How we built the
Idea → Impact Diagnostic

Why friction, not maturity

Most organizational diagnostics are maturity models. They ask: "How capable are you?" Then they score you against a benchmark and tell you where you sit on a spectrum from Level 1 to Level 5.

The problem is social desirability bias. When people answer a capability question, they answer it aspirationally. They describe how the team operates on a good day — or how they wish it operated. The result is inflated scores and a picture that looks better than reality.

Friction framing cuts through that. Instead of asking "how good are you?", it asks "where does it hurt?" Friction statements describe specific, recognizable pain points: Unclear priorities slow us down when new opportunities arise. We often discover gaps between what stakeholders expect and what we actually deliver.

Leaders can identify with those statements honestly. Agreement isn't an admission of failure — it's a practical description of a real problem. That shift in framing produces more accurate data, which produces more useful results.

The four dimensions

The diagnostic maps your team across four dimensions that form a pipeline. Friction upstream compounds downstream — a team that struggles to identify the right problems will build misaligned strategy, ship the wrong things, and have little worth learning from.

How scoring works

Each of the 20 scored items uses a 6-point Likert scale with no neutral midpoint. Removing the midpoint forces a directional response — it eliminates the easy escape of "neither agree nor disagree" and surfaces where people genuinely stand. (Four short open-ended reflections bring the full assessment to 24 questions.)

All 20 scored items are friction statements. Agreement with a statement means the friction is present. Responses are reverse-scored so that higher scores represent lower friction and better performance. A dimension score of 6.0 means the friction is essentially absent. A score of 1.0 means it is pervasive.

Your primary bottleneck is the lowest-scoring dimension — the place where friction is highest and intervention will produce the greatest downstream lift.

Research foundation

The diagnostic is grounded in published research across product development, organizational behavior, and execution science. Each construct maps to at least one validated body of work.

• Reinertsen (2009) — The Principles of Product Development Flow
  Foundational framing for queue management, batch size, and flow efficiency as the primary levers of product development throughput. The pipeline metaphor and bottleneck logic derive directly from this work.
• Forsgren, Humble & Kim (2018) — Accelerate (DORA Research)
  Four-year research program identifying the metrics and practices that distinguish high-performing software delivery organizations. Execution Excellence items are calibrated against DORA's elite/high/medium/low performance clusters.
• Torres (2021) — Continuous Discovery Habits
  Practitioner framework for structured, ongoing customer discovery. The Insight Generation dimension draws on Torres' distinction between assumption-testing and continuous opportunity exploration.
• Cagan (2018, 2020) — Inspired / Empowered
  Widely adopted frameworks for product team structure, outcomes-vs-output thinking, and the conditions that enable teams to do their best work. Strategic Alignment items reflect Cagan's emphasis on shared context over directives.
• Edmondson (1999, 2019) — Psychological Safety / The Fearless Organization
  Peer-reviewed research establishing psychological safety as the most consistent predictor of team learning and performance. Learning & Adaptation items include constructs from Edmondson's team learning framework.
• Kaplan & Norton (2001) — The Strategy-Focused Organization
  Research on how organizations translate strategy into execution. The Strategic Alignment dimension incorporates Kaplan & Norton's finding that most strategy failures are execution failures, not strategy failures.
• Pfeffer & Sutton (2000) — The Knowing-Doing Gap
  Analysis of why organizations fail to translate knowledge into action. The diagnostic's friction framing addresses the knowing-doing gap directly — by surfacing the specific points where knowledge stops converting into output.

What you get

Results are immediate and confidential. Nothing is stored. You see your full profile the moment you complete the diagnostic.

• Your primary bottleneck identified — the single dimension where friction is highest and intervention will matter most
• A velocity profile radar chart across all four dimensions, so you can see your team's shape at a glance
• Construct-level insights for all 20 scored items, so you understand exactly what is and isn't driving each score
• Prioritized actions for every friction point — specific, executable "Try this" recommendations
• A downloadable PDF report you can share with your team or use in a planning session