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How’s that going for you?
A field diagnostic for organisations that have lost momentum, and the conscious-action responses for each pathology.
A good deal of the work I do as a CTO or interim leader tends to start with a leadership team that knows something is wrong but cannot quite name what it is. Growth has slowed for reasons nobody can satisfactorily explain. The sales force has gone flat without an obvious cause. The substantial investment in collaboration software has somehow failed to produce noticeably better collaboration. Useful information from customers reaches the front line but never quite arrives anywhere that someone with the authority to act on it can do anything about. And the team as a whole is unmistakably busy without being especially productive in any way that shows up on the financial reports.
None of these symptoms is mysterious in itself. Each one is essentially a recognisable failure of an underlying organisational capability, sensing the environment, prioritising what matters, deciding what to do about it, and actually executing, and each has, in my experience, a reasonably structural response that can be applied if you are willing to look beneath the symptom for its cause. The table below is the short version of that diagnostic, originally drafted as part of the Sensandu work back in 2019 and refined a fair amount since then in the course of running it against real businesses.
It is built around a single question that I have found surprisingly useful to ask out loud: how’s that going for you? The first column names the organisational area in question. The middle column describes the symptom, which is to say what things tend to look like when something is wrong in that area. And the right-hand column is the conscious-action response, which is the structural move that addresses the underlying cause rather than the surface-level symptom.
| Area | How’s that going for you? | Try conscious action |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Sales sluggish, more competition, getting caught out, product line ageing, objection handling poor, useful sales tips hard to share across the force. | Consciously connect the sales force. Improve the contact points between them and the people who can handle objections, sharpen the product, or help them sell. Make the connections explicit rather than relying on hallway conversations. Give them better products and services to sell, informed by what they are hearing. |
| Growth | Sales or profit growth slowing or inadequate. The curve is flattening and no-one has a confident story about what bends it back. | Consciously consider the historical pattern and understand what has shifted in the competitive landscape. Use proactive approaches to investigate the change rather than reactive analysis after the fact. Improve co-creation across functions so growth ideas can come from anywhere, not just the strategy team. |
| Co-creation | Despite investment in training and ‘collaboration’ software, people still don’t seem to be working together well enough to get the best results. | Co-creation happens beyond the boundaries of functional groups, not inside them. Introduce a conscious approach to idea generation and co-creation of ideas, solutions, and products across silos. Use existing and new technology to support that, not to substitute for it. Run Idea Mining as the structured process, with real facilitation. |
| Sensing | Getting caught out by events or missing opportunities until it’s too late. Useful or critical insights from customer and supplier contact points consistently getting missed. | Sensing is the ability to be aware of, and quickly respond to, relevant changes in the competitive environment. Introduce a conscious approach to sensing and to the distribution of environmental-change information. Reward the staff who contribute to it. Use simple process changes to shift the culture so the people in contact with the wider environment know that what they observe matters, and is incentivised accordingly. |
| Agility | Teams don’t respond fast enough. Either they are overloaded, or they don’t have the time and motivation to notice that a change is needed, or they can’t mobilise once they do notice. | Agility underpins the need for fast responses in a hyper-connected world. Introduce a conscious approach to agility delivery. Tighten the sensing → informing → prioritising → responding loop. Use the five-step Idea Mining framework to make the response generative rather than reactive. |
How the diagnostic actually gets used
The table tends to be most useful as a fast leadership-team exercise, run in under an hour with a degree of structure. The approach I generally take is to hand each member of the team a copy, ask them privately to rate the symptom for each row on a simple 1–5 scale against the part of the business they happen to own, and then compare the answers across the room. The rows where the ratings cluster towards the high end are usually the structural pathologies the business genuinely has and that are worth investing time in. The rows where the ratings actively disagree across the team are often more interesting still, in the sense that they identify the boundaries where different parts of the business are quietly seeing different versions of what is supposedly the same problem.
The conscious-action responses in the right-hand column are not, it should be said, quick fixes. Each one is essentially a structural change that takes weeks or months to install properly, and the framework is fairly honest about that fact. There is no shortcut for the people-and-process work that sits at the bottom of each row, and the businesses that try to skip past it tend to pay the consequences later in the form of recurring symptoms and a much larger eventual bill.
What this diagnostic is a companion to
This particular diagnostic is essentially the short, practical front-end to the longer frameworks that appear elsewhere on the site. The sales, growth and co-creation rows are typically where Conscious Collaboration pays back most clearly, since they are the rows that depend most heavily on diverse teams actually working together rather than just sharing a room. The sensing row is where Conscious Agility tends to matter most, given that the underlying capability is precisely the ability to notice changes in the environment in time to act on them. The agility row is essentially the operational manifestation of the “lean is dead” argument, which is to say it is about structural responsiveness rather than simple operational speed. And all five rows turn out to benefit, in the end, from running Idea Mining and Decision Mining as the underlying processes for generating and choosing the responses you eventually deploy.
The table itself, in other words, is the diagnostic. The frameworks linked to from it are the prescription that follows from the diagnosis.
© 2024 Catherine Ives-Yim. All rights reserved.
Catherine Ives-Yim
Chartered Engineer and independent technical adviser, with a lifetime at the bleeding edge of embedded systems, connected products, data platforms and AI-assisted engineering, who has advised clients across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, North America and Africa. Based in Leeds.