Description

Organizations develop explanations for their own performance problems that are usually partially right and often misleading. A management team that attributes poor output to individual underperformance may be correct, but is more likely to be looking at a symptom of something structural — a poorly designed process, a misaligned incentive, a coordination failure that the organizational chart doesn’t capture. Getting past the presenting narrative to the actual cause is the core diagnostic challenge.

You’ll work with:

• Diagnostic frameworks: mapping organizational systems, identifying misalignments, and tracing performance problems to structural rather than individual causes
• Stakeholder analysis: understanding whose interests shape organizational behavior and how those interests affect the problem and the solution
• Intervention design: matching the type and scale of intervention to the diagnosis — and avoiding the common failure mode of applying a standard solution to a non-standard problem

Timeline: +/- 6 hours

Outcome: A more rigorous organizational diagnostic capability — the ability to look past organizational self-narratives to the actual drivers of performance, and to design responses that address those drivers with appropriate precision.