Assess
Understand what is really happening beneath the visible symptoms.
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Organisational assessment & intervention support
Making complex
things easier.
Helping leaders understand what is happening beneath the surface, build shared understanding and act where change will have most impact.
01 Our practice
The issue is rarely a lack of effort.
Organisations in recovery, escalation or complex transformation often have significant activity already under way. The harder challenge is understanding why improvement is not landing as intended.
HAWS helps leaders see the organisational dynamics affecting implementation, performance and outcomes - so action becomes clearer, more focused and better coordinated.
02 Assessment to intervention
How we help
We work from the situation outwards: first understanding what is really happening, then focusing support where it will have most impact.
A practical support model
Make sense
Build shared understanding and alignment.
Intervene
Address the organisational dynamics affecting performance and delivery.
Develop capability
Strengthen the organisation’s ability to sustain improvement.
Assessment is not a detached exercise. Done well, it begins to shift understanding, alignment and action. Sustainable improvement also means strengthening the organisation’s ability to respond more coherently over time.
Where support may focus
Intervention may be required at several levels.
Structural
Governance, accountability, roles, operating models and decision rights.
Relational
Collaboration, trust, team dynamics and cross-boundary working.
Behavioural
Leadership behaviours, culture, norms and psychological safety.
Strategic
Alignment, priorities, clarity of purpose and organisational direction.
Systemic
Interdependencies, unintended consequences and wider system dynamics.
The assessment helps identify where intervention is most likely to have impact, rather than defaulting to a predetermined solution.
03 Selected experience
Experience
Executive teams working through complexity
Supported the executive leadership of one of the UK’s largest national infrastructure programmes to strengthen alignment, improve collective effectiveness and navigate complexity across a major programme of change.
Leadership alignment · Organisation design · Systems thinking
Turning insight into organisational change
Led organisation-wide culture and leadership work during a period of merger, regulatory intervention and recovery, engaging more than 6,000 colleagues and helping translate complex organisational challenges into practical action that became embedded across leadership, recruitment and performance.
Culture · Leadership · Organisational effectiveness
Helping organisations see the whole system
Led strategic organisational assessments for NHS England and local government, combining systems thinking, behavioural insight and evidence to help leaders understand what was happening beneath the surface and identify where change would have the greatest impact.
Organisational assessment · Strategy · Transformation
04 Ideas in progress
Thinking
A growing archive of ideas about organisations, leadership and change.
Organisational assessment
More activity is not always the answer.
When improvement isn’t landing, the first task is to understand what is sustaining the current situation.
Read the thoughtIntervention design
The right intervention starts at the right level.
A sensible intervention applied at the wrong level can leave the real problem untouched.
Read the thoughtOrganisational capability
Assessment is not separate from change.
Done well, assessment begins to shift understanding, alignment and action.
Read the thoughtCollective leadership
Strong relationships are not enough
Collective leadership also depends on the conditions that allow people to act together.
Read the thoughtCollective sense-making
Different perspectives are part of the evidence.
Differences between accounts can help reveal how the organisation is working.
Read the thought05 Contact
Every meaningful piece of work starts with a conversation.
Tell us what you're thinking about. You don't need to have it neatly defined.