Bis praemissa: Introduction, Part 1 and 2
Recapping our progress to date
We are now a little over 5 months into 2026, and although there has been more a lot more discussion around underpinning theory than I had planned, this has turned out to be critical foundational work.
I had mapped out the topics I intended to cover before starting, but as I delved into existing research and articles to support design work, I ended up re-thinking my approach to some of the topics and taking a slightly different approach than I was expecting. This led to some re-thinking in the tools being developed as a result. As I refined the underlying theories, I found it necessary to alter, merge and in some cases completely replace some of the topics from my initial catalogue.
The developed tools fall into three categories:
Mapping tools — these are explorations of particular facets of organisational theory, building greater shared knowledge and consensus among leaders and staff
Diagnostic tools — these are structured questionnaires that can be used to quickly establish relatively objective trend or performance baselines on particular topics, typically to highlight emergent modes of behaviour that may not be fully understood at a strategic level
Methodologies — these provide detailed implementation guidance, typically through a staged process that supports collaborative and scalable design, execution, and review at the organisational level.
Having done a first pass against all 25 topics, we can now review our premise, re-state the basis for each part, and summarise the type of tool being used to support a quality response. Today we will recap the introduction and first two parts; then in the next two weeks, we will recap the remaining parts.
Introduction
An organisation is defined as “a subcategory of complex adaptive systems where multiple people work towards shared goals in a coordinated way and with vested authority”.
Provided with appropriate context, motives, and resources, people will organise into self-sustaining systems that deliver valuable results to themselves or others as a result of their activities.
Organisations can be classified through a five-arm assessment of their alignment, persistence, adaptation, centralisation, and emergence (APACE). It is hypothesied that organisations of a similar classification will be responsive to similar design choices and interventions for improvement.
Tools for optimising organisations seek to identify dysfunction, strengthen coordination, and provide practical guidance toward sustainable achievement of greater effectiveness.
Part 1: Understanding your organisation’s purpose, intent, and structure
The tools in part 1 help you to determine the through line that aligns your organisational purpose to the individual motivations of its participants. In sequence, the tools provide an inside-out progression from abstract organisational intent to its tangible realisation:
The strategy canvas is an mapping tool that seeks to elicit your organisation’s intended structure and direction — what is emphasised in creating a coherent purpose designed to produce results of value.
The business process architecture is an mapping tool that documents, at a high level, the activities allocated among groups — practically describing the work practices that achieve your purpose as an end-to-end path from demand to value.
The system fitness questionnaire is a diagnostic tool that examines how your organisational work practices select among the ongoing trade-offs for performance, robustness, and resilience, and whether the normative values in your organisation’s purpose align to actual practices observed in use.
Finally, the results alignment questionnarire is a diagnostic tool that tests alignment of the motivations of the sub-groups and individual agents working for your organisation, examining whether it is reasonable to expect they will actually do the activities necessary to achieve your organisation’s purpose.
An assessment using these tools will help you to understand your organisation’s key choices, and whether these choices are likely to be realised in practice.
Part 2: Understanding your organisation’s domain
All organisations are both systems and units that operate within a system. Any team of an organisation teams can similarly be assessed both as an organisation and as a unit of the larger organisation.
The domain is that section of your organisation’s overall environment that you can directly impact and/or directly impacts on you. The tools in part 2 focus on how to build awareness of your domain’s characteristics, adopt an organisational structure that is well-adapted to your domain, and options for strategic repositioning :
The landscape alignment test is a two-part diagnostic tool: it assesses your current operating context and tests it for alignment to your organisation’s broader environmental positioning. Doing this opens up nuanced discussions around both whether current operating strategies are fit for purpose and/or whether your organisation should seek to reposition how it adapts to its environment.
The stakeholder discovery tool is a mapping tool which uses classification against the dimensions of power, legitimacy and urgency to determine the levels of influence of stakeholders, in turn opening discussions around whether management strategies being used for each are fit for purpose.
The rule of hand method is a mapping tool that supports discovery of the 3-5 key domain indicators which are most important to to understanding the majority of system impacts on your organisation and its operations. Completing this mapping exercise helps you to reduce complexity to a manageable level and guide efforts in your domain interactions to the things that matter most.
Lastly, the QUO diagnostic tool assesses individual and organisational exposure to five distinct forms of uncertainty (from knowledge gaps, randomness, perspective divergence, powerlessness, and sensory overload). Rather than assessing the nature of a domain directly, QUO examines your organisation’s understanding and relationship to it — and in particular, whether your staff feel themselves to be controlled by, or in control of, your domain.
An assessment using these tools will help you to understand your organisation’s relationship to its surrounding domain, and whether your structures and strategies are suitably aligned to the challenges it presents.