22.5 A good balanced scorecard design has several features 1 It tells the story of a company’s strategy by articulating a sequence of cause-and- effect relationships. 2 It helps to communicate the strategy to all members of the organisation by translating the strategy into a coherent and linked set of understandable and measurable operational targets. 3 It places strong emphasis on financial objectives and measures in for-profit companies. Non-financial measures are regarded as part of a programme to achieve future financial performance. 4 It limits the number of measures to only those that are critical to the implementation of the strategy. 5 It highlights suboptimal trade-offs that managers may make when they fail to consider operational and financial measures together. 22.6 Pitfalls to avoid when implementing a balanced scorecard are 1 Do not assume the cause-and-effect linkages to be precise they are merely hypotheses. An organisation must gather evidence of these linkages overtime. 2 Do not seek improvements across all of the measures all of the time.
