Founding Director ·
Augmenting Your Future Workforce: Part 7
In the last post I argued that sequencing beats content — that a programme’s success is decided less by what is taught than by the order in which it is designed: before, during and after. A journey, not an event.This post asks a harder question. If you have designed the journey properly, how do you know it worked? Not whether people enjoyed it. Whether anything actually changed.
Speed to insight — capability measurement
For most of the 25 years we have spent building Mission Performance, we measured organisational capability using third-party survey tools. I want to be honest about how that felt, because honesty is the point. It was painful. The administrative pre-work was complicated, and a great deal of effort went into ensuring the technology itself didn’t become a barrier to people simply completing the task. Choosing the questions was slow, over-engineered and bureaucratic. And when the report finally landed, it needed a training course just to interpret it.
Descriptive is not the same as diagnostic
The reports were dense. You had to work hard to see how the data actually played out at an organisational level, and the graphics were flat — built as though for a specialist statistician rather than the leader who had to act on the findings. These were good tools of their time, and we persevered with them for years. But they shared a flaw common to most capability models: they describe. They tell you, at length, what is. What they rarely do is tell you what to do about it, or whether anything has moved since you last looked. A model that describes is interesting. A model that diagnoses is useful. We wanted the second kind.
What we built instead
So, with better coding and now AI, we did something only 25 years of practice could let us do well. We drew together our insights — and their associated questions and capabilities — across all four of our practice areas: Coach, Lead, Communicate and Human Factors. We call the result our Capability Gap Indicators. The design principle was strict. Every question, every capability, has to be trainable. These are not distant aspirations dressed up as a survey question; each one can be developed and reinforced through our own suite of training, coaching and technology. Every capability we map is already loaded into COACH, the learning sustainment platform I described in the last post — so the moment a gap shows up in the data, the means to close it is already waiting.
Data that moves
The survey captures organisational perception from a full 360-degree view, cut across whatever groups matter: departments, divisions, seniorities, geographies. The real shift, though, is what happens next. The data lives in a dynamic dashboard rather than a static report. You can interrogate it, recut it, and watch the patterns move with every manipulation — heat maps, spider diagrams, whichever view tells the story you need. If you still want something written down, the tool produces it, reflecting exactly the cut you’ve chosen. The client owns that dashboard. And when the time comes to resurvey — to test whether the actions taken have reinforced the strengths and closed the gaps — we measure the delta and tie it to a defined set of performance indicators. That last capability matters more than any graphic. It connects the work that follows a survey to a genuine measure of impact and return — something, for all our years, we simply couldn’t offer clients before. That is what speed-to-insight actually buys you: not a faster survey, but a shorter route from data to decision to demonstrable change.
Behavioural precision over competency theatre
This is the difference between behavioural precision and generic HR competency theatre — the kind that mistakes activity for progress.What gets measured gets done, or so the cliché goes. There’s truth in it. Performance rarely improves unless you measure both the result and the progress towards it. Goal-setting is implicit in the whole process, as is the discipline — and the support — to see those goals through.
Eyes on the road
A word of caution, though, because data can be misused as easily as it can be ignored. We don’t drive a car by staring at the dashboard. We watch the road and glance down occasionally to check we’re on track. Metrics work the same way: they serve the journey; they are not the journey. Fixate on the numbers and you’ll drive straight off the road, losing sight of the very purpose the measurement was meant to serve. Used properly, data keeps you honest. It holds you to objectivity and keeps you on track — provided you’re measuring the right things, and rewarding the right behaviours. After 25 years, that is the standard we hold ourselves to. Not the organisation with the most data, but the one that can show what actually changed
