Employee performance is becoming harder to measure as the nature of work changes. Roles are becoming more interconnected, skills are evolving rapidly, and organizations are asking employees to contribute beyond narrowly defined job outputs.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 39% of workers’ existing skill sets are expected to be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. The report also identifies analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, leadership and social influence among the core skills employers consider important.

For Employee Performance Management (EPM), this raises a practical question: Can organizations continue to assess performance effectively when what constitutes good performance is changing?

Results are only one part of performance

Targets and KPIs remain central to performance management, but they do not always capture the full contribution of an employee.

The CIPD’s 2026 performance management evidence distinguishes between task performance, behaviors and other aspects of contribution. It also notes that where work relies heavily on teamwork, organizations may need to incorporate team-based goals or behavioral objectives rather than relying exclusively on individual targets.

This becomes particularly relevant as collaboration and human skills remain important alongside technological capabilities. The World Economic Forum identifies collaboration, leadership, resilience and analytical thinking among the skills employers expect to remain important as work evolves.

The challenge is defining what good performance looks like

A performance system can only be as effective as its criteria.

Employees need to understand what is expected, how performance will be assessed and how their objectives connect to organizational priorities. The CIPD recommends aligning individual and team objectives with organizational strategy while recognizing that different types of work may require different approaches to measurement.

For complex roles, rigid targets may not be sufficient. Learning objectives, competencies and behaviors can provide additional evidence of performance, particularly where outcomes depend on collaboration or changing circumstances.

Managers have to interpret the data

Performance management does not end with collecting ratings and KPIs.

Managers have to interpret results, provide feedback and determine what action is appropriate. The CIPD identifies people managers as central to performance management, with responsibility for connecting organizational and individual objectives, giving feedback and holding employees accountable. It also describes performance management as a continuous cycle rather than an isolated event.

That makes managerial capability an important part of the system. Clear criteria and data can support better decisions, but managers still need to understand the context behind the numbers.

Performance systems also need to account for changing skills

The skills an employee needs today may not be the skills the organization will need several years from now.

The World Economic Forum reports that 59 out of every 100 workers are expected to require training by 2030, reflecting the scale of anticipated workforce reskilling and upskilling needs.

For EPM systems, this creates a stronger connection between performance assessment and employee development. Competency frameworks, feedback and development objectives can help organizations identify not only whether employees are delivering current responsibilities, but also where capability needs to develop.

Building the capability

Designing an EPM system around objectives, performance criteria, competencies, feedback and improvement requires more than an appraisal form. The Certified Employee Performance Management Professional and Practitioner certifications from The KPI Institute cover EPM system architecture, strategic alignment, performance processes, criteria and competencies, as well as calibration and bias mitigation. For professionals responsible for designing or applying employee performance systems, the programs provide a structured framework for connecting performance management with organizational goals and practical workplace requirements.

 

Sustainability reporting has moved from a voluntary communications exercise to a regulatory obligation. Under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), thousands of companies now face detailed, audited disclosure requirements on environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance — with similar expectations building through the ISSB standards internationally.

For many organizations, the instinct has been to treat this as a reporting problem: build the disclosures, satisfy the auditors, move on. A growing body of research suggests that framing is too narrow — and that organizations already running a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) are better positioned to meet these requirements as a matter of strategy rather than compliance.

Compliance is the floor, not the framework

A 2025 study in Management Decision makes this case directly. Examining how companies can operationalize the CSRD, the researchers propose implementing its requirements through a sustainability balanced scorecard, arguing that the exercise should integrate sustainability with corporate governance rather than sit alongside it as a separate disclosure workstream. Their proposed framework moves through four steps — identifying material themes, assessing current capability, formulating strategy and then reporting — deliberately placing reporting last, as an output of strategic work rather than its starting point.

That sequencing matters. Organizations that build ESG metrics only to satisfy disclosure rules tend to end up with indicators that are audit-ready but strategically disconnected — numbers that describe activity without informing decisions.

A well-established extension of a familiar framework

The idea of adapting the BSC for sustainability is not new; the “sustainability balanced scorecard” (SBSC) has been studied for over two decades. A 2025 bibliometric review of 247 publications on the subject found that the SBSC consistently strengthens organizations’ capacity to align sustainability goals with core strategic objectives, while also flagging persistent implementation barriers — chiefly, the difficulty of choosing sustainability indicators that are both meaningful and comparable across business units.

Sector-specific applications reinforce the pattern. A 2024 study of fast-moving consumer goods companies proposed a method for operationalizing ESG-adapted corporate strategy through the BSC’s four perspectives, translating climate and sustainability targets into the same cause-and-effect logic FMCG firms already use to manage financial and customer outcomes. Separate research on Indonesian manufacturing firms found that integrating ESG considerations into BSC design produced positive, statistically significant improvements in sustainability performance across all four scorecard dimensions — evidence that the framework does not need to be reinvented to absorb ESG, only extended.

It is not only a private-sector question

The pressure to link sustainability reporting to genuine strategic management extends beyond corporations. A 2025 study of local government organizations examined how municipalities are implementing ESG indicators within their balanced scorecards, finding that institutions incorporating sustainability into their performance frameworks — rather than treating it as a separate policy initiative — reported stronger policy coherence and citizen engagement. Leadership commitment and stakeholder participation emerged as the critical success factors, echoing what the private-sector research also finds: the framework only delivers value when it is genuinely used to manage strategy, not simply populated with new metrics.

The strategic risk of getting this wrong

None of this suggests ESG integration is straightforward. The same body of research is candid about where organizations struggle: selecting indicators that are material rather than merely available, avoiding a proliferation of metrics that dilutes strategic focus, and ensuring that sustainability targets are cascaded through the organization with the same discipline applied to financial ones.

That is precisely the discipline a well-designed Balanced Scorecard system is meant to enforce. The organizations best placed to meet ESG reporting obligations without derailing focus are, generally, the ones that already have a structured way of connecting objectives, KPIs and initiatives across the business — and are extending that same structure to sustainability, rather than building a parallel system for it.

Building the capability

As reporting requirements tighten and stakeholders — investors, regulators, customers — expect sustainability performance to be managed with the same rigor as financial performance, the ability to design and cascade a scorecard that genuinely integrates ESG becomes a strategic capability, not an accounting task.

The Certified Balanced Scorecard Management System Professional program from The KPI Institute equips participants to design, implement and cascade a Balanced Scorecard system built to hold up under exactly this kind of pressure — where strategy, KPIs and reporting obligations all need to move as one.

Artificial intelligence is changing how organizations make decisions, allocate resources and respond to opportunities. But as the business environment becomes more dynamic, how should organizations adapt the way they execute strategy?

Artificial intelligence is moving beyond experimentation and into the core of business operations. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 86% of employers expect AI and information-processing technologies to transform their businesses by 2030. At the same time, the Forum identifies resilience, flexibility and agility among the core skills expected to remain important as organizations adapt to technological and economic change.

This combination creates a strategic challenge.

Organizations can use AI to process information faster, identify patterns and support decisions. But they still need the organizational capability to translate those insights into action.

And when the assumptions behind a strategy change, execution may need to change with them.

This is where agile strategy execution becomes particularly relevant.

AI can accelerate decisions. What happens next?

AI can give organizations access to new sources of information and new ways of working. Yet adopting AI does not automatically translate into better organizational performance.

A peer-reviewed study published in the International Journal of Information Management examined data from 205 supply-chain executives in the United States and found that AI assimilation was associated with organizational agility, customer agility and firm performance. The researchers also found that organizational and customer agility partially mediated the relationship between AI assimilation and firm performance.

The finding suggests that the organizational response to AI matters alongside the technology itself.

More recent research reinforces the connection. A 2025 study in Industrial Marketing Management examined 246 B2B firms in Australasia and found that AI-enabled systems can support innovation through improved decision-making performance, while strategic agility plays a significant role in the relationship between AI adoption, decision-making and innovation.

The implication for strategy professionals is straightforward: AI may improve the information available for decision-making, but organizations still need the ability to respond effectively to what that information reveals.

Agile does not mean changing strategy every time something changes

Agility is sometimes reduced to the idea of moving quickly or changing direction whenever something new happens.

For strategy execution, that interpretation is too narrow.

Agility can instead mean having a structured way to sense changes, evaluate their implications, take action and adjust implementation while maintaining strategic direction.

Consider an organization that launches a strategic initiative based on a particular customer process. Six months later, an AI capability makes part of that process significantly faster or less expensive. The strategic objective may still be valid, but the initiative supporting it may no longer be the most effective way to achieve it.

An execution-oriented organization needs to be able to recognize that difference.

Recent research supports this broader view of agility. A 2025 study published in Industrial Marketing Management found that organizational learning can contribute to strategic agility in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments, with the researchers emphasizing continuous learning, decentralized decision-making and adaptability.

Agility, therefore, is not simply about speed. It is about the organization’s capacity to respond intelligently to changing conditions.

The execution problem is also a coordination problem

Strategy does not execute itself.

A systematic review in the European Management Journal describes strategy implementation as a dynamic and complex process through which managers and employees turn strategic plans into reality. The review identifies managerial actions, organizational conditions and dynamic managerial capabilities as important elements of effective implementation.

That means execution involves considerably more than approving a strategic plan.

People need to understand what the strategy means for their work. Resources need to be aligned with priorities. Different functions need to coordinate their efforts. Leaders need to monitor progress and intervene when implementation begins to diverge from strategic intent.

This becomes even more important when technology is changing rapidly.

A peer-reviewed study on strategy implementation and organizational agility found that organizational agility can influence managerial discretion, which in turn supports strategy implementation and unit performance.

In practical terms, organizations need enough structure to maintain strategic alignment—but enough flexibility to allow decision-makers to respond when circumstances change.

What should organizations actually monitor?

This is where performance measurement enters the picture.

A strategy needs more than objectives and initiatives. Leaders also need evidence that implementation is moving in the intended direction.

KPIs can provide that visibility.

When appropriately connected to strategic objectives, KPIs can help organizations monitor implementation, identify performance gaps and determine where management attention may be required.

In a rapidly changing environment, however, measurement should not become purely retrospective.

A significant change in a KPI can prompt a broader strategic question:

Does the original plan still make sense?

This creates a feedback loop between strategy and execution. Performance information does not simply tell an organization whether it achieved a target; it can also provide evidence for deciding whether an initiative, resource allocation or implementation approach needs to change.

This view is consistent with research published in Long Range Planning on strategy implementation, which conceptualizes implementation through practices including structure and process matching, resource matching, monitoring, framing and negotiating.

The result is a more dynamic understanding of execution: strategy provides direction, while implementation generates information that can inform subsequent strategic decisions.

Agile strategy execution is becoming a practical discipline

Recent research is also beginning to connect agile principles directly with strategy deployment.

A 2025 study published in Management Research Review examined strategy development and deployment within an automotive company through 39 semi-structured interviews. The researchers identified challenges involving process integration, communication, information quality, strategy mentality and coordination, and proposed an agile framework for strategy development and deployment.

This is significant because agile principles have often been associated with project or product development rather than the broader process of executing organizational strategy.

The emerging research suggests that the same underlying challenge exists at the strategic level: how can organizations maintain direction while responding effectively to new information and changing conditions?

For professionals responsible for strategy and performance, that requires a combination of planning, measurement, stakeholder engagement, monitoring and change management.

Building the capability to execute strategy

The Certified Agile Strategy Execution Professional (C-ASE) from The KPI Institute is designed around this challenge.

The program introduces a proprietary framework for strategy implementation and combines best practices with practical advice, process maps and implementation tools.

Participants develop capabilities to:

• Use strategy planning tools
• Deploy KPIs to monitor strategy implementation
• Engage the right stakeholders in strategy execution
• Monitor strategy implementation
• Drive organizational change

The live-online certification involves 40 hours in total, including four hours of pre-course requirements, 20 hours of live online sessions delivered over five consecutive days, three hours for an Individual Learning Map, a one-hour certification exam and 12 hours of after-course requirements.

Participants also gain access to the international Certified Agile Strategy Professional Community and can pursue international recognition for their strategy execution skills.

The next question for strategy professionals

AI is changing what organizations can do. It is also changing the speed at which assumptions can become outdated.

The strategic challenge, therefore, is not simply adopting AI. It is developing the organizational capability to turn new information and capabilities into coordinated action—and adjust that action when circumstances change.

That is where agile strategy execution becomes relevant.

For professionals working in strategy, performance management and organizational transformation, developing this capability can help strengthen the connection between strategic objectives, initiatives, KPIs, stakeholders and organizational change.

Explore the Certified Agile Strategy Execution Professional →

Picture the last strategy offsite your organization ran. The whiteboard full of ambitions. The slide deck with the five-year vision. The applause when the CEO said “this is the year we execute.” Now, picture where that plan is today.

If your company looks anything like most, it’s sitting half-finished in a folder nobody opens.

That’s not a guess.

According to Harvard Business School Professor Robert Kaplan, co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard, 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully. Read that twice. Most strategy work in most companies simply dies somewhere between the whiteboard and the results dashboard.

The real problem isn’t strategy

Ask around and you’ll hear the usual excuses: bad market timing, weak leadership buy-in, a distracted team. A 2026 benchmark of 180 strategy and operations leaders tells a more specific story: 86% of companies have employees who cannot actually name their organization’s strategy, and only 7% of leaders say more than three-quarters of their teams’ daily work connects back to it. In 93% of companies, a meaningful share of daily work simply isn’t serving the strategy at all. People aren’t failing to execute strategy. They’re failing to even see it.

Academics have spent decades trying to pin down exactly how bad this gets, and the honest answer is: it varies more than any single number suggests.

A review published in the Journal of Management & Organization found implementation failure estimates ranging from 28% to 90% across the literature, largely because most of the evidence behind those headline figures is outdated, fragmented, or thin. What the research does agree on is this: writing a good strategy is rarely the hard part. Making it survive contact with the organization is.

What this means for business planning professionals

Here’s the uncomfortable part: none of this is a strategy-writing problem. Every failed plan in these studies started with a strategy someone believed in. What separates organizations that execute from the ones that don’t is the discipline of planning practice — clear ownership structures, cascading goals people can actually name, review rhythms that catch drift before it becomes failure, and metrics built to be used, not filed.

That discipline is a learnable craft, not a personality trait some executives happen to have. It’s built through structured frameworks, KPI design, and planning methodologies that hold up once the offsite excitement fades.

If you want to move from writing plans to making them stick, this is exactly what The KPI Institute’s Strategy and Business Planning certification is built around. Bring the practical toolkit back to your organization. Sign up for the course →