The Genesis of an Organizational Diagnosis: It’s All about Improving Performance

Picture this: Your top management group has gathered to observe a presentation by the leader of an organizational diagnosis effort for your business. He is standing in front of a wall-size, blank whiteboard and is preparing to illustrate a diagnosis of the organization. In other words, he will be making the case for what is going on within the organization versus what should be going on within the organization. 

Although different than a medical diagnosis—which identifies a disease by examining the symptoms—an organizational diagnosis basically examines the current performance of a business and identifies those gaps that are keeping it from its desired performance. 

An organizational diagnosis can be a valuable and revealing process, if properly approached, and if an organization is willing to take full advantage of it. 

Organizations are made up of people who coordinate activities with others to carry out business transactions. Once you involve people, of course, you have all sorts of areas that are affected, which should also be taken into account. 

Why wouldn’t an organization take on such an effort? There are a number of reasons: For one, some companies simply don’t take the time to conduct an organizational diagnosis. For another, some companies are unsure of how to account for all the interconnected parts. 

To that point, I think it’s very important for organizations to understand how to take advantage of an organizational diagnosis, because this process can: 

• reveal certain activities that you aren’t even aware of;
• help reconfirm what you are aware of and remove blind spots and
• help you laser in on other very useful information. 

Ultimately, what you’re trying to accomplish with an organizational diagnosis is a performance check on each of all the moving pieces. During this check, for instance, you will want to examine those pieces that serve to help create the culture of the business and help drive things forward. 

Individuals in a business tend to focus on their own little worlds, so they don’t always think of the organization as an organic entity. But a business has a great number of interconnected activities; they are interdependent on one another—not independent of one another. As a result, you have a ripple effect, with consequences. So when one unit acts on even one piece of the business, invariably, there are implications for other units. In other words, you can change something in one part of your business that can end up impacting the entire business. 

And this is why organizational diagnosis is so important. You end up getting a picture with data that can help you measure the entire business system, not just one piece of it. This is how you start to build the diagnosis. 

Which leads me to my next point: It’s much more important to take a holistic wide-view of the business—or on a system-wide basis—instead of simply addressing localized, individual parts of the business.  

As someone once said, “You don’t want to win the battle, but lose the war.” In other words, you can try to accomplish something in one part of the business, or with one group of people affecting one element of operations; so you focus just on that and feel like you have gained a short-term win. But, undoubtedly it's going to have an impact on other parts of the business, and you can ultimately end up losing, if you haven't accounted for the other parts. 

So the key thing with organizational diagnosis is you're looking for all of those patterns and then the goal is to not just make individual changes—isolated changes—but to look at the system as a whole and get to the root of what the issues are and not just act on symptoms. The overall goal of an organizational diagnosis is to apply ‘what should be happening within the organization,’ so that the effect is improved business performance overall.

An organizational diagnosis can be a valuable and revealing process, if properly approached, and if an organization is willing to take full advantage of it.