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67% of strategies fail in execution. We've watched it happen for 30 years.
67% — HBR's number, not ours. We're Ted and Dylan. We spent the 1990s and 2000s flying into city halls and hospital boardrooms with the Balanced Scorecard. The plan got built. The sponsor got excited. Three months later, it lived in a binder. So we built the thing that should have existed between PowerPoint and spreadsheets. 21,000+ plans run on it today.
21,000+ plans of training data
SCORECARD.XLS — METROPOLIS FY1992
FileEditFormulaFormatDataWindow
B7
=SUM(VITAL_FEW)
A
B
C
D
1
PERSPECTIVE
MEASURES
OWNER
STATUS
2
Financial
3
CFO
OK
3
Customer
2
CITY MGR
OK
4
Internal Process
2
???
#REF!
5
Learning & Growth
1
???
#REF!
6
7
TOTAL MEASURES
8
Ready 8 measures · 2 unowned rows NUM
1992 · FOUR PERSPECTIVES · FLOPPY DISK · DOT-MATRIX BOARD PACKET · OVERHEAD TRANSPARENCIES · #REF! · 1992 · FOUR PERSPECTIVES · FLOPPY DISK · DOT-MATRIX BOARD PACKET · OVERHEAD TRANSPARENCIES · #REF! ·
Where this started: one spreadsheet, four perspectives, eight measures — and two rows nobody owned. Thirty years later, unowned rows are still the single best predictor of a plan that dies in a binder.
The most common reason strategic plans fail isn't strategy. It's structure.
The BSC Hall of Fame (U.S. Army, Marriott Vacation Clubs, and 200+ others Palladium has recognized since 2000) proves the framework works at the highest level. What's harder to see — and only platform-level data can show — is what consistently breaks down between strategy and execution. Three patterns we see across 13,000+ active scorecards.
12.2%
8–10 measures is the sweet spot. Plans with 20+ measures complete 19% fewer initiatives.
Across 4,141 plans: the 1992 article's “focus on the vital few” principle wins, three decades later.
+61%
Plans with 2–3 distinct initiative owners complete 61% more than plans owned by one person.
Single-owner plans: 11.6% completion. Two-to-three owners: 18.7%. Ownership is a structural choice, not a personality trait.
4.3×
Healthcare and higher ed don't have a strategy problem. They have a completion problem.
County gov: 22.0% · Healthcare: 5.1% · Higher Ed: 4.9%. Same framework, 4.3× the gap.
The five papers this is built on
Kaplan and Norton's canon, in order. Click any one for what it actually introduced.
HBR JAN–FEB 1992The Balanced Scorecard — Measures That Drive Performance
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton · HBR 70(1), 71–79+
HBR JAN–FEB 1992
The Balanced Scorecard — Measures That Drive Performance
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton · HBR 70(1), 71–79
Built on a Nolan Norton Institute study with 12 leading-edge companies. Argued that financial measures alone “can give misleading signals.” The four-perspective scorecard was born.
HBR SEP–OCT 2000Having Trouble With Your Strategy? Then Map It.
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton+
HBR SEP–OCT 2000
Having Trouble With Your Strategy? Then Map It.
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton
Introduced the strategy map — a one-page diagram of cause-and-effect linkages between Learning & Growth, Internal Process, Customer, and Financial perspectives.
HBS PRESS 2001The Strategy-Focused Organization
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton+
HBS PRESS 2001
The Strategy-Focused Organization
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton
Five principles for organizations that translate strategy into operational terms — based on ten years of research across 200+ companies.
HBR OCT 2005The Office of Strategy Management
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton+
HBR OCT 2005
The Office of Strategy Management
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton
Defined the OSM as “the CEO's chief of staff for strategy” — a standing function, not a planning season.
HBS PRESS 2008The Execution Premium
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton+
HBS PRESS 2008
The Execution Premium
Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton
Introduced the six-step Execution Premium Process (XPP) — the closed loop from strategy development to operational planning, monitoring, and adaptation.
A few of the 300+ organizations running plans on it today
Choctaw Nation
Carilion Clinic
UNFCU
MCC
City of Durham
City of Fort Collins
Metropolis City Scorecard.
As it would look in your hands.
This is a real test scorecard — not a marketing mockup. Click through. The structure is what every customer ends up with after the first quarter.
app.clearpointstrategy.com/metropolis/scorecard
Scorecards / City of Metropolis
FY26 Strategic Plan
Q3 FY26 Owner: All
Objective
Status
Owner
Perspective
Safe & Resilient Neighborhoods
On track
C. Barrow
Customer
Fiscal Stewardship & AAA Rating
At risk
M. Ruiz
Financial
Permit Cycle Time Reduction
Off track
L. Chen
Process
Workforce Retention & Succession
On track
J. Okafor
Learning
Measure
Actual
Target
12-mo trend
Status
Avg. emergency response (min)
6.4
7.0
Above
Permits issued within 30 days
61%
85%
Below
General fund reserve ratio
14.8%
16.0%
Caution
Voluntary staff turnover
9.1%
11.0%
Above
Initiative
Owner
Completion
Due
Unified permitting portal (phase 2)
L. Chen
42%
Mar 2027
Co-responder mental health pilot
C. Barrow
78%
Dec 2026
Capital plan & budget linkage rewrite
M. Ruiz
19%
Nov 2026
Supervisor succession bench program
J. Okafor
64%
Jun 2027
QUARTERLY
Council Performance Briefing
18 pages · auto-built from Q3 data · last exported 2 days ago
MONTHLY
Department Director Scorecard
One page per department · owner-filtered · PDF + web link
PUBLIC
Resident Transparency Dashboard
Published to metropolis.gov · 4 measures held back as internal
Six moments that should be controversial. They're not.
Click any year for what we actually think — from 30 years of watching this framework work and fail in the field.
HBR JAN–FEB 1992
“What you measure is what you get.”
The Balanced Scorecard — Measures That Drive Performance
What we actually think
Every consultant who skips the ownership conversation builds a dashboard, not a strategy. Measurement without a named human attached is just reporting — and our own data says it costs you: single-owner plans complete 11.6% of initiatives, plans with 2–3 owners complete 18.7%. That's the whole point of the 1992 article — and 30 years later, it's still the part most BSC rollouts miss.
HBR SEP–OCT 2000
“Having trouble with your strategy? Then map it.”
The strategy map arrives: cause and effect on one page.
What we actually think
The map is the most copied and least used artifact in the canon. It gets printed, framed, and never revisited. Only about 54% of plans on our platform use a structured strategy map — and the ones that do aren't better because of the diagram. They're better because drawing cause-and-effect forces somebody to admit which objectives are actually assumptions.
HBS PRESS 2001
“Translate the strategy into operational terms.”
The Strategy-Focused Organization · five principles, 200+ companies
What we actually think
“Translate” was always the hard verb, and 2001 didn't have the tooling to do it. We were in the room for that gap: the strategy lived in a document, the operations lived in spreadsheets, and the translation was an annual heroic act by one analyst. Our 12.2% finding is the receipt — plans that stay at 8–10 measures translate; plans with 20+ measures complete 19% fewer initiatives because nobody can hold the whole thing in their head.
HBR OCT 2005
“The CEO's chief of staff for strategy.”
The Office of Strategy Management
What we actually think
This is the most underrated paper of the five, and the public sector ignored it hardest. A city manager's office is an OSM whether it's named one or not — the difference is whether anybody owns the cadence. Where we see completion rates at 20%+, there is always a named function that runs the review, not a person who volunteers for it. At 1,500+ employees, stand it up on day one.
HBS PRESS 2008
“Close the loop between strategy and operations.”
The Execution Premium · the six-step XPP
What we actually think
Six steps is four more than most organizations will actually run. The loop that matters is narrow: review, decide, update the record. We'd rather see a client execute two steps every month than all six once a year — which is exactly what the annual-retreat model produces, and exactly why healthcare sits at 5.1% completion while county government sits at 22.0%.
TODAY · 2026
21,000+ plans. 13,000+ active scorecards. One pattern.
The dataset the 1992 authors never had
What we actually think
Kaplan and Norton got the methodology right. What no one could see in 1992 was the failure distribution — that the framework holds and the structure around it collapses: too many measures, one owner, no cadence. We didn't improve the theory. We built the operating system that was missing between PowerPoint and spreadsheets, and the data now tells us which structural choices predict completion before the first quarter closes.
The mistake every sector makes.
And the onboarding data behind it.
Local government
GASB GFOA
The data
16.1%
completion across 2,521 scorecards — the second-healthiest sector on the platform.
The failure mode
The CFO writes the budget. The city manager writes the strategic plan. The two documents are never linked, so the plan has no money and the budget has no strategy.
The contrarian fix
Write both as a single object in November. Not two documents that reference each other — one hierarchy where every budget line inherits a strategic objective.
Healthcare
The Joint Commission DNV
The data
5.1%
completion across 1,880 scorecards — the worst outside higher ed.
The failure mode
Accreditation becomes a parallel worksite. Two teams, two calendars, two sets of evidence — and the strategic plan is the one that slips, because nobody's license depends on it.
The contrarian fix
Stop running them in parallel. The four BSC perspectives already contain every TJC chapter — map the chapters into the plan and accreditation becomes a report, not a project.
Higher education
MSCHE SACSCOC HLC
The data
4.9%
completion across 733 scorecards — the weakest sector we serve.
The failure mode
Shared governance turns every objective into a committee, and the evidence for reaffirmation gets assembled from scratch in year nine — by people who weren't there in year one.
The contrarian fix
Build the evidence chain into the strategic plan on day one. If a measure can't be pointed at a standard, it isn't a measure — it's a preference.
Banking
OCC SEC
The data
19.5%
completion across 716 scorecards — but only 29.6% of initiatives have an owner.
The failure mode
Risk reporting is immaculate and strategy reporting is an afterthought. KRIs live in one hierarchy, strategic objectives in another, and the board sees them on different slides.
The contrarian fix
Every KRI inherits a strategic objective in the same hierarchy. If a risk indicator can't name the objective it protects, it's telling you something about the strategy, not the risk.
LP
“Before ClearPoint, our quarterly metric refresh was a 40-hour spreadsheet hostage situation. One analyst, seventeen tabs, and a week we couldn't spend on anything else.”
“The 15-to-20-minute weekly maintenance number is real, but it's not the headline. Anyone can sell you time savings. What changed is what we do with the hours.”
“The headline is that strategic conversations now happen in the room where decisions are made — not three weeks later in a memo nobody reads. When the data is current, the plan stops being a document and starts being the agenda.”
Lawrence Pollack
Strategy & Performance · City of Fort Collins
30 minutes. Bring your hardest sector-specific question.
We bring the dataset — 21,000+ plans, segmented by your sector, your size, your regulator. You bring the question your last consultant couldn't answer.
Built by
TJ
Ted Jackson
Co-founder · Harvard MBA · Duke Public Policy
DM
Dylan Miyake
Co-founder · MIT Sloan MBA · Bowdoin BA Government
“We've worked hands-on with Robert Kaplan and David Norton's Balanced Scorecard methodology since the 1990s — consulting city halls and hospital boardrooms through it long before ClearPoint existed. We watched the same pattern every time: the plan got built, the sponsor got excited, three months later it lived in a binder. The methodology wasn't broken — Kaplan and Norton got it right. The missing piece was the operating system. Spreadsheets gave you measurement, PowerPoint gave you communication, nothing lived between them. We started building ClearPoint in 2007. Eighteen years later, we're still the ones writing the product roadmap.”
★★★★★ 4.7 average150+ verified reviews on G2 & Capterra SOC 2 certified 21,000+ plans run on it
Four answers we'd give over a beer
What do you tell people who push OKRs over BSC?
+
Most consultants pushing OKRs in the public sector haven't watched what happens in year two. OKRs are a quarterly cadence tool — excellent at focus, terrible at institutional memory, and they quietly assume you can re-plan every 90 days. A city can't. A health system can't. Our answer is boring: BSC as the multi-year frame, OKRs as the quarterly cadence inside it. Anyone selling you one instead of the other is selling a methodology, not an outcome.
Do we need the full BSC framework?
+
No. About 54% of plans on the platform use a structured strategy map, and the other 46% aren't worse off for skipping it. What matters is the discipline: a small number of measures, a named owner per initiative, and a review that actually happens — not the visual framework. If the four perspectives help your board read the plan, use them. If they turn into a formatting argument, drop them.
Is this overkill for our size?
+
Sometimes, yes. Here's the honest grid we use on calls:
Under 25 people
No. A shared doc and a standing meeting will beat us.
25–150
Probably. Start with measures only — skip the strategy map until quarter two.
150–1,500
This is who we built it for.
1,500+
Yes — and stand up the Office of Strategy Management module on day one.
Can it work alongside our existing strategic plan?
+
Yes — and we'd rather you didn't rewrite it. We load the plan you already adopted, keep your language and your numbering, and the first change your team feels is administrative, not political. City of Fort Collins cut data-population time from 40 hours per month to 15–20 minutes without changing a single objective.
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