Any effective organization must strive to keep a thoughtful balance among several focuses at one time.   Giving too much attention to any one of them while ignoring the others will result in an out-of-balance situation and eventual trouble.  We believe that we can reduce the number of critical dimensions to just five. 

We customize the survey to include a limited number of demographic questions at the discretion of the client.  Those questions allow us to look at individual groups to determine whether we find a pattern in the responses.  They might include, for example:  age, length of service in the organization, or gender.  Depending on the interests of the organization, we can also use questions to gather data based on position within the organizational hierarchy (e.g., rank-and-file versus management) or organizational unit (e.g., the operations group versus the marking group).

Here are a few sample statements from a survey designed to determine the organization's effectiveness along these carefully drawn dimensions.  We have refined our survey down to just a handful of key items for each dimension.

On the key dimension of Committing (to a clearly identified market segment):

• We engage in ongoing interaction with our market segment
  to help us understand what they want and need from us.

On the key dimension of Validating (our strategy against both our organization's and our customer's values and priorities):

• We refrain from activities clearly excluded from our strategies. 

On the key dimension of Shaping (the organization to deliver on the strategies):

• We have institutionalized processes where consistency is critically important

• We hold ourselves mutually accountable to achieve organizational success

On the key dimension of Coherence (between what we say and what we do as an organization):

• We have frequent conversations about our values in the context of making decisions. 

Based on the responses to these statements -- the degree of agreement that the statements reflect the current situation -- we produce summary graphs such as this one:

In this example, the organization under review has a moderate score for Committing, weaker scores for Engaging and Shaping, and a much lower score for Validating.  In order to boost its overall effectiveness, the organization would likely want to pursue interventions in the area of Validating first.  The leader in this organization might undertake such interventions as

• clearly communicating which activities and projects are explicitly
  included in the strategy and which are excluded,
• visibly withdrawing or shifting resources and explaining why
  this supports the strategy, or
• adopting a personal discipline of working into several
  discussions each day how this particular activity or project fits
  the strategy.

In addition we produce two more detailed graphs for each dimension.  In the samples below, you can see results related just to the Validating example above.

While none of these results represent high effectiveness, clearly the two lowest sets of responses came for the statements related to dealing with urgent versus important activities and with the allocation of resources.  With this more detailed information, the leader might decide that the sense of activities included / excluded does not appear problematic, but the allocation of resources to important rather than urgent activities is problematic.

Continuing to explore the responses for the Validating dimension, we offer the following graph:

From this chart we can see that there was not a single response of 8, 9, or 10 (on a 1-to-10 scale of 'agreement') within the set of responses.  Further, we see a relatively normal distribution, suggesting that there are not isolated pockets of disagreement with the statements.  Rather we see a broadly shared sense that Validating the strategy is not something that the organization has successfully emphasized.

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Last modified: Monday April 26, 2010.