Executives, managers, and individual contributors familiar with the day-to-day workings of their organizations undoubtedly know or have contrived the reason for ‘why things are the way they are.’ Beyond this understanding, sometimes at an unconscious level, these individuals will perceive one or more drivers to these organization shaping whys. What remains unseen and unthought-of are the tertiary and lower level drivers to why the business performs as it does. It is here that truly useful insight can be gained; insight enabling the foundational changes needed to alter the organization’s direction and propel it to the next level.[wcm_restrict plans=”25541, 25542, 25653″]

To be of real value, business performance assessments must get to tertiary and lower drivers; otherwise they are nothing more than simple collections of already known data. Assessors should therefore strive to ask three whys deep before drawing their final conclusions on organizational performance.

How to Get to the Third Why

Getting to the third why and its valuable insight can be challenging, after all, these drivers are largely outside of the organization’s collective conscious. Therefore, the following method is offered as a means of third level driver identification.

Step 1: Identify and Document the Strength or Problem

Variability increases the further away from the source of organizational strength or challenge assessors probe. Therefore, it is critically important to precisely and concisely identify the strength or problem statement first. This statement should be documented and discussed by the assessment team to ensure unity of understanding.

Step 2: Brainstorm Possible Level 1 Causes of the Performance Strength or Problem

Performance drivers not considered by the assessment team, particularly at Level 1, may prevent the team from identifying the one insight that leads to breakthrough growth. Therefore, it is important at this stage to consider all possible performance drivers.

The most effective means of ensuring all potential performance drivers are considered is to consolidate the assessment team’s collective experience in a performance driver identification brainstorming session. The outcome, the list of potential performance drivers, should be documented and communicated with the entire assessment team to ensure a common understanding.

Step 3: Validate the Level 1 Performance Drivers

Once a list of potential Level 1 performance drivers has been created, it will be important to identify which drivers play an active role in organizational performance. Only those impactful performance drivers will be considered in Step 4.

It is important to remember that not all identified potential Level 1 performance drivers will actually exist within the organization. Additionally, some drivers may exist but have little or no influence on organization behavior and so can be disregarded. Finally, validation of the relevance of the potential performance drivers will typically require some combination of document reviews, personnel interviews, and in-field observations along with the subsequent data analysis and calculation.

Step 4: Brainstorm Possible Level 2 Causes of the Performance Strength or Problem

Like Step 2, it is important to leverage the collective experience of the assessment team in identifying potential causes of Level 1 drivers. As before, these potential drivers should be documented and socialized with the entire assessment team to ensure a common understanding.

Step 5: Validate the Level 2 Performance Drivers

Assessors should follow the approach described for Step3. Note that at this point, the reasons for organizational behavior are becoming more vague to both leaders and staff members. At this point, the diverse experience of outsiders, internal and external, become invaluable in ‘seeing’ past organizational predispositions and to the existence of performance drivers; particularly undesired drivers and those conflicting with the organization’s values or self image.

Step 6: Brainstorm Possible Level 3 Causes of Performance Strength or Problem

and

Step 7: Validate the Level 3 Performance Drivers

These steps are a repeat of Steps 4 and 5 respectively. Insights of organization outsiders become increasingly important now as conclusions drawn should be well outside of the organization’s conscious. Whenever possible, driver validation should be supported by quantitative or a significant amount of collaborating qualitative evidence. If not already being done, assessors should routinely brief stakeholders to ensure ongoing buy-in for their conclusions.

Step 8: Conclusion Documentation and Communication

As with all self assessments, the conclusions reached should be well documented and communicated to key stakeholders. Documentation should include enough detail that later readers of the assessment will not only understand the conclusion reached but will be able to logically follow the evidentiary reasoning for it. Communication should motivate those who can preserve good or improve on poor performance to do so.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”25541, 25542, 25653″]

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Additional Resources

Several other StrategyDriven best practices work in concert with Three Whys Deep to ensure assessment teams reach insightful, value adding, and robustly supported conclusions including:

• Strategic Analysis Best Practice 3 – Identify the Hidden Drivers
• Strategic Analysis Best Practice 3 – Identify the Hidden Drivers (Continued)
• Strategic Analysis Best Practice 4 – Use of Independent Assessors
• Strategic Analysis Best Practice 6 – Multidiscipline Teams
• Decision-Making Best Practice 4 – Identify the Target