What can your organization actually see?

The Sensing and Communicating Assessment Tool

This tool follows a single signal along its journey and scores what happens to it. Nothing is sent anywhere; the page calculates in your browser.

Allow 20 minutes or more the first time. Two or three questions may need a colleague who knows, for example how much of what the unit reports is checked, or whether the time between a report and the instruction is measured. Ask them rather than guess: because the stages multiply, one guessed answer can decide the whole result.

What are you scoring? Name one unit and its essential process before you start. A score for "the company" in general cannot be compared with anything, including your own score next year.

How to use it. Work down the grid one criterion at a time. Under Your answer, write in a sentence or two what actually happens in your unit today, then choose a score:
3 = we are doing all that needs to be done  |  2 = we still have some gaps  |  1 = we have many essential gaps.
The page does the rest: each stage takes the average of its criteria, and the three stage scores multiply into a total out of 27. What the result means is explained below it.
Stage / Criterion What to look at Your answer Score (1–3) Stage score
Monitoring Ownership (recorded, not scored). Who is in charge of the monitoring processes: the unit’s own manager, that manager’s manager, a process improvement team, an HR specialist, or another role?

Ownership is not scored here. It still explains the result: a stage nobody owns is almost always the weak link, and where one role owns all three stages, the chain has a single point of failure. The companion tool scores who takes part in the watching in its own right.

Overall sensing capability
–  of 27 · – of the maximum
Complete the grid to see your result.

Bands read on the total out of 27: below 8 (under 29.6%) = Reacting blind; 8 to under 18 (29.6% to under 66.7%) = Partial sight; 18 and above (66.7% and above) = Sensing in place. The anchors are exact: 8 is “2 at all three stages”, 18 is “3, 3 and 2”, the first combination with no weak link. Because the stages multiply, one weak link pulls the whole score down. A unit scoring 2 everywhere reaches 8 of 27: under a third, not two-thirds. That is the arithmetic of a chain rather than a list, and it is deliberate.

Sense → Comprehend → Adapt, in time.
The three stages are that sentence. In time is not a flourish; it is the last criterion, whether the instruction comes back in time. An organization can watch the right indicators, read them correctly, route them to exactly the right person and still be overtaken, because the instruction came back after the moment had passed. Arrival is not adaptation, so the chain is scored to its very end.

Reading the stages separately

The stage scores tell you more than the total. Strong in (A) and weak in (C) means you are watching the right things and telling nobody in time. Strong in (C) and weak in (A) means the unit is deciding efficiently about the wrong things. That is the most comfortable failure mode and the hardest to find, because everything appears to be working.

Reading it as a team

Have each member of the work unit score the unit independently, then place the answers side by side. Agree the unit, the parent organization and the essential process before anyone starts, have everyone enter them in the same words, and have everyone score on the same date: answers about different units, or taken weeks apart, cannot be compared, and the spread is the finding you would lose. The average shows how well the unit senses; the spread shows how much its members agree about it. A wide spread on Circulation is a finding in itself: it usually means information reaches some people and not others, and that those who receive it have assumed everybody does.

What follows

A companion tool asks the next question: how widely this kind of sight is built into the organization, and who is accountable for it. This tool scores the quality of one signal chain; the companion scores how far such chains reach across the organization. The pattern worth looking for across the pair is a high score there with a low score here: the machinery is built, and all of it is watching the wrong things. Both tools use the same range, 1 to 27, and the same bands, so the two can be read side by side.

One difference in scope is worth knowing before going on. The companion tool needs at least two levels of management: a unit’s manager and that manager’s own manager. This one does not: a small unit, with front-line staff and a single manager, can use it and read its result.

What this does not do

The score indicates only whether the organization can see its own condition and its surroundings, and whether what it sees arrives where decisions are made. It does not judge the decisions, and it does not repair what it finds. Identifying the weak links is its whole function; closing them is the work of leadership.

What does your score actually mean for your organization?

If you want me to help you read your result, send it to me and I will be happy to walk you through it. No charge, no obligation.

Your answers in the tool above are not sent anywhere unless you add them here yourself. The scoring happens entirely in your browser. This form is separate: it sends only what is in its boxes, to Nagib Choueiri, and is used for nothing else. The button above puts your result into the message, where you can read and change it before you send.