Leaders feel the drag long before they can name the cause
In most organizations I work with, the leaders sense trouble in their strategy well before they can describe it. Something fails to connect between what the organization knows about its market, its customers and their needs, and the decisions made at the top. Research is delivered and nothing changes. The plan looks right and the results do not follow.
Trouble that begins in how an organization senses its market is hard to see from the inside, because the faculty at fault is the one the organization would use to look.
Diagnosis comes before any remedy
The first step is a diagnosis. Statements such as "we need to be more innovative" or "let's do more research" are prescriptions that skip it. A diagnosis asks where the constraint sits. It may be in how the organization observes, in how it interprets what it observes, or in assumptions nobody has tested. It may be a matter of people, of process or of governance. It also asks how severe the constraint is.
A useful diagnosis measures behavior and the conditions behind it
The Sensing Gap Diagnostic, one of the instruments on ForesightOps (foresightops.org), Fugue's site for strategic foresight methods, answers those questions. It looks at seven capabilities across the full cycle of organizational intelligence: observing, interpreting, mapping assumptions, imagining futures, formulating strategy, experimenting and learning. It looks at seven infrastructure conditions that enable or block those capabilities. And it asks twenty-seven questions, each about observable behavior, so the answers describe what the organization does and the respondents' self-image stays out of the score. The results map to a maturity model, so a team sees where the shortfall is and how deep it goes.
Most diagnostic tools produce a flat score. Placing the questions across both axes, capabilities and conditions, measures what the organization can do and also the structural conditions that decide whether it does. That second dimension is where the diagnosis lives. It separates knowing that something is wrong from knowing what keeps it wrong.
Twenty-seven borrows Plato's figure for depth
In Plato's Timaeus, twenty-seven, three cubed, closes the odd side of the lambda, the figure Plato used to describe the proportions of the world soul. It marks the step at which a line becomes a surface and a surface becomes a solid. The diagnostic borrows that idea: a result with depth, beyond a single number.
Twenty minutes with the diagnostic locates the constraint
The Sensing Gap Diagnostic runs on ForesightOps and takes a leadership team about twenty minutes. If its result points to a constraint in how your organization sees its market, request a briefing and we will walk through the results with you.
William Haas Evans
Founder and chief strategy officer of Fugue Strategy Advisors. He works with leadership teams on strategy design, strategic foresight and organization design. More about William
