Alignment Health Checkup What if your department or company had the following results? (Ouch! These were the real results for 8 of 71 questions used in an anonymous online survey of 38 employees of a department of a client. Questions asked in the negative that had positive responses are reversed here. For example, in question # 35, 27 people said they agreed that decisions affecting them are often made without their input.)   Is there an alignment problem in this department? Remember the Lake Wobegon Trap before you assume that it is not possible for it to be this bad in your company. We encourage you to read the next section before going to the Rapid Organization Alignment Health Checkup section that follows it. _______________________________________________________________ Knowing-Doing Gap Every year 1,700 business books are published, 60 billion dollars is spent on training (particularly management training), 43 billion dollars are spent on consulting, and 80,000 new MBAs hit the business landscape, and still organizations fail to apply the latest well-know and most viable principles and practices. Additionally, numerous researchers have found that little of what is taught in college or even business schools really prepares would-be managers for the realities of managing. Evidence-Based Management Successful executives use evidence-based management, that is, they learn from the mistakes of others, by understanding the underlying causes of failure and how to be alert to them, and by creating organizations that are open-minded enough to acknowledge and learn from their own mistakes. Five Principles of Evidence-Based Management
The favored hypothesis is the one with the least inconsistent evidence, not the one with the most consistent evidence. Consistent evidence proves nothing, because evidence can, and usually does support more than one hypothesis. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Rapid Organization Alignment Health Checkup  Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Management Framework A validated, evidence-based management approach to improving your organization’s performance. Using a (71 question, 7 categories) assessment instrument (D.I.AL.O.G - Data Indicating ALignment of Organization Goals) based on the Malcolm Baldrige Framework, we can rapidly help you determine how various levels of the organization perceive the health of the organization's alignment for success: how well critical elements are working together to achieve business and strategic goals. It provides an objective information baseline that can help determine an alignment improvement strategy. The Baldrige performance excellence approach has been used by thousands of organizations for more than 20 years. The focus is on these key management processes and results:
Superior organizational performance? It's All About Alignment.SM  "I see the Baldrige process as a powerful set of mechanisms for disciplined people engaged in disciplined thought and taking disciplined action to create great organizations that produce exceptional results.” (Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t) The real leverage in most management situations lies in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity. Improving quality, lowering costs, and satisfying customers in a sustainable manner is a dynamic process. Most systems analyses focus on detail complexity not dynamic complexity.  Two methods can be utilized in gathering organizational data: an online questionnaire survey and personal interviews. The survey is used to gather the depth of understanding, the views of the employees, and to determine directional trends. Personal interviews can be conducted to gain an understanding of the intensity of feelings within the organization. Key Activities:
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