’Tis the season… The year ended, and we muddled through and swore everything would be better next year. More organized. Better aligned. Less chaotic. 2023 will be the year we finally get our KPIs in order.

KPIs – the perfect world of Key Performance Indicators. “You can’t change what you can’t measure” and all that good jazz. Apparently, you can even get certified as a KPI Professional. Who knew? Maybe we should add this to our list of KPIs for the year.

But, as with pretty much anything hiding behind an acronym, KPIs do squid for you more often than not. They look great on a dashboard; you can spend endless cycles collecting, cleaning, and processing the data. But they don’t move your people. People tend not to care about numbers all that much – they care about contributing, working on things that matter, being part of a collective effort, and crushing it.

Here’s an idea: Change the meaning of the acronym, and you are onto something:

KPI: Keep your People Interested / Inspired / Involved

Make that your overriding principle for the year, and things will fall into place. People are pretty great at doing awesome things if we just let them. It will be a little messy — so be it. It’s much more fun to color with a box of crayons than to paint by numbers.

Happy New Year, my friend. May it be nothing short of epic.