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Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag 7 – Content Without Context
“Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.”
Author Unknown
Because all things are relative, context is important. All too often, individuals react to a given set of circumstances or facts without considering the context within which those circumstances or facts exist. Consequently, the importance assigned to the circumstances or facts may exceed that which is warranted.
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Additional Information
StrategyDriven Advisors often find it is within the unique context of a situation that the most valuable insights are gained for the unlocking of substantial performance improvement. As such, we’ve captured practices to better help assessors understand situational context within the following articles:
- Best Practice – Seek Local Participation for Context
- Best Practice – Multidiscipline Teams
- Best Practice – Independent Assessors
- Best Practice – Define Issue Materiality
- Best Practice – Different is not Necessarily Wrong
- Warning Flag – Inwardly Focused Performance Assessments
About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Business performance assessments seek to identify meaningful improvement opportunities for an organization, typically in the areas of safety, performance reliability, and operational efficiency. Meaningful or material opportunities are those representing a performance improvement that satisfies a regulatory requirement, exceeds the organization’s financial return on investment threshold, and/or provides a not easily replicable advantage over competitors. As such, assessors should evaluate potential performance improvement opportunities for their materiality; focusing on those offering the organization meaningful gains.
Constructively critical business performance assessments often present executives and managers with a difficult to accept performance message. While intended to improve overall organizational performance, leaders may take these assessments as an affront to their authority or condemnation of their performance and some leaders may even retaliate against assessors. (See StrategyDriven Evaluation and Control Best Practice article, 
Organizations expend significant personnel and financial resources on well-performed business performance assessments and the implementation of follow-up performance improvement actions. To reap the appropriate return on their investment, executives and managers must carefully select the self assessments to be performed such that they directly support achievement of organizational goals and values while mitigating its most significant risks.
Something is not right… performance seems okay but the organization is not moving forward, not learning, not developing, as it should. The spark of innovation, the passionate drive to excel is gone from the leadership team and workforce. Sales may be stagnate or declining. Or perhaps asset experience one too many failures to be considered normal.
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