Rereading Richard Rumelt’s The Crux last weekend, I noticed something I apparently missed the first time around — Rumelt’s mention of Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard management framework.
The Balanced Scorecard measures performance across four “perspectives”:
Customer Perspective
Internal Business Perspective
Innovation and Learning Perspective
Financial Perspective
I felt my cheeks warming as I read through the list. Our MaP³ assessment also measures four areas:
Participant Outcomes
Strategic Alignment
Learning Capabilities
Financial Performance
After some soothing self-talk (There’s nothing new under the sun, Kyle; Everything’s a remix; Car companies don’t stop building better wheels just because the wheel was already invented, etc.), I found myself curious about something more important than originality: How do you choose the right framework for your organization’s current reality?
If you’re a museum leader wrestling with which decision-making model might serve your institution better, today’s letter will be of interest.
The question isn’t which framework is “better” — it’s more a question of which framework matches where your organization is right now.
Both approaches organize thinking around four key performance areas. The difference lies in their starting assumptions about your organization’s readiness.
Starting Point: Execution vs. Discovery
The Balanced Scorecard begins with execution in mind — there’s a presumption that teams know and agree on what the organization needs to achieve. If your team can honestly say, “We’re clear on our objectives, we just need better execution,” the Scorecard offers a good structure.
MaP³ begins with discovery — assuming that different departments are probably working on different challenges, often related to their expertise rather than shared priorities. If you suspect your team might be solving different problems, MaP³ helps surface what you’re actually trying to accomplish together.
Can your staff articulate the same critical challenge when asked separately? If yes, management tools excel. If not, you need alignment before optimization.
The direction you face when you start the journey has an outsized impact on results.
Now, let’s dig into the different dimensions.
Customer Perspective vs. Participant Outcomes
The Scorecard measures customer satisfaction, retention, and acquisition — metrics that assume you’ve already identified your priority audiences and understand what success looks like with them. These measurements work well when you’re confident about who you serve and how (and, again, shared understanding is important).
MaP³’s Participant Outcomes approach asks what outcomes your institution supports — a first step toward understanding who you could serve most effectively. Rather than measuring satisfaction with existing audiences, you’re exploring what your institution uniquely enables people to achieve.
It’s the difference between optimizing relationships with known audiences and discovering opportunities with potential audiences you haven’t fully considered. A museum could score high on visitor satisfaction and still be irrelevant to all but the relative few who already love museums.
This is a persistent theme in comparing the frameworks — the Scorecard is a management and planning tool; MaP³ is a framework for making strategic decisions. Management and planning are important, but so is strategy, and they are complementary but not the same thing.
Internal Business Perspective vs. Strategic Alignment
Here, the two approaches couldn’t be more different. In fact, this is probably an apples-to-oranges comparison, but I’ll run with it for the purposes of today’s letter.
The Scorecard asks “What must we excel at?” — basically, capability optimization in service of existing objectives.
MaP³ asks “What critical challenge must we face?" — so, problem identification that shapes which capabilities need to be developed.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Can’t we just look at our strategic plan to determine our capabilities focus?” Go look at yours right now. You’ll likely find aspirations that could apply to any museum in town, not specific challenges that demand specific capabilities. Strategic plans typically offer wishlists, not coherent direction.
Innovation and Learning Perspective vs. Learning Capabilities
The Scorecard focuses on optimizing processes that deliver customer value, while MaP³ examines how customer learning flows across the organization. Again, in the Scorecard model, there’s an assumption that the people within the organization are aligned on what customer value is and what kind of value the museum wants to provide. MaP³ begins by questioning what learning is happening within the organization, who is doing the learning, and how that learning is being shared.
The Scorecard model works if you’ve properly diagnosed what you should be optimizing for — again, that’s a function of management. But why bother improving a ladder if climbing it is going to lead you up the wrong wall?
Financial Perspective vs Financial Performance
There’s considerable overlap between the approaches in this area — at least if we consider financial measures in isolation. The differences emerge when considering financial performance (or “perspective”) in relation to the other areas, and this is where the Achilles heel of the Scorecard model becomes apparent.
MaP³ is designed to help the museum align around a decision of a) who the museum wants to better support (Participant Outcomes) to help address b) a critical challenge (Strategic Alignment) so that the organization can improve c) financial performance.
A strategy is a bet: “If we focus on a, then we’ll be able to address b, and we’ll see results in c”. There’s no guarantee your bet will succeed, but the bet is a coherent one — all the parts speak to one another. This is where the Scorecard falls short. You could more or less succeed on every metric and still underperform or fail as a whole. The financial performance is where this becomes clear because financial performance is not an end in itself. I don’t think it is even for a for-profit company — after all, all organizations exist to produce better outcomes for the humans those organizations support — but financial results are certainly not something that should be considered in isolation in mission-driven organizations.
Choosing a framework
Is there some heuristic or decision tree you can use to decide when to use which model? (If you’re thinking, “Why not both?” I’m with you — but that may be a different letter for another day. For now, let’s keep things simple and binary.)
The Balanced Scorecard makes sense when you’re certain everyone is aware and more or less aligned on organizational objectives — you’ve diagnosed the critical challenge and are ready to work on addressing the challenge. You’ve also identified priority audiences based on their desired outcomes (people don’t fit into neat demographic boxes).
MaP³ is valuable when the opposites are true: you’re not sure everyone is working on the same problem or has a shared understanding of what matters most today. The mental model for staff is a default understanding of people based on things like age, location, ethnicity, and gender — and no one has really talked about who matters most (probably in part because choosing a priority audience when your operating system is based on demographics generates uncomfortable conversations about “older people” or “African Americans” — it’s hard to decide who your museum wants to support when the model you’re using to define people reinforces stereotypes or prejudices).
Reflection challenge: Pick a handful of your colleagues (make the selection as random as possible) and individually ask them: “What’s the most critical challenge our organization faces right now?” If you get similar answers, optimization tools serve you well. If you get scattered responses, alignment work comes first.
Of course, I’m biased, but I think the framework that challenges your thinking probably matches your needs better than the one that confirms your existing approach.