Fifteen ways an organization can believe one thing and live another.
A pattern fires when answers from different vantage points disagree in a specific, recognisable shape. Each one needs particular seats at the table to be visible at all — which is why we tell you how confident the reading is, not just what it says.
Inside the organization
10 PATTERNSLeadership believes people are empowered to act. People believe they need approval. Both are describing the same policy.
An innovation budget exists on the slide. Nobody doing the work has been able to spend it.
The direction is clear at the top and unrecognisable three levels down. Three levels down, people are working hard on a different plan.
Capability is assumed because someone was hired for it once. The people expected to apply it disagree.
Cross-functional forums are frequent, well-attended, and the work downstream carries on unchanged.
Retrospectives happen. The same failure happens again next quarter, in the same shape.
Innovation is named as a priority and appears in no budget, no calendar, and no promotion decision.
Hackathons, labs and demo days are visible. The operating business runs on unchanged.
Leadership means to build more through others. The organization's own account of partnerships, external involvement and channels in describes an island.
Across the boundary
05 PATTERNS · PARTNER & CUSTOMER INSTRUMENTS, BY INVITATIONPartnerships are announced. Partners describe a relationship with no shared work in it.
Ideas are generated internally and validated internally. Customers meet them once they are already built.
Customers are consulted after the decision. The organization records it as co-creation.
What the organization is proud of is not what the customer can describe as valuable.
A leader names the competitor moves they saw coming, and the speed they would claim. Customers describe a pace that does not match their own market.
How a pattern actually fires
Not a threshold on a single score. A pattern fires when two or more instruments describe the same dimension differently by more than the instrument's own margin — and the report names which seats produced the reading, so you can judge it yourself.
How it works, in full- Dimension
- Permission
- Instruments read
- Leadership · Employee
- Divergence
- beyond the instrument margin
- Missing for a finding
- Manager Scan
Find out which of these is yours.
The first ten to twelve questions are free and end on one named finding; the full scan reads all six dimensions. Your employer cannot see what you personally answered — individual answers carry no identity past the aggregation boundary.