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This is a book for leaders. Organisations have a mission, a vision and a set of strategic goals. They have these things because organisations exist to achieve something, to make some difference in the world, to serve a purpose. And the job of leaders is to bring that to fruition – to make the conceptual goals a tangible reality.

But how can we know how well that's happening, or if it's happening at all? How can we know if we are leading our organisations to make a measurable difference? Most leaders talk about productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, quality, engagement, best practice, sustainability and profitability. And yet we struggle to inspire our leadership team, and everyone throughout the organisation, to:

• do what's most needed to fulfil the mission

• realise the vision

• achieve the strategic goals.

The world is demanding more and more of organisational leaders. The world wants more transparency – to see the truth about how organisations are performing. And not just in terms of profit, but also how they treat people and the planet. The world wants more accountability, holding leaders responsible for the performance of their organisations. Many leaders may be kept awake at night, panicked by what transparency might reveal about their organisation's performance and how they might be held to account.

But the best leaders won't be panicking. The best leaders already know how their organisations are performing, in terms of profit, people and the planet. They know that performance has improved under their leadership, and they can prove it because they measure it. They can prove it because they practise evidence-based leadership.

If we want to know the impact of our leadership on our organisation – if we want to know what legacy we will leave – we have to prove it. And to prove it, we have to measure it. What our gut says, and what ‘they' say, is not proof. A finished improvement project or change initiative or capital investment or new product line is not proof. For proof we need objective measures of the results that these investments were supposed to improve.

Measuring performance is like gravity. It pulls our attention and action toward a centre, toward the most important things we should focus on and improve. When we measure the important performance results, we move more directly toward those results and we achieve them sooner and with less effort.

When an eagle circles the sky, hunting for a meal, she sees her prey, she works out how far it is from her, and she lines up the most direct path toward it. Instinctively, she lets gravity pull her toward her goal, effortlessly and rapidly.

For leaders of organisations, performance measurement is the gravity that speeds up and takes effort out of our pursuit of what we want. So we get bigger and better improvements for less effort. And, on an organisational scale, evidence-based leadership is the process of using measurement as the gravity to draw the whole organisation toward the results that matter most.

Evidence-based leaders can prove how well their organisation is delivering what matters most, measurably and objectively and convincingly.

This book is about a system of evidence-based leadership. It maps out the principles, habits and processes that leaders must master to create high-performance organisations. Organisations that can:

• measure their impact

• demonstrate how well they fulfil their mission and realise their vision

• make the world better than they found it.

The evidence-based leadership map is like any map for a territory we want to explore: there isn't only one path to follow. My hope is for this book to guide you through the territory of high-performance organisations. I hope it shows you what's possible, helps you navigate and points out things you otherwise wouldn't have noticed. Let's begin our adventure!

Stacey Barr

September 2016