When making major decisions in my life, I like to make a balanced scorecard. It's a common tool taught in business school used to evaluate the main strategies and objectives of a project in relation to one another. You determine the main pillars or areas of strategy, their outcomes, and then assign each pillar a weight, or percentage indicating relative importance, so that all percentages add up to 100%.
In business, typically the four pillars to evaluate are:
Financial, meaning the revenue or financial numbers.
Customer, such as satisfaction or retention.
Internal processes, such as efficiency, operations, and quality.
Organizational capacity, or learning and development, meaning how this affects the people involved, growth, and culture.
For each option, you would assign each pillar a numerical score, and “weigh” them according to their assigned percentages to come up with your total score.
I like to make a balanced scorecard for most decisions. For example, when choosing a career path early on in my life, I made a balanced scorecard to measure and evaluate my first two job offers out of school. The first offer was for a stable job in technology consulting, the other was a much riskier (and to me exciting) role making submarines.
While my original balanced scorecard is lost to time, the pillars included:
Salary: Would I make enough to live (and move out of my parents’ home)?
Career growth: Would this job be a dead end or lead to new opportunities?
Interest: Would I be interested in the work I was doing? Would it be fun?
Company: Was it a good company with a good reputation?
People and fit: Did I like my potential manager and colleagues? Was it a good cultural fit?
Quality of life: Would I be able to have a life outside of work?
Good story factor: Would my new job make for a good story?
For many of the pillars, consulting easily scored higher. It’s hard to compete with the salary and career prospects of a major firm. Yet consulting jobs are famous for requiring people to work twice as many hours as most other jobs, and I couldn't stop thinking about making submarines. So I wasn’t happy with those results and felt deeply that I needed to rethink the scorecard. It was an emotional decision, but one I still wanted to support with data. So I added this last pillar, the good story factor, and weighed it heavily. Submarines won that pillar easily and it changed the whole scorecard.
My father pointed out that the good story factor wasn’t a good criteria for choosing a job. But I did end up accepting the role at the U-Boat Worx and stayed there happily for more than four years. My father would say to me years later, “I get it now! I tell everyone you’re making submarines!”
Good story factor simply means that I’m excited to talk about something and it makes for a good story, whether it’s a job or a project, anywhere I spend my time. It’s a way of measuring that excitement in a way that is meaningful. And it’s a pillar I’ve kept on my scorecards.
A framework gives you a structure to measure factors in relation to one another, but only you can decide what is most important to measure, what is most important to you. Don’t discount adding in categories that might seem like intangibles or X-factor items. If it matters to you, you should make it one of your pillars.
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