What survives contact with other people

Everything in this course so far has been you, assessing your own operation, using your own judgment. That is where it has to start and it is not where it can stop, for the reason established in part two: your instruments came out of the same system.

So take the blank diagnostic and give it to two other people who hold operational accountability in the same organization. Separately. Do not discuss it first, and do not compare until both have finished. Discussing first produces agreement, and agreement produced that way carries no information.

Then compare three things, in this order.

The rankings. If your ordering of the eight domains and theirs differ by more than two places on any domain, you do not have a shared picture of who is accountable for what, and every conversation about that domain has been two conversations.

The attention shares. Large disagreements here mean people are seeing different operations, which usually means the reporting shows different things to different levels.

The reference column. This is the one that matters. If three people independently leave the same domain blank, that domain has no external reference anywhere in the organization, and the blankness is structural rather than personal. If one person fills in a reference the others did not know existed, you have found an instrument you already own and were not using.