashboarding-and-analysis
Variance
Variance is the gap between the target and the actual, written as a number or a percentage: goal twelve, actual nine, variance minus three.
02Target
A target is the number written beside a measure that says what a good week looks like: twelve proposals, ninety-five percent on time, cash collected.
03Benchmark
A benchmark is a figure from outside your company used to judge whether your own number is any good: an industry median for churn or win rate.
04Scorecard
A Scorecard is a weekly table of five to fifteen numbers that tells a leadership team whether the business is on track, one owner and one goal per row.
05KPIs and EOS®: build a Scorecard that predicts results
Where KPIs fit inside EOS: the weekly Scorecard, 5 to 15 measurables, one owner each, and a simple picker to draft yours by industry in a few minutes.
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