How leaders can assess a transformation already in motion, identify emerging strain, and decide what to do next

Diagnostic lens examining systems, behavior, and culture across five active change layers as signals guide organizational course correction.

An organizational assessment during change is not a general check of whether the organization is doing well. An organizational change assessment is a decision-oriented examination of a change system already in motion.

The distinction matters.

Assessing an active transformation is more like adjusting the next steps during heart surgery than asking whether the patient appears healthy. The organization cannot simply stop while leaders conduct a lengthy review. Employees continue serving customers, operating systems, resolving problems, and implementing several initiatives at once.

Leaders therefore need to understand:

What is working well enough to protect?
Where is the change losing momentum?
Which risks are becoming more serious?
Where are systems, behavior, and culture out of balance?
Are different parts of the organization experiencing the change differently?
Which assumptions need to be reconsidered?
What should happen next?

A useful organizational assessment during change must produce more than observations. It should improve the next management decision.

Readiness, assessment, and evaluation answer different questions

Several types of organizational diagnosis can support change, but they serve different purposes.

Before the change: organizational change readiness

This type of change management assessment asks whether the organization has the capacity, commitment, clarity, leadership, and supporting conditions needed to begin or expand a change.

The central question is:

Are we prepared to undertake this change?

For a more detailed discussion, see Executive Questions for Organizational Change Readiness.

During the change: organizational change assessment

An organizational assessment during change examines what is happening while implementation is underway.

The central question is:

Given what we are experiencing now, what should we do next?

This is the focus of this article.

After the change: change evaluation

A post-change evaluation considers results, outcomes, sustainability, and lessons after a significant implementation phase has been completed.

The central question is:

What did the change achieve, and what should we learn from it?

These three perspectives are connected, but they should not be treated as interchangeable.

Begin with the decision, not with the assessment tool

An organizational diagnosis becomes unfocused when it begins with a survey, interview guide, maturity model, or dashboard before leaders have clarified what they need to decide.

A better starting point is a management question.

For example:

Should we continue with the current implementation approach?
Do we need to slow down or resequence activities?
Is a performance problem caused by insufficient training, unclear processes, competing priorities, or limited capacity?
Should we adjust our approach within the current stage?
Have important assumptions changed?
Do we need to return to an earlier design decision?
Is the problem local, or does it require an enterprise decision?

The management question determines which evidence matters.

A large volume of information does not automatically create understanding. A survey result, performance indicator, customer complaint, employee observation, or project update becomes a useful signal only when it is interpreted in relation to a question, objective, baseline, risk, or decision.

Look for real momentum, not visible activity

Change programs often report activity:

Workshops have been completed.
Communications have been distributed.
Training participation is high.
Milestones have been reached.
New systems have gone live.
Project plans remain on schedule.

These measures may be useful, but they do not necessarily demonstrate progress.

Real momentum becomes visible when the organization begins to operate differently in ways that support the intended outcome. Employees understand the change, managers reinforce it, processes support it, systems function as intended, customers experience improvement, and operational units can sustain the new way of working.

An organizational assessment during change must therefore distinguish activity from impact.

Useful questions include:

Are people applying what they learned?
Are decisions being made differently?
Are the new processes usable under real operating conditions?
Are managers reinforcing the intended change?
Are workarounds increasing or decreasing?
Are customer experiences improving?
Are teams able to maintain performance while implementing the change?
Are reported results consistent with what employees and customers experience?

Quieter resistance, completed training, or a green project dashboard should not automatically be interpreted as healthy momentum.

Examine risk alongside progress

Assessments often focus on whether implementation is advancing. This can hide the cost of that progress.

A transformation may appear successful while:

operational capacity is being depleted;
employees are compensating for poor process design;
managers are resolving recurring problems manually;
customer consequences are appearing outside the project dashboard;
one department is absorbing costs created by another;
several initiatives are competing for the same people;
temporary workarounds are becoming permanent;
important concerns are no longer being raised.

The question is therefore not simply, “Are we progressing?”

Leaders must also ask:

What is making this progress possible, and is it sustainable?

This is especially important when multiple projects affect the same teams, processes, systems, or customers. Individual projects can report progress while the combined change demand exceeds the organization’s capacity. The result may be change saturation even though each initiative appears manageable on its own.

Assess the change through the five GLCM layers

The GRIFFOX Layer Cake Model provides a structured way to examine an initiative without reducing the change management assessment to one methodology, dashboard, or stakeholder narrative.

The five layers help leaders identify where momentum, risk, or disconnection is emerging.

1. Foundation and Experience Layer

The Foundation and Experience Layer includes organizational context, culture, previous experience, leadership patterns, existing capabilities, and change readiness.

Questions at this layer include:

Have the conditions on which the change was designed altered?
Which previous experiences influence how employees interpret this initiative?
Does the organization have the capacity required for the next phase?
Are existing systems, processes, and responsibilities compatible with the change?
Are leaders underestimating the cumulative effect of concurrent initiatives?
Is past experience creating trust, skepticism, or caution?
Have customer expectations or market conditions changed?
Are important cultural patterns supporting or undermining implementation?

Problems at the Foundation Layer cannot usually be corrected through additional communication alone. If the context or assumptions are wrong, leaders may need to reconsider part of the change design.

2. Framework Layer

The Framework Layer contains the principles, methods, roles, decision rights, data, tools, and governance arrangements guiding the initiative.

Questions include:

Are responsibilities and decision rights clear?
Do teams know which methods and standards to apply?
Are escalation paths understood and usable?
Does the information collected support the decisions leaders need to make?
Are local teams receiving enough guidance without losing necessary flexibility?
Are project management and change management activities connected?
Does the governance structure resolve cross-functional problems?
Are teams using different definitions for the same measures or outcomes?

A framework can be complete on paper and still fail in practice. The organizational change assessment must examine whether it helps people make decisions and coordinate work under real conditions.

3. Implementation Layer

The Implementation Layer is where employees, managers, teams, and departments put the change into practice.

Questions include:

Is the intended change workable in daily operations?
What adaptations have teams made?
Which workarounds are appearing?
Where are employees unclear about priorities?
Are managers reinforcing the change consistently?
Which teams are progressing, and which are struggling?
What is happening to service quality, workload, and customer experience?
Are dependencies between departments delaying implementation?
Are people able to raise operational concerns safely?
Has local adaptation improved the design or moved it away from its purpose?

This layer is particularly important because project reports may describe what was delivered, while operational evidence reveals what employees can actually use.

4. Recalibration Layer

The Recalibration Layer connects change management assessment, learning, reflection, and course correction.

Questions include:

Are leaders reviewing evidence frequently enough?
Are adjustments based on patterns or isolated reactions?
Are teams learning from implementation experience?
Are assumptions being reviewed when conditions change?
Are decisions and their reasons being documented?
Is feedback reaching people who can act on it?
Are adjustments solving the underlying problem?
Do teams know what was changed and why?
Is leadership willing to slow down, wait, or revise the approach when necessary?

Recalibration should not be limited to repairing problems after they become visible. It should create regular opportunities to interpret experience and make deliberate adjustments.

5. Goal Layer

The Goal Layer concerns the intended outcome, its operational integration, and the value the change should create.

Questions include:

Is the intended outcome still relevant?
Are teams working toward the same outcome?
Is the change producing useful operational or customer results?
Are local targets supporting the enterprise objective?
Have short-term project goals displaced the wider purpose?
Can the organization sustain the new way of working?
Are the results becoming integrated into normal operations?
Has the original definition of success become too narrow?

A project may deliver its stated outputs without producing the intended organizational outcome. Organizational diagnosis at the Goal Layer helps leaders detect this difference.

Apply Theme-Centered Diagnostics at every layer

The GLCM uses Theme-Centered Diagnostics, a GRIFFOX diagnostic perspective inspired by Ruth Cohn’s Theme-Centered Interaction model and adapted to organizational change.

The diagnostic lens examines the dynamic relationship among three dimensions:

Systems
Behavior
Culture

The change initiative surrounds these three dimensions and continuously influences all of them. However, the influence is rarely equal.

Imagine systems, behavior, and culture as the three corners of a triangle balanced on a single point. The triangle can tilt in any direction. When one corner carries more weight than the others, strain becomes visible.

The purpose is not to stabilize the triangle permanently. Organizational change is too dynamic for that. The purpose is to observe how the balance is shifting, understand what the movement indicates, and decide whether an adjustment is necessary.

Systems

Systems include organizational structures, processes, technology, policies, incentives, governance arrangements, resources, information flows, and decision rights.

Diagnostic questions include:

Do current processes support the intended change?
Are responsibilities and interfaces clear?
Does the technology work under actual operating conditions?
Are incentives aligned with the expected behavior?
Do employees have the time and resources required?
Are decisions being made at the appropriate level?
Are different initiatives placing conflicting demands on the same units?
Do reporting systems reveal operational consequences?

Behavior

Behavior concerns what leaders, managers, employees, teams, and other stakeholders actually do.

Questions include:

Are people using the new processes and systems?
Are managers reinforcing the change through their decisions?
Are employees raising concerns, asking questions, and sharing experience?
Where are workarounds appearing?
Are people cooperating across organizational boundaries?
Are teams reverting to established practices?
Is visible compliance masking uncertainty or disagreement?
Are leaders responding constructively to evidence that challenges the plan?

Culture

Culture includes shared assumptions, unwritten expectations, trust, identity, accepted norms, and the meaning people attach to the change.

Questions include:

Does the initiative fit the organization’s stated and lived values?
Do employees believe that raising concerns is safe?
Are mistakes treated as learning opportunities or personal failures?
Does the culture reward cooperation or protect organizational silos?
How do previous change experiences affect current trust?
Are employees interpreting the change as improvement, threat, disruption, or another temporary management program?
Are customer and employee experiences taken seriously?
Which unwritten rules influence adoption?

Diagnose the interaction, not only the three dimensions

The greatest value of Theme-Centered Diagnostics comes from examining how systems, behavior, and culture influence one another.

For example:

Employees may avoid a new system because the workflow is poorly designed.
Managers may continue making decisions centrally because decision rights remain unclear.
Teams may create workarounds because performance targets conflict with the new process.
Employees may stop reporting problems because earlier concerns were dismissed.
Leaders may interpret low participation as resistance when people lack time, information, or authority.
A department may appear uncooperative because another initiative is using the same operational capacity.

Correcting behavior alone would not resolve these problems.

If leaders respond with additional training or stronger communication without examining systems and culture, they may treat a symptom while reinforcing the underlying cause.

The change management assessment should therefore ask:

What is happening?
Where is it happening?
How frequently is it happening?
Which system conditions influence the behavior?
Which cultural assumptions shape the response?
What evidence supports this interpretation?
What alternative explanation should we consider?

Use Theme-Centered Diagnostics at every GLCM layer

Systems, behavior, and culture should not be assessed only once. Their interaction can be examined at every layer of the GLCM.

Foundation and Experience

Systems: What existing structures, capabilities, and constraints shape the change?
Behavior: How have people responded to previous changes?
Culture: Which experiences, assumptions, and trust patterns influence the current initiative?

Framework

Systems: Are governance, methods, roles, measures, and decision rights fit for purpose?
Behavior: Are leaders and teams applying the framework consistently?
Culture: Does the organization view the framework as useful guidance, unnecessary control, or administrative work?

Implementation

Systems: Do processes, resources, technology, and interfaces support execution?
Behavior: What are employees, managers, and teams actually doing?
Culture: What makes it easier or harder to question, adapt, cooperate, and learn?

Recalibration

Systems: Are reflection, feedback, escalation, and decision processes functioning?
Behavior: Are leaders responding to evidence and adjusting their actions?
Culture: Can the organization acknowledge problems without blame or loss of credibility?

Goal

Systems: Are outcomes measurable and integrated into operations?
Behavior: Are new practices becoming part of normal work?
Culture: Is the change becoming accepted as part of how the organization operates?

This produces a more precise diagnosis than asking whether the initiative is simply on track.

Combine different perspectives and signal sources

An organizational assessment during change should not depend on a single executive narrative, employee survey, project dashboard, or consultant interpretation.

Useful evidence may include:

operational performance data;
customer feedback and complaints;
employee observations;
leadership assessments;
project and portfolio information;
quality and risk measures;
process data;
workload and capacity indicators;
interviews and facilitated discussions;
observations from implementation teams;
external market or regulatory information.

The Baldrige Organizational Profile similarly emphasizes organizational context and the identification of areas where information is missing, limited, or conflicting.

Different perspectives serve different purposes.

Top-down perspective

Executive and senior leaders clarify priorities, strategic direction, intended outcomes, constraints, and enterprise risks.

Bottom-up perspective

Employees and operational managers explain how the change is experienced, what is workable, which problems recur, and what may already be improving.

Network perspective

Cross-functional analysis reveals dependencies, interfaces, resource conflicts, customer consequences, and problems that no individual department can see alone.

External perspective

Customers, partners, regulators, market developments, and other external sources can reveal consequences that internal reporting does not capture.

When these perspectives disagree, the disagreement is not an inconvenience to remove. It may be the most valuable finding in the change management assessment.

Distinguish isolated information from patterns

A single complaint, weak metric, or stakeholder opinion should not automatically redirect an initiative.

Leaders should ask:

Are we measuring what matters at the current layer?
Are we using more than one source of evidence?
Are we combining data with lived experience and leadership input?
Are we confusing activity with impact?
Are we reacting to noise or recognizing a pattern?
Is the issue local, repeated across several units, or enterprise-wide?
Is the evidence consistent with the intended outcome?
What contrary evidence exists?
What information is still missing?

The goal is to develop a qualified signal picture that shows what is happening, where it is occurring, why it matters, and which decision it may require.

Reframe the problem before selecting the response

Initial explanations are often incomplete.

Leaders might hear:

“Employees are resistant.”
“The managers are not communicating.”
“The training did not work.”
“The technology is the problem.”
“The project is moving too slowly.”

These statements may describe visible symptoms, but they do not yet provide a diagnosis.

Reframing means testing alternative explanations.

For example:

Is resistance actually a response to competing priorities?
Is the communication problem caused by unresolved leadership decisions?
Is low adoption a training issue or a workflow problem?
Is slow progress caused by poor execution or a deliberate effort to protect service quality?
Is a local performance problem created by a cross-unit dependency?
Are employees rejecting the goal, or do they lack clarity about implementation?
Has change demand exceeded the unit’s capacity?

Reframing helps leaders avoid solving the wrong problem with greater intensity.

Translate the change management assessment into four steering choices

Theme-Centered Diagnostics and the GLCM layers lead to four practical choices.

1. Keep the course

The organizational change assessment may show uneven progress without revealing an unhealthy imbalance.

Leaders can maintain the current direction when:

variations are appropriate for the implementation stage;
systems, behavior, and culture remain sufficiently aligned;
risks are understood and controlled;
teams are learning and adapting;
evidence supports continued progress.

Keeping the course is an active decision. It should be based on evidence, not on reluctance to reconsider the plan.

2. Adjust within the current layer

The overall direction may remain valid while tactics, resources, responsibilities, methods, or sequencing need adjustment.

Examples include:

clarifying roles;
changing communication channels;
adjusting training;
reallocating capacity;
correcting a process;
strengthening coordination;
revising a measure;
resolving a specific dependency.

This option preserves the general design while improving how the current layer functions.

3. Wait consciously

Sometimes the appropriate decision is to pause, reduce speed, or wait.

This may be necessary when:

operational capacity is temporarily constrained;
another decision must be completed first;
evidence remains contradictory;
teams require time to stabilize;
customer risk is increasing;
several initiatives are colliding;
an external condition is likely to change;
further action would create avoidable disruption.

Conscious waiting is not passive. Leaders should define what they are waiting for, what will be monitored, who remains responsible, and when the decision will be reviewed.

4. Go back one layer

Returning to an earlier layer becomes necessary when a fundamental assumption, design element, or organizational condition is no longer valid.

Examples include:

implementation reveals that the framework is incomplete;
the framework rests on an incorrect understanding of the organization;
the goal no longer reflects strategic or customer needs;
responsibilities and governance must be redesigned;
technology cannot support the intended process;
major cultural conditions were overlooked.

Going back one layer does not mean abandoning the change. It means correcting the design before advancing further.

The recursive structure of the GLCM supports this movement. Leaders can revisit the relevant layer without restarting the entire initiative.

An example: assessing a customer onboarding transformation

Consider an organization implementing a new customer onboarding process across sales, customer service, operations, and IT.

Project reporting indicates progress:

the technology has been launched;
training is complete;
the new process is active;
most milestones are green.

Operational evidence presents a different picture:

customer service receives more status inquiries;
operations uses spreadsheets to correct incomplete records;
sales continues promising timelines that the new process cannot support;
employees ask managers for repeated clarification;
customers receive inconsistent information.

Theme-Centered Diagnostics reveals the interaction.

Systems

Workflow definitions, technology rules, handoffs, responsibilities, and escalation paths are not fully aligned.

Behavior

Employees create workarounds, managers resolve recurring problems manually, and departments protect their own performance targets.

Culture

Employees believe that implementation concerns are treated as resistance. As a result, they become less willing to question the design.

The problem is not simply low adoption. The organization is placing increasing pressure on behavior while system and cultural conditions remain unresolved.

The organizational change assessment may therefore recommend:

remaining at the Implementation Layer;
correcting the cross-functional workflow;
clarifying decision rights and escalation;
adjusting performance measures;
creating a structured reflection cycle;
monitoring customer and employee signals;
reviewing whether a return to the Framework Layer is required.

This is a more useful outcome than declaring the transformation red, yellow, or green.

Connect local assessment with enterprise decisions

Not every issue should be escalated to senior leadership. Many adjustments can and should be made by the teams and departments closest to the work.

Within the GLCM, these organizational areas can operate as Change Units. A Change Unit applies the change within its own context, observes local effects, and contributes relevant signals.

However, local teams cannot resolve every problem.

Escalation may be necessary when:

several initiatives compete for the same capacity;
dependencies cross departmental boundaries;
one unit’s decision creates consequences for another;
enterprise priorities are unclear;
customer effects accumulate across several processes;
local measures conflict with organizational goals;
a decision requires wider authority.

Operational Integration makes these cross-unit consequences and dependencies visible.

A Change Office can integrate and qualify signals, identify patterns, prepare decision options, and connect operational experience with leadership.

The Enterprise Change Architecture provides the wider decision structure through which leadership can evaluate priorities, capacity, risks, sequencing, and governance.

The roles remain distinct:

Change Units interpret and manage local implementation.
The Change Office integrates signals and prepares decision support.
Authorized leaders and governance bodies make enterprise decisions.

This allows the organization to preserve local responsibility while addressing consequences that cross boundaries.

Make assessment part of the change process

An organizational assessment during change should not occur only when the initiative is already in trouble.

Short, recurring reflection cycles can help teams and leaders:

collect relevant evidence;
qualify information into signals;
compare systems, behavior, and culture;
examine the current GLCM layer;
identify patterns, imbalances, and risks;
reframe the issue;
select the appropriate steering choice;
monitor the consequences of the decision.

The frequency and depth of reflection should match the initiative. A high-risk transformation may require frequent structured reviews. A smaller local change may need lighter and less frequent reflection.

GLCM does not force every organization into the same structure. The principles can be adapted to the organization’s size, risks, governance, existing methods, and level of change activity.

Common change management assessment traps

Leaders should watch for several recurring mistakes:

Moving forward without understanding what is happening
Measuring activity while overlooking impact
Correcting individual behavior when system design is the problem
Declaring progress because resistance has become quieter
Treating speed as proof of success
Relying on one stakeholder’s narrative
Overcorrecting because of isolated feedback
Ignoring contrary evidence
Treating every local problem as an enterprise issue
Expecting local teams to resolve cross-unit conflicts without authority
Collecting more data without clarifying the decision
Waiting without defining what should happen during the pause

These traps create the appearance of control while weakening the quality of the next decision.

Questions leaders should ask

When change is already underway, leaders should ask:

What decision must this change management assessment support?
What does genuine progress look like at the current layer?
Which evidence indicates momentum?
Which evidence indicates strain or emerging risk?
Are systems, behavior, and culture supporting one another?
Where is the diagnostic triangle beginning to tilt?
Are we observing an isolated event or a recurring pattern?
What are employees, customers, operational data, and leaders telling us?
Which perspective or evidence source is missing?
Are we interpreting workarounds as adoption?
Is the issue local, cross-functional, or enterprise-wide?
Do we need to reframe the problem?
Should we keep the course, adjust within the current layer, wait consciously, or go back one layer?
Who has the authority to make the necessary decision?
How will we know whether the decision improved the situation?

Assessment should improve the next decision

An organizational assessment during change should not produce a static description of organizational health. It should help leaders understand a living change system and determine its next responsible step.

The GLCM layers reveal where momentum, risk, and disconnection appear. Theme-Centered Diagnostics examines the changing balance among systems, behavior, and culture at each layer. Reflection cycles ensure that new experience informs the next decision.

Together, these elements help leaders determine whether to keep the course, adjust within the current layer, wait consciously, or return to an earlier layer.

That is the practical value of an organizational assessment during change: clearer interpretation, better decisions, and progress that the organization can sustain.

About the Author

Harald Lavric is the founder of GRIFFOX Consulting and the developer of the GRIFFOX Layered Cake Model. He works with organizations facing complex and continuous change, helping leaders connect strategy, operational reality, organizational learning, and enterprise decision-making. His work focuses on making change more visible, integrated, and manageable across initiatives, teams, and organizational boundaries.

Theme-Centered Diagnostics is a GRIFFOX diagnostic adaptation inspired by Ruth Cohn’s Theme-Centered Interaction. For background on the original approach, see Schneider-Landolf, Spielmann, and Zitterbarth’s Handbook of Theme-Centered Interaction.