Self-service guide. Organisation level.
Assess your organisation’s capability
A method your leadership team can run in an afternoon to establish where the organisation stands, where it needs to stand, and which gaps matter most.
- TIME
- Half a day, plus an hour each beforehand
- PEOPLE
- Four to eight, spanning the whole business
- YOU NEED
- A quiet room and somewhere to record scores
What this tells you
Organisations rarely fail because one thing is broken. They stall because several elements are slightly weak at the same time, and the weakness only shows up when something demands they work together. A capability profile makes that visible before a programme exposes it.
The output is two lines on the same chart. Where you are today, and where you need to be for the change you are planning. The distance between them is the work.
The method
Work through these in order. Skipping a step will not break the exercise, though it will usually cost you the finding that made it worth running.
Agree what the change is
Write one sentence describing the change the organisation is facing over the next eighteen months. Everyone scoring must have the same change in mind, because required capability is meaningless in the abstract.
Score each element independently
Take the ten elements below. Each person scores every element twice, alone, before any discussion. Once for where the organisation is today, once for where it needs to be to carry the change. Use a scale of one to five.
- 1. Absent. No shared understanding, no ownership.
- 2. Weak. Exists in places, depends on individuals.
- 3. Uneven. Works in parts of the business.
- 4. Adequate. Consistent, documented, owned.
- 5. Strong. Consistent, measured, and improving.
Compare before you discuss
Put all the scores side by side without averaging them yet. The elements where your people disagree most are usually more informative than the elements they agree are weak. Disagreement about the present tense means the organisation has no shared view of itself.
Average and plot
Average each element across the group, for current and required separately. Plot both. You now have a profile with a required line above it and a set of gaps.
Rank the gaps by consequence
Take the three largest gaps and ask what happens if each stays open for a year. Rank by the answer. The largest gap and the most consequential gap are often different elements, and the second one is where to start.
What to score
| Element | The question to score against |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Could everyone here state what the organisation exists to do, and would they agree? |
| Value | Do we know what customers actually pay for, and can we tell when we deliver it? |
| Work | Do we know what work is really being done, including the parts nobody designed? |
| Workflow | Does work move cleanly end to end, especially between teams? |
| Actors | Is it clear who does what, with the authority that goes with it? |
| Resources | Do people have the skills, capacity, time and tools the work requires? |
| Information | Is the information we rely on captured properly and trusted? |
| Decisions | Is it clear what gets decided, by whom, on what basis, and within what limits? |
| Measurement | Can we see how we are performing, and do those measures lead to action? |
| Learning and Evolution | Do we improve deliberately, or only when something forces us to? |
Where this goes wrong
- Scoring aspiration instead of reality. If the process exists but people work around it, the honest score is two.
- Letting the most senior person score first. Run it silently and independently, then compare.
- Setting the required line at five everywhere. Very few organisations need strong capability in all ten elements, and a required line of all fives tells you nothing about priority.
- Treating the result as a verdict. It is a starting position, and it only means something when you run it again later.
What to do with the result
Pick one element and one specific improvement, with a named owner and a date. Then book the same session again in six months and score it the same way. A profile has very little value on its own. The value comes from the second reading.
If the exercise surfaces a particular workflow that everyone points at, that is the signal to look at that workflow properly.
What the instrument adds
The method above gives you a profile. Edge151 Contour scores the same ten elements against the published standard, which is what makes a result comparable over time and between parts of a business.
The difference is determinism. The same answers always produce the same score, so a second reading measures the organisation, not the mood of the room.
- Deterministic scoring, so the same answers always give the same result
- All ten elements scored against the published standard
- A recommendation set tied to the profile, in a defined order
- A baseline you can measure against at the next reading
Contour is in development and will open as a tool you can use. This guide stays free either way.
The other two levels
Each guide stands on its own, and together they cover organisation, workflow and task.
WORKFLOW
How well one workflow performs across people, process and technology.
TASK
Where the hours actually go, task by task.