Organizational Flow — Appendix
What would you notice, if you looked?
Eighteen questions about things you can actually observe where you work — how a decision gets made, what happens when work crosses a boundary, who people go and ask. About seven minutes. What comes back is a picture of your organization, some patterns that seem to stand out, and where in the paper each of them is described.
This is not a maturity model and it does not grade anything. It is a way of looking, and the value is mostly in what you notice while answering rather than in any number at the end.
Friction never announces itself as failure. It arrives as everyone being busy, which is why it is worth asking about deliberately rather than waiting to notice.
One word recurs: capability — meaning something the organization must always be able to do, regardless of who does it or what they use. Settle a claim. Admit a patient. Onboard an employee. The methods change constantly; the capability doesn't.
Answer for the organization as you actually experience it, not as it is described in the operating model. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
What came back
What the answers suggest
There is deliberately no number here. Nobody has measured enough organizations for a score to mean anything, and a number invites comparison with other people rather than with your own reading of the same place in six months.
What stood out
Patterns that seem to show up in what you answered. Read them as things worth going and checking rather than as conclusions — you know the place and this page does not.
Heavier spokes are the five indicators. The rest are the conditions that produce them, grouped by the coloured arc they sit under.
Where to start
The five indicators these questions roll up to
They do not divide cleanly into friction and value, and it would be misleading to present them as though they did. Ownership and handoffs recover capacity and say nothing about where it goes. Value creation aims it. The two in between do both — deciding sooner is not only cheaper, it is how you find out sooner whether the decision was any good.
All eighteen questions and your answers
Your own observations
Eighteen questions cannot reach everything, and the theory behind them is deliberately unfinished. These are optional. Anything you write stays in this browser — it is not stored, not sent, and deliberately not put in the share link, so a link you pass on carries the answers and nothing you wrote here.
Things worth noticing next
None of these need a project, and all of them are more informative than another round of questions.
- Notice where work waits, and whether anyone is counting the waiting.
- Notice how far a decision has to travel before it meets the judgement it needs.
- Notice who people naturally go and ask, and whether that person's name appears in any process.
- Notice where a meeting has grown over a question of ownership nobody settled.
- Notice what survives a reorganization, because that is the part the organization actually runs on.
- Notice which problems keep coming back, and whether anything changed after the last one.
Help evolve Organizational Flow
This is a working theory, not a finished one. The most useful thing anyone sends me is an observation that does not fit — a pattern I have not described, or one I have described wrongly. There is no account and no form.
The button below opens a draft email containing the overall reading, what stood out, and anything you wrote above. Nothing is sent until you send it, and you can edit or delete any of it first.
Keep it
The link carries the eighteen answers and nothing else — not what you wrote above. Useful for putting the same picture in front of people who would have answered differently.
Opens the print dialog — choose Save as PDF for a copy with every question, your answer, and everything above.