Organization

Assessment 

"Like having a CAT-Scan."

Organization Assessment Instruments

This section provides a number of tools that can be used to assess the issues and opportunities that exist in your organization with respect to organization effectiveness and performance improvement. We have found that the use of these tools can be very educational and motivational, as well as diagnostic. That is because they can not only shed light on why the organization is performing as it is, they can also raise to a conscious level all the essential elements underlying organization performance, which are typically invisible, and show where the gaps are in all these elements. This can be a bit shocking at first, but typically becomes a motivating set of insights.

Our experience is that these kinds of gaps are the root cause of what Jim Collins of Stanford calls, "the the silent creep of impending doom." He likens this to having cancer, a disease with which people can look good on the outside, but be decaying on the inside. Our instruments enable you to see beneath the surface, like a CAT Scan or MRI in the physical world.

Included are global surveys that assess the whole organization -- e.g., its level of evolution and its level of health and capability. There are surveys that assess the quality of the major design elements of the organization-- e.g., its governing ideas, its infrastructure and the capability of its members. There are some more focused surveys that assess the level of awareness of the members, the level of relationships between them, and the quality of their work lives. Most of them are short, and will take only a few minutes.

For those who prefer to have a basic understanding of this process, there is a model that shows how all these organizational variables relate to one another, and another model that shows the elements of organization assessment. There is also a set of Guidelines on how to proceed through the assessment process.