Growing Without Slowing Down: A 5-Minute Viability Test for Mission-Driven Organizations
Could your organization do twice as much without becoming twice as complicated?
Some organizations lack resources. Others have the means to match their ambitions, find the skills they need, enjoy strong legitimacy, and could still considerably increase their activity.
That is when another question arises.
What happens when the organization grows?
An additional team has to be coordinated with those already in place. A new activity generates new information. A necessary specialization creates one more interface. A decision that could once be made around a table must now pass through several functions, sometimes several levels, sometimes several countries.
Activity increases. Capacity for action does too, fortunately.
But complexity can increase even faster.
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The test takes approximately 5 minutes.
It examines five dimensions: system coherence, the real autonomy of teams, speed of adaptation, the resilience of essential functions, and the way the organization absorbs its own complexity.
At the end of the 12 questions, you receive:
- an overall organizational viability score;
- your profile across the 5 dimensions of the test;
- the factor most likely to become your first point of tension if activity increases;
- a few concrete areas to examine;
- and one question to take into your next team or management meeting.
Answer based on how the organization actually operates today. An organization may have very good reasons for centralizing certain decisions, producing large amounts of information or maintaining highly specialized functions. It is precisely the balance between all these elements that interests us.
12 questions. Approximately 5 minutes.
Let’s begin.
1. If your organization’s activity doubled over the next six months, what would happen?
Choose the answer that best reflects what would actually happen.
A — We would quickly face significant difficulties in maintaining our current operations.
B — We could absorb some of this growth, but several functions would quickly become bottlenecks.
C — We could probably adapt, at the cost of a noticeable increase in coordination and management workload.
D — We could absorb this growth by progressively adapting resources, teams and coordination mechanisms.
E — Our organization can significantly increase its capacity for action without increasing its internal complexity in the same proportions.
You have just answered the most general question in the test.
It provides an estimate of the organization’s absorption capacity. The following questions seek to understand where this growth would be absorbed easily, and where, on the contrary, it would begin to create tension.
The rest of the test is available free of charge to members of the Geneva Forum community.
Creating an account is free and also allows you to save your result.
Continue the test — free login
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