Another day, another enhancement deployed! Yesterday’s was about flexibility in reporting, encouraging experimentation in different debrief structures and incorporating the best ideas in the online tools for other facilitators to try. Today’s gives survey administrators additional control over the assessment template.

Let’s start with the motivation, shared in the #assessments Slack channel last week by partner Johan Nordin (lightly edited):

I have this feeling of a pattern emerging when revisiting my first conversations with managers and team leads even before we are ready to do anything at all together. I find a lack of shared visibility and understanding of what is going on AND people are feeling overwhelmed with work, stressed and in a state where they don’t seem to have time left for improvement work. Their ability to do anything sustainable and predictable is then very difficult from my experience. This pattern of “chaotic-state” is more common than not in my experience (maybe because that is my ideal customer).

I’ve been reviewing the assessment prompts and wonder about just asking for mini-assessment prompts for just the Balance and Transparency categories; my assumption/hypothesis is that if the scores are low AND they suffering from it AND they are willing to do something, the first thing they need to start with is to increase ability to see and understand what is going on (see workflow, enough clarity on current way of working) AND limit WIP to create enough room to start reflect and do small adjustments to their system.

So (finally)… how about a ‘super-mini-assessment’ with the only prompts from transparency and balance categories of the mini assessment?

The list of templates is already quite long (different combinations of theme, structure, length, and language) so instead we’ve allowed the chosen template’s categories to be selectable by the survey administrator. Not only is Johan’s initial need met, he could roll out the full template in stages: Transparency and Balance first, then maybe Collaboration and Customer Focus, with Flow and Leadership last. But not necessarily in that order – perhaps his clients will help to decide!

As described yesterday, you can try the mini assessment (18 prompts across all six categories) by participating in the 2017-18 global survey or by joining the free trial, the latter allowing you to survey small teams. Full partner status gets you a range of full-sized templates, all our workshop materials, and (under your control) a listing in our partner directory.

Upcoming workshops:

• 6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA – Mike Burrows, Kert Peterson
• 14-15 May, Munich, Germany – Mike Burrows, Mike Leber
• 22-23 May, Cardiff, UK – Mike Burrows

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