Part One of this series described a pattern that most managers will recognize: goals set before the success question is defined, metrics chosen to fit those goals, and a planning cycle that gradually loses its connection to the decisions it was meant to inform.

Part Two is about what to do differently.

The Question-Metric-Goal framework asks local governments to reorder work they are already doing. No new software, no performance management overhaul. Just a different question asked first—and being disciplined enough to answer it before the goal gets set.

What follows uses a housing services scenario to walk through the framework. The same steps apply to public works, planning, parks, or any service area where performance goals are set and tracked.

The Framework in Brief

The Question-Metric-Goal framework has three steps:

First, define the success question—the yes-or-no question that tells you whether you are succeeding at what actually matters. It should be about outcomes, not activities, and specific enough that it can be answered with data.  It’s likely the question in the back of everyone’s heads; this just calls for making it explicit.

Second, build the metric that answers it. This is rarely the one that is easiest to track or already in your system. It is the one that honestly answers the question you just defined. This step may take longer than expected, and that is a sign it is being done right.

Third, set the goal—the threshold the metric needs to cross for your success question to be answered yes. This is where the number comes in, grounded in the question and the metric rather than only informed by last year’s baseline.

The number comes last. Everything that precedes it—the question, the metric—determines whether it means anything when you get there.

A Scenario: Housing Services Response Time

A mid-sized city has been receiving complaints about how long it takes to process housing assistance applications. The department director wants to set a performance goal for the coming year. The usual conversation would open with last year’s average processing time and a target for improvement.

Under the Question-Metric-Goal framework, it opens differently.

STEP 1 — DEFINE THE SUCCESS QUESTION

The director starts by asking: what is the yes-or-no question that tells us whether housing services is working the way it should for the people who need it?

A first attempt might be: “Are we processing applications quickly?” But speed is only part of the picture. Applications processed quickly but incorrectly generate corrections, appeals, and delays that end up costing applicants more time than a slower, cleaner process would have. And processing speed, even when accurate, describes what the department does, not what applicants experience.

A sharper version: “Are applicants receiving sound decisions in time to act on them?”

That question puts the applicant’s experience at the center rather than the department’s throughput. It implies that the relevant timeframe is set by what applicants need, not by what the department finds manageable. And it can be answered yes or no, which is what makes it usable for setting a goal.

In this case, the success question is not about what the department does. It is about what the people depending on the department actually experience.

STEP 2 — BUILD THE METRIC

With the success question in hand, the director can ask: What metric answers it?

For an applicant to receive a sound decision in time to act on it, two things have to be true: the decision has to be right, and it has to arrive when it is still useful. A metric built around only one of those dimensions may miss the other. Average processing time, for instance, says nothing about decision quality. An error rate, tracked on its own, says nothing about whether correct decisions are arriving before applicants have run out of options.

A metric that more honestly answers the success question might combine both: the percentage of applications receiving a complete, accurate decision within a defined window—where that window is set by what applicants actually need, not by what the department has historically delivered.

That metric is harder to move than either component alone, but it is tailored to what really matters. It surfaces problems that average processing time smooths over and that error rates, reported in isolation, never connect to timing. It may also generate a less comfortable conversation at the next council presentation. That may very well be a sign it is telling the truth.

Getting the metric right means working back from the question: What would need to change about how applications are reviewed, communicated, and resolved for this number to improve? Asking that of the people doing the work, not just the people tracking it, usually points to the operational changes that actually matter.

The right metric is often the one that generates the most productive discomfort. If the number is easy to move, it is worth asking whether it is measuring what you think.

STEP 3 — SET THE GOAL

Now the director sets the goal.

With the success question defined and the metric chosen, the goal has a specific job: mark the threshold at which the success question can honestly be answered yes. That is not found by looking at last year’s number and adding a percentage. It comes from asking: at what level of performance are the people we serve genuinely well-served?

For this scenario, the director might look at the 21-day window and ask what percentage of applications receiving decisions within that window would constitute real success—not a modest improvement over baseline, but the kind of outcome the community would recognize as the department doing its job. That conversation, held with the staff who process applications and the community members who depend on them, produces a goal that is grounded in something real.

It may also produce a goal that feels ambitious, and that is appropriate. A goal built from an honest success question should reflect what success actually requires, not what the department is comfortable reporting at a council meeting.

What Changes When the Framework Is Used

The most immediate shift is in the goal-setting conversation itself. Opening with a question about the people the department serves tends to surface disagreements that were previously invisible—about what the department is actually for, whose experience counts as the measure of success, and what the data are and are not telling leadership.

Those disagreements are not a problem the framework created. They were already there, embedded in goals that were never quite asking the right question. The framework just makes them visible, which is where they can be addressed.

The second change is durability. A goal built from a written success question is harder to quietly renegotiate when the year gets difficult. The original intent is documented, and everyone in the room knows what the metric was designed to answer. When a department proposes redefining the metric mid-year, the framework makes visible what is actually being proposed: a change in the success question. If the question has genuinely changed, we should say so. If it has not, the metric should not change either.

The third change accumulates over time. After a few planning cycles, the department has an institutional record of what it was trying to accomplish, how it chose to measure progress, and whether it got there. That record is the raw material for learning—for understanding what drove the metrics, which assumptions turned out to be wrong, and what to do differently next year.

Goals that come from real questions build institutional knowledge. Goals that come from last year’s numbers just come from last year’s numbers.

Where to Start in the Next Planning Cycle

The framework does not need to be applied everywhere at once. A single service area, worked through carefully, will teach you more than a rushed attempt across the whole organization.

Pick a service where the current metrics feel hollow—where the numbers trend in the right direction but nobody is quite sure things are actually getting better. Bring the people who do the work into the room, not just the people who track it. Ask the success question out loud. If the people in the room answer it differently, that is not a problem to resolve quickly. It may be the most useful signal the process has produced about what the department is actually trying to accomplish.

Write the question down before choosing the metric, and write the metric down before setting the goal. Keep all three somewhere they can be returned to when the pressure to revise them builds.

That is the whole framework. The discipline is in holding the sequence.

The Connection to Better Decisions

Performance goals and measurement systems are not administrative exercises. They shape what leaders notice, what staff work toward, and for what the community can reasonably expect to hold a department accountable.

When that infrastructure is grounded in a clearly defined success question, it supports the decisions it was designed to inform.  When it is not, it runs alongside the real decisions without connecting to them, producing numbers that look like but don’t function like accountability.

The Question-Metric-Goal framework is one tool in a broader discipline of decision intelligence—the practice of building the data, metrics, and organizational culture that allow decision makers at every level to make better choices. It is the right place to start, because it addresses the most common failure point: the moment before the goal is set, when the question that would give the goal its meaning never gets asked.

Ask it first. The rest of the process has somewhere to go.