Thanks for your comment. While the concept of top-to-bottom vertical themes (TBVT) makes logical sense, in practice it has been a challenge. Cause-and-effect relationships don’t usually fit a one-to-one sequence leading up the map. A typical objective at the bottom of the map, such as “Drive a culture of performance and accountability” is certain to be seen by management as a driver for many objectives in a process perspective above. The use of arrows to denote cause-and-effect relationships becomes a bit of a clutter when there are these one-to-many relationships. In reality, there are very few maps with TBVT, and I hope I’ll not be using that acronym any more.

Even when themes don’t necessarily span all perspectives, they are a great way of organizing strategy review meetings, especially for relatively new BSCs. However, leadership teams with mature BSCs often use the first few minutes of the review meeting for a high-level review of all objectives, and then do a “deep dive” on just one or two objectives. The evolution of the strategy review meeting was the topic of an article I co-authored in Balanced Scorecard Report back in 2005. Perhaps I’ll be revisiting the topic here soon.

Thanks again for your support.