The term gets used to cover several activities, from a half-day leadership offsite to a six-month consulting engagement. What we mean by an organisational diagnostic is specific: a structured, time-bounded process for understanding how an organisation actually makes decisions, allocates resources, and handles friction between teams. Not how it is supposed to do those things. How it actually does them.
Why the documents matter as much as the interviews ¶
Most diagnostics rely heavily on interviews. Ours do too. But we also read the documents that most consultants skip: the meeting minutes from the past twelve months, the budget revision history, the project post-mortems, the emails that explain why the last initiative stalled. Those documents tell a different story from the interviews, and the gap between the two stories is usually where the real problem lives.
How we structure the interview process ¶
We interview stakeholders at every level of the organisation, not just the leadership team. The people closest to the operational work often have the clearest view of where the friction is and why. We use a consistent question set across all interviews so that patterns become visible. The final question in every interview is the same: what does everyone in this organisation know is true but nobody says out loud in a meeting?
What the report contains ¶
The output is a written report, not a slide deck. It contains a description of what we found, a prioritised list of the issues we identified, and a set of specific recommendations with enough detail to act on. We do not produce a list of observations and leave the client to figure out the implications. Every finding is connected to a recommendation, and every recommendation is connected to a realistic next step.
What a diagnostic does not do ¶
A diagnostic is not an implementation plan. It tells you what is happening and what to do about it. It does not do the doing. Some clients use the diagnostic report as the basis for an operating model redesign engagement. Others take the report and implement the recommendations internally. Both are valid outcomes. The point of the diagnostic is to give the leadership team a clear, honest picture of the situation so they can make informed decisions about what to do next.
If you are considering a diagnostic and want to understand whether your situation fits the format, the most useful next step is a short conversation. We are glad to think through the fit before any commitment is made.