If you could have one wish granted, what would that wish be? The obvious and best answer is to wish that all your future wishes would come true.

If you could have your organization learn one thing, what would that learning be? The not-so-obvious and my preferred answer is to have your organization learn the art of organization inquiry.

To inquire means to ask questions about something specific in order to gain additional information and knowledge. Currently organizations inquire of employees about their satisfaction with working conditions and inquire of customers about their satisfaction with particular products and services. In this article I propose certain criteria and standards that set a new platform for the art of organization inquiry.

• Provide information for improving current performance.
• Provide knowledge for strategic rethinking
• Provide needs analysis for preparing a program of competence development
• Provide opportunity for employee empowerment

An Organization Inquiry should be a fast, comprehensive, wide-ranging, multi-purpose survey. In-depth, specific-purpose surveys could follow from the feedback of this inquiry

• Employees
• Management
• Customers
• Suppliers and other stakeholders in the organization’s network

An Organization Inquiry should be a multi-source, 360° gathering of opinions from all pertinent stakeholder groups. The inquiry should ask similar questions to all respondents so that group perspectives can be compared.

• Opinions about organization practices
• Opinions about organization capabilities
• Opinions about actual strategic focus
• Opinions from customers about competitor capabilities
• Opinions from suppliers about emerging industry trends
• Use both structured and open-ended questions.

An Organization Inquiry should be based upon an action map that lets the organization know where it is in relation to where it wants to be as well as what are the lines of action to be taken for progress. The map should align practices to capabilities to strategy.

• Comparing perspectives between groups within a stakeholder category
• Comparing perspectives among stakeholder categories
• Identifying consensus re organization strengths and weaknesses
• Interpreting discrepancies between groups.
• Ranking customer respondents from most positive to most critical
• Identifying opportunities and threats
• Comparing units within the organization
• Comparing the organization with other organizations

An Organization Inquiry should present the data to the organization in a manner that facilitates sensemaking by the members of that organization. The latter turn the objective information from the inquiry into relevant knowledge and meaningful insights.

• Discussing the feedback at all organization levels
• Inter-departmental project teams for performance improvements
• Planning workshops for strategic rethinking
• Alignment of competence development programs with building desired capabilities

An Organization Inquiry should provide knowledge for action at all levels of the organization, involving change strategists, change implementers and change recipients.

• The first organization inquiry sets baseline measures
• Subsequent organization inquiries identify and measure improvement efforts.
• Follow-up an organization inquiry with in-depth surveys of particular areas.
• Create a culture of inquiry at all levels – individual, team, department, and organization.
• Foster values such as self-evaluation, open dialogue, collaboration and seeking consensus.

An Organization Inquiry should be part of an organization renewal spiral going from

Organization Action

To Inquiry about the Action

To Mobilization of workforce based upon the Inquiry

To Renewal Action , to Inquiry, to Mobilization….