The instrument

The Monday-Morning Test

Five mechanisms decide whether an approved strategy changes anything on Monday. Five questions here, and a first reading of where yours is.

Runs in your browser. Nothing stored, nothing sent, no email wall.

From approved to Monday morning

Five mechanisms, two clusters.

The five are not a sequence, and neither cluster depends on the other, so an organisation can be sound on one and stuck on the other.

Cluster ACan the strategy command the work?

Authorship and the budget both feed ownership: someone can only own an outcome if they shaped the work and can pay for it.

Approved
M1Authorship The body that approves is not the body that delivers.
M2Budget The budget contradicts the strategy.
M3Ownership Nobody owns the outcome.
Monday morning
Cluster BCan the organisation see it moving and steer it?

Reporting hands off to deciding, so what matters is whether what arrives is good enough to decide on.

Approved
M4Reporting The results framework reports outputs, not what they mean for the outcome.
M5Deciding Governance meets to report status, not to decide.
Monday morning

Supports delivery  ·  Constrains delivery

Five questions

About your organisation.

Answer for how things actually work, not how they were designed to. Nothing here is scored.

Five answers from one person make a first reading rather than a diagnosis. The Review asks the same five questions of the organisation's records and of the people who have to deliver the work.

Question 1 of 5

The first full draft of the strategy was written by…

M1 · Authorship

Question 2 of 5

A member of staff spends Monday working on the strategy. That time gets charged to…

M2 · Budget

Question 3 of 5

One level down from the outcome owners, each component of the work belongs to:

M3 · Ownership

Question 4 of 5

Your results framework mostly tells the people reading it…

M4 · Reporting

Question 5 of 5

In your organisation, governance meetings mostly…

M5 · Deciding

Your reading

What five answers cannot see

One person answered. The Review puts the same questions to around fifteen people across every layer, and to the records the organisation already holds.

How hard the evidence is to get. That is a reading in its own right, and this page cannot produce it. A mechanism that looks sound but takes two weeks and a working group to evidence is not yet a system.

Where people disagree. You have put one mark on what is believed. The Review sets a whole layer's marks against what the documents show, and that distance is usually where the value sits. Case study 02 is what it looks like when the two come apart.

Nothing on this page was stored or sent. Printing or closing the tab is the end of it.

The Monday-Morning Test · alefurtado.org/monday-morning-test · Ale Furtado

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