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ResearchCapabilityServicesSignalsAbout
ResearchCapabilityServicesSignalsAbout
The programCountriesOrganizations

Organizational Capability Benchmark

How well can your organization adapt to change? The benchmark measures how it senses change, makes decisions, experiments and turns learning into action, across companies, agencies, universities and NGOs.
Seven dimensions
  1. 01

    Sensing

    Can the organization notice relevant change early?

  2. 02

    Sensemaking

    Can it understand what that change means?

  3. 03

    Decision

    Can it make consequential decisions under uncertainty?

  4. 04

    Coordination

    Can different actors align around a response?

  5. 05

    Experimentation

    Can it test responses cheaply and quickly?

  6. 06

    Learning

    Does evidence change beliefs and behavior?

  7. 07

    Scaling

    Can successful responses become normal institutional practice?

The assessment

The first layer is a short assessment: 21 scored questions, three per dimension, about five minutes. Every question asks about what the organization did in the past twelve months, on one scale:

Never / Rarely / Sometimes / Often / Consistently

Questions ask about behavior, for example: “When important changes emerge outside your organization, how consistently are they identified before they become urgent?” Attitude questions such as “our organization embraces innovation” are excluded because the desirable answer is obvious.

One more question is not scored. Where does your organization most often get stuck when responding to change?

  • We do not notice it early enough.
  • We see it but do not know what it means.
  • We understand it but cannot make a decision.
  • We decide but cannot coordinate action.
  • We know what to test but cannot experiment quickly.
  • We experiment but do not learn systematically.
  • We find things that work but cannot scale them.

After the scored questions we ask for context: organization type, sector, size, region, your role, function and seniority, and whether you hold strategic decision authority. Context is stored apart from the capability profile. It makes comparisons possible: by sector, by size, and between leadership and operational respondents.

What you get back

A profile across the seven dimensions, with a primary and a secondary constraint. There is no total score, because a total does not say where the organization gets stuck. Strong sensing, strong experimentation, weak coordination and weak scaling means the organization notices change and can test responses, and cannot turn isolated experiments into coordinated institutional change.

Comparisons with other organizations appear once the sample supports them.

Adaptive capacity is institutional, so one perspective is incomplete. From your result you can invite colleagues. With five or more respondents from one organization, the profile shows the mean, the spread, differences by function, and disagreement between leadership and operational teams. Disagreement is a result in itself.

What strengthens a weak dimension

Each service works on named dimensions:

  • Signals Session: sensing and sensemaking.
  • Build Sessions: experimentation and learning.
  • Bespoke Projects: coordination and decision.
  • Signals: sensing, as the platform an organization runs itself.

Weak scaling calls for organizational work that we scope case by case.

Status

The assessment is in development. Responses will be collected with consent, stored apart from identifying data, and used to develop the benchmark. To be notified when it opens, write to us.