The Diagnostic

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.

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.

A cluster isn’t a personality type or a customer segment. It’s a read of how the work is currently landing on a group of people — what they’re carrying, what they’re working around, what’s getting in their way. Some clusters reveal where compensating work is concentrating. Some show where the work is flowing the way it should. The picture is operational.

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.

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 see what their group is producing and what the groups next door hand them. They see when handoffs work and when they don’t, when the next group has what they need to keep moving and when they don’t, when knowledge travels and when it gets stuck. They live with these patterns every day, in a way nobody above them does.

Leaders see the strategic intent the work is meant to be carrying out — what the operation is supposed to be doing for the customer, the business, and the people inside it. Their read is the other half of the picture; managers see what’s happening at the handoffs, leaders see what the work is supposed to add up to. Both go into what I bring to the readout.

The leadership readout is where the analysis meets your context. I bring what the survey and the conversations produced — the clusters, what each one is sitting on top of, where the cost is concentrating, the order to act on it, business unit by business unit. You and your team bring what only you have: the strategic intent, the histories between the groups, the past attempts that have shaped what’s possible now. The synthesis happens in the room. By the end, your team has the picture, the order, and clarity on what to do with both.

A multi-entity legal services firm came in convinced they had a knowledge problem. Two prior internal knowledge programs had failed before I arrived. They had been about to launch a third. The readout caught it. What was actually sitting underneath the failed programs was the second job — three merged groups carrying years of work that wasn’t traveling between them, scar tissue along every handoff. The first work wasn’t another knowledge initiative. It was getting the three groups into the same room with the same picture of what the client experienced end to end. The knowledge work came after, on that foundation. It flowed easier than anything they’d tried, building trust and confidence the earlier programs had been chasing without the foundation under them. This time it held.

The report lands in your hands at the end of the readout, not before — the clusters, what the conversations surfaced, how it cross-relates to your existing measures, and the sequence walked through and validated in the room. Each business unit walks out with its own reading; the operation walks out with the picture across all of them.

What you do with it is yours to call. Some leadership teams take the sequence and run it themselves — the picture is theirs now, the language is theirs, the team owns the work. Others want me along for the next stretch. Either way, you walk out with the clarity to decide what comes next.