Select Page

Balanced Scorecard Training – customised for your organisation’s needs

Our Balanced Scorecard Training helps organisations use the 4G Strategic Balanced Scorecard Approach to make a difference.  If you simply want a set of measures, call someone else. If you are serious about having a modern, customised and effective strategic balanced scorecard approach, then read on…

“The way Phil explains things and helps us to design and implement a modern balanced scorecard approach, makes it a simple, effective and easy to understand system, to manage your performance.” Ben Ticehurst, Assistant Chief Executive, Peterborough City Council

About our Strategic Balanced Scorecard training: helping you to decide…

Here is a contents list for our Balanced Scorecard Training.  Select the topics that will help you decide and it will take you to the details below.

  1. An introduction to our approach: A video that gives you insights into our training and the basics of Modern Balanced Scorecards (Strategy Mapping 101 – Why we say it is not about measures)
  2. Your trainer: What experience and expertise will the trainer have?
  3. Why talk about the Fourth Generation Strategic Balanced Scorecard approach
  4. Customised training: Why we don’t do open courses… and how that can still help you by customising our training to suit your team’s and your organisation’s needs
  5. What you will learn on our course: How different people will benefit, be they Executives and Directors, A management team, or Strategy & Performance Management specialists
  6. A range of training options: various Balanced Scorecard training and workshops

If you have a particular need or question, feel free to call or email us.

1. An introduction to our approach. Strategy mapping 101 and why we say it is not about measures

Strategy Mapping 101 a video introduction to modern Balanced Scorecard training. (Opens a new tab)

If you want to understand why we say this watch our Balanced Scorecard basics video: Strategy mapping 101.  The video is a good introduction into how we talk about and explain the approach. The video will explain why we say it is not simply about measures (and never has been). You may even learn some things about good practice in balanced scorecard design.

2. What experience will the Strategic Balanced Scorecard trainer have?

You have a choice.  You could be trained by someone who has read a book or two on the subject.  Or you could be trained someone who worked with the originators for 4 years, has implemented around 70 Strategic Balanced Scorecards and written a book endorsed by one of the originators of the Balanced Scorecard. You choose.

Front cover for "Strategy Mapping for Learning organizations (published by Gower), Author Phil Jones

Strategy Mapping for Learning Organizations, by Phil Jones

All our strategic Balanced Scorecard training is provided by Phil Jones, Chief Executive of Excitant Ltd.  Phil worked with David Norton & Bob Kaplan for over 4 years, and has been working in this space since 1996. He has designed and implemented over 70 strategic balanced scorecards in a wide variety of organisations, sectors and countries.
Phil’s book, Strategy Mapping for Learning Organizations distils much of this experience.  It has a highly complementary foreword by David P Norton.

3. Our Balanced Scorecard training includes the Fourth Generation Strategic balanced scorecard approach

It is this experience that has helped us develop the Fourth Generation Strategic Balanced Scorecard approach for the environment organisations face today. Our training will help you design, communicate and execute your strategy, whilst tackling the wider issues of the discipline and the culture that creates performance.  Read more about the paradigm shifts that informed this fourth generation balanced scorecard approach.

“The real benefit was thinking more deeply about the problems, and why we had not always succeeded in the past.” Mats Knuttson, HSSE Director, Addax Petroleum

We customise our balanced scorecard training to suit different types of organisation, whether they be commercial organisations, network or membership organisations, Charities, Not for profits, or the public sector. (Measures, targets and basic scorecards play a part: but only a small part of this overall approach and system).

4. Customised Balanced Scorecard Training: Why we don’t do open, public courses… and how that will help you…

Don’t be put off yet, but we need you to understand why we do not do open public courses.  You see when you get a whole collection of different people from quite different organisations coming to a training, you have to teach generic material.  That generic material is NOT as useful as material designed to address the business models and needs of an individual client or management team.

What we can do is provide a course for you and a number of colleagues.  Frankly, it would probably be the same as the cost of sending 2 or three people on a public course, and our course will probably be about five times more relevant (estimated).

We customise your Balanced Scorecard Training, to suit your particular needs

“In only two days, we made real progress with the strategy, the balanced scorecard, and the team.” Lindsay Stratton, Managing Director, Unite Modular Solutions

All our training is customised for a particular client.  The idea is you actually develop your balanced scorecard components, as the course develops.  You walk away from the course with material that is relevant to you and has kick-started your design and implementation.  You do not have to go away and work out how to apply the general theory and principles you your business model,  We will do that together.

We help organisations influence behaviours and deliver strategy, in a way that suits their culture and today’s environment.  Our Balanced Scorecard training and consultancy services help organisations understand and use Fourth Generation Balanced Scorecard thinking and techniques.

“It really made me think hard about what we believe about how performance should be managed: how that affects what we do, how we manage our people and what effects that gets.” Inez Bailey, Chief Executive, National Adult Literacy Agency, Ireland

We have standard types of courses (see below) which we easily customise to a client’s particular needs, industry and culture. We have well proven material, but we discuss your organisation’s needs in detail beforehand, so we present and facilitate in the way that will most benefit your team and your circumstances.

We find this is what clients really want: understanding the underlying principles and having material that is immediately relevant and useful.  If that works for you, give us a call.

5. What will you learn in your customised Strategic Balanced Scorecard Training ?

Understanding how different types of ‘balanced scorecard’ serve different management needs

In our balanced scorecard training we help you understand how the Balanced Scorecard approach has evolved, how different approaches to the Balanced scorecard suit different circumstances and have different effects.  A different emphasis within the approach helps to solves different problems strategy, performance or culture.  The approach developed in 1992 is sometimes helpful, but does not reflect today’s world.  So we explain the different types, or generations, of balanced scorecards, strategic and operational.  These different types of generations of balanced scorecard serve quite different management needs and solve quite different problems.

We introduce our Fourth Generation Balanced Scorecard Approach which serves the needs of today’s organisations and their challenges.

Addressing your organisations specific needs

Our balanced scorecard training is not mere theory, nor superficial techniques.  It is practical training aimed at you solving your organisation’s specific strategy implementation and performance management problems.

Thank you. That balanced scorecard training was simply the best day’s training I have had for a long while.” MI Manager, Department of Work & Pensions

Our strategic balanced scorecard training is based on over 20 years Strategic Balanced Scorecard experience in a wide variety of organisations. It is practical training in the underlying thinking so you can apply that thinking, appropriately, to your organisation’s market, circumstances, business and performance management challenges.

The social and technical elements of the approach

“You presented with so much energy and enthusiasm, I thought you were going to knock the flip chart over!” Rich Ryder, Quality Improvement Manager, HM Revenue & Customs

Many see the balanced scorecard as a technical solution.  It is not.  it is as much a social tool as a technical one.  Good design, implementation and use should improve the quality of thinking, conversation and decision making in a team.  That quality of thinking, conversation and decision making should spread through the organisation.

5a) Some topics from a typical one or 3 day course

  • Core principles
    • Choosing the most appropriate generation or type of Balanced Scorecard for your organisation
    • Avoiding problems, saving time and effort. Practical actions you can take away and implement.
    • Strategy map design and scorecard design: How they support different conversations
  • Good design
    • Capturing your strategy. Getting the cause and effect relationships right
    • How strategy maps and scorecards fit together.
    • Cascading, developing a set of balanced scorecards for an organisation
  • Alignment and implementation
    • Aligning projects: the five themes of implementation that you must pay attention to.
    • Aligning investments
    • Creating connections across the organisation
  • Roll-out and ownership, so the whole organisation is behind the strategy
    • Communicating and socialising the strategy
    • Ownership and engagement: Developing and maintaining it.
  • How will we use it?
    • Your management meetings: so you talk, work and learn better as a team.
    • Refining your strategy map and scorecards
    • Adding to being a learning organisation

If you are serious about your Balanced Scorecard based Performance Management system… email, or pick up the phone and discuss your training requirements.

5b) How you and your colleagues might benefit from our balanced scorecard training

Executives and managers

  • Communicate your strategy better
  • Align resources, behaviours & actions.
  • Make your strategy easier to manage.
  • Be more confident that you will deliver
  • Become a more responsive organisation.

Management teams

  • Align the organisation’s strategy
  • Demonstrate progress and contribution
  • Create joined up thinking and working.
  • Improve the quality of decisions
  • Move strategy & performance management to the next level

Performance professionals & change managers

  • Get projects on the right track
  • Ensure you get engagement and ownership
  • Improve existing management processes
  • Avoid dysfunctional measures
  • Manage strategy and performance better

To discuss your needs, pick up the phone.

6. A range of options for Balanced Scorecard training

Here is a range of our base courses and workshops, from which we would customise your sessions.

Management Briefing: The Fourth Generation Balanced Scorecard overview

A short, deep briefing on Modern Balanced Scorecard thinking, design and implementation.

Timing: from 2 hours to a full a day. Usually a half day to allow for audience participation and exploration.

  • This session is ideal for briefing a team. Whether you have an existing balanced scorecard or want to introduce one, the session will help you understand the underlying issues. It will help you think through how to update to your existing strategy implementation approach and your management of performance.
  • The Fourth Generation approach helps you become more agile and responsive as an organisation, putting human beings back into performance management.
  • Typically this is a half day session for a team or group of managers. It is an ideal starting place and overall briefing. Some clients have used this to spur to their teams into thinking more deeply about performance and changing the way they work.

To learn more, have a read of our Fourth Generation Strategic Balanced Scorecard approach, or simply call us.

Build your Strategic Balanced Scorecard: Three day practical training course

A deep and practical immersion into modern Balanced Scorecard Training: their design, implementation & use

Timing: three days. Does not have to be consecutive. Ideal for a management team as a group

  • During the three days participants will develop drafts of their Tangible Future, Strategy Map and First Draft Balanced Scorecard.
  • You will also develop a plan for its further development, implementation and use.
  • This is deep immersion into designing, implementing and using a Modern Balanced Scorecard.

This training course is really a three day interactive workshop where a team work together to both learn the principles AND develop their strategy map and balanced scorecard together. It is based upon our proven “Three workshop Rapid Balanced Scorecard” approach.

The Modern Balanced Scorecard Approach (Five day Training): Planning, Design, Implementation & Use

A deeper version of the three day course.  More intense.  More thorough.  Can be spread over different weeks.

Timing: Five days. Intensive course for a management team as a group.

  • This can be split into parts if required. Actually I would suggest this is how you do this). 
  • Members of the Executive team can attend the sessions that are most relevant to them.
  • This is an extended version of the three day course, where more time is spent going deeper into the approaches to develop ownership and engagement.

This course is ideal for a team that wish to develop their balanced scorecard and present it to their management team. Over the five days participants will develop drafts of their Tangible Future, Strategy Map and First Draft Balanced Scorecard. They will also develop a plan for its further development, implementation and use. This is deep immersion into designing, implementing and using a Modern Balanced Scorecard.It is based upon our “Five day Rapid and Intensive Balanced Scorecard” approach.
To learn more, simply call us.

Capturing Strategy in Strategy Maps

“Phil’s book [Strategy Mapping for Learning organizations] is a ‘drivers manual’ for anyone who is implementing a Balanced Scorecard performance management system. […] it is required reading.” David P Norton, one of the originators of the Balanced Scorecard approach

A Specialist course in Strategy Mapping for Strategic Balanced Scorecards

Timing: Two days. Ideal for a those designing Strategy Maps for Strategic Balanced Scorecards

  • Strategy maps make the difference between an operational balanced scorecard and one that supports the organisation’s strategy. Strategy maps have to capture the organisation’s strategy so it can be communicated and later managed. So, how do you do this? This course is based on the book “Strategy Mapping for Learning Organizations” by Phil Jones, (Excitant’s Chief Executive) with a foreword by David Norton.
  • This course exposes the inner thinking and working of strategy maps and strategy mapping. It explains how strategy maps can capture the diversity of strategy in its various forms. We show how strategy maps capture different forms of value propositions that use, and then go beyond, the models used by Kaplan and Norton.
  • We explain how strategy gets captured as choice and focus in an organisation. We expose how competition and the external environment are handled. It explains how strategy works at various levels and how strategy maps handle this. It also explains how to use strategy maps in a strategic management process. The course is available for both Commercial organisations, and organisations in the Not For Profit, Public and Third Sectors.

Talks, Conferences, Videos and Seminars: Keynotes and Specialist topics

Insightful, provocative, and clear: talks you can learn from. Our Managing Director, Phil Jones, talks at seminars, conferences and to in-house teams. His clients say:

“Thank you very much for your excellent speech… it is always a pleasure to listen to interesting and well-planned speeches. You are the highest scoring speaker we have had. Monica Lijeroth, Chair, ACCA

“You held the audience’s attention and gave them just what they wanted. That was excellent, thanks.” Todd S Johnson, Bettermanagement.com

Recent topics include:

  • The Culture of Performance;
  • Strategic management vs Operational management: telling the difference;
  • Using judgement and Evidence in modern balanced scorecards.

If you have not found what you are looking for, get in touch, as we may simply not have listed it here.

Next steps in finding the right balanced scorecard training for you…

To learn about the latest techniques of 4th Generation Balanced Scorecard design… ask about our 4th Generation Balanced Scorecard briefings email, or call

To prepare your team for their Balanced Scorecard training and project…

email, or call, and ask about our Modern Balanced Scorecard training for Strategy & Performance Management Professionals.

Unsure what will be best for you and your team?

We have helped teams in a whole variety of situations and are happy to explore how best to help your team. Simply give us a call for a no obligation discussion.