The Diagnostic
A 5-minute anonymous survey for your people, ending in a working session with your leadership team that produces a specific next move.
14 questions · 5 minutes per person · 30 days end to end
Common situations where leaders run it.
- You’re new in the role and need to read the operation fast.
- You’re six months into an initiative that should have taken three.
- Your last deployment succeeded in pilot and stalled at scale.
- Your acquisition integration keeps hitting friction no one predicted.
- You’re about to deploy something major and want to know which groups will absorb it cleanly.
How it works
The survey.
Anonymous, fourteen questions, about five minutes per person. It runs for a week. Everyone whose work touches the customer is invited. No names, no titles, no manager identifiers.
The clusters.
Once the survey closes, I spend about ten days analyzing the data — clustering it statistically with k-means across the fourteen-question response patterns. What comes out is a set of behavioral groups: people who are experiencing the work the same way, regardless of role, department, or tenure. Two people sitting in completely different parts of the org chart can land in the same cluster. The number of clusters is whatever the data produces — three, four, sometimes five. Each engagement gets its own.
Who I interview, and why.
I look at the work your operation is trying to accomplish, end to end — what your customer experiences, what your operation has to deliver to make that happen. I look at the key clusters that sit along that path. I ask to interview two or three people from each cluster, at the points in the work where it changes hands between groups.
The conversations.
I observe how the work actually runs. I ask specific questions — about the measures the work is running against, about the workarounds people have built, about the official version of the work and the unofficial version that fills in for it. The clusters tell me where to look. The conversations tell me what each cluster is sitting on top of, pinpointed group by group. What used to take hundreds of hours of interviews now lands in weeks. Same depth.
Managers.
I also talk with the managers of the groups the clusters surface. Managers see what their group is producing and what the groups next door hand them. They see when work arrives incomplete, when the next group can’t do what they need to, when something bounces back. They live with these breakdowns every day, in a way nobody above them does.
Analysis and synthesis.
With the conversations complete, I bring everything together — the survey data, the cluster patterns, what the conversations surfaced, the measures the operation already runs against, and where I can get it, system telemetry from the work itself. AI runs the correlation across all of it: patterns that hold across groups, places where what people said diverges from what the data shows, signals I couldn’t catch on my own. Then I synthesize. The AI surfaces the patterns; the read is mine.
The readout to leadership.
Before we sit together, I’ve already talked with leaders across the operation about the strategic intent the work is meant to be carrying out — what the operation is supposed to deliver for the customer, the business, and the people inside it. That intent goes into the picture alongside the managers’ read. Then I walk your leadership team through the picture business unit by business unit — what each BU’s clusters look like, what each cluster is sitting on top of, where the cost is concentrating. I bring the data and the conversations. You and your team bring what only you have: the histories between the groups, the past attempts that shaped what’s possible now.
A multi-entity legal services firm came in convinced they had a knowledge problem. Two prior internal knowledge programs had failed before I arrived. The readout showed something different: it wasn’t a knowledge problem. It was a trust problem wearing a knowledge problem’s clothes — three merged groups passing work to each other with no shared picture of what the client experienced end to end. The earlier attempts had failed because they had started with knowledge. We started with conditions.
The final readout. The first session clarifies a lot — leadership brings context I couldn’t have known, and together we sharpen the read. I take it back, refine the analysis against what got clarified, and return with the settled findings. The report lands in your hands here, not before — the clusters, what the conversations surfaced, the cross-relation against your existing measures, and the validated sequence. You leave with a specific next move: this project, in these groups, in this order. A sequence, not a list of problems. Each business unit can come away with its own reading; the operation gets the read across all of them.
This complements what you already have. Engagement surveys tell you how your people feel about being there; the Diagnostic tells you how the work is being experienced inside. Dashboards show outcomes; the Diagnostic shows the conditions those outcomes come out of. The Diagnostic is the layer underneath.
Most leaders have never seen their operation this way before. What the picture points at is how fast value lands — for your customer, for your team, powered by knowledge. I call it Time to Smile. The picture tells you where it’s getting blocked.
When you’re ready, the first conversation is thirty minutes. Tell me what you’re seeing.