Part one. The Definitions
The Pronoun Audit
Count how often people say "they" about their own organisation. The number is diagnostic.
Read the transcript
Take forty consecutive sentences from an internal channel or a recorded operating review. Count how many describe another team inside the same company as they. Not customers, and not a vendor. A function that shares your profit and loss statement. The reading is blunt. Under a fifth is a normal organisation with ordinary friction. Up to about half means the seams are known and being worked around rather than fixed. Above that, the functions have stopped treating each other as part of the same operation. It works because the pronoun is involuntary. People will tell you on a survey that collaboration is good. They will not manage to say we about a team they have privately written off. Run it again ninety days after a fix.
Take forty consecutive sentences from an internal channel, a retrospective document, or a recorded operating review. Count how many describe another team inside the same company as "they".
Not "they" meaning customers, and not "they" meaning a vendor. "They" meaning a function that shares your profit and loss statement.
The reading below is blunt, and it is a proposed reading rather than a measured one. Under twenty percent is a normal, healthy organisation with ordinary friction. Twenty to forty five percent means the seams are known and being worked around rather than fixed. Forty five to seventy percent means the functions have stopped treating each other as part of the same operation. Above seventy percent, you do not have an operation with a handoff problem, you have two operations sharing a bank account.
It works because the pronoun is involuntary. People will tell you in a survey that collaboration is good. They will not manage to say "we" about a team they have privately written off.
Run it before the fix and again ninety days after. It is one of the very few operational measures that moves quickly and visibly when something real has changed, which makes it useful as evidence rather than as a scolding.
Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything
Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.