Keep a visible, compelling scoreboard

Create a simple, always-visible scoreboard showing lead and lag measures — so you always know if you’re winning.

Why it works

Scoreboards activate the game dynamic: when people can see the score, they play differently. Visibility of progress toward goals strengthens motivation through immediate feedback and a sense of agency. Publicly shared scoreboards also introduce social accountability without requiring formal oversight, because teammates can see each other’s contributions.

How to do it

1. Design a scoreboard that shows current lead measure performance and progress toward the WIG lag measure — on one page.
2. Make it physically visible in your workspace or in a shared digital space — not buried in a spreadsheet.
3. Update it at least weekly; stale scoreboards lose their motivating function.
4. Keep it simple: if you can’t read it in 5 seconds and know if you’re winning, it’s too complex.

Evidence

Feedback specificity consistently improves goal-directed performance; visible progress indicators are a well-supported component of motivational systems. The "scoreboard" framing adds gamification, which has observational support for enhancing engagement in task contexts. (observational)

Scoreboards can become demotivating if the team is consistently losing and no corrective action is taken; they require the cadence of accountability (Discipline 4) to be useful rather than demoralizing.

Sources

• Locke & Latham (1990), A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance — feedback as essential ingredient

Common mistake

Building an elaborate scoreboard with many metrics that no one reads — complexity kills the real-time "are we winning?" function that makes scoreboards motivating.