The 8M Assessment
Everyone in the building gets asked. The software does the hard part.
Man at level 3, Machine at level 2, Material at level 3, Method at level 2, Measurement at level 1, Mother Nature at level 3, Maintenance at level 2, Management at level 2. The weakest link is Measurement at level 1.
Eight levels and a named weakest link. No mean, no index, no composite.
The experience
What it looks like to the person answering.
They open a plain screen with a prompt and a box, and they type. That is the entire interaction. It is the same thing they already do fifty times a day in a text message or a post, so there is nothing to learn, no training to attend, no scale to interpret, and no form to work out. They write what happened in their own words.
The prompts are written to provoke a specific memory rather than an opinion. What happened. What did you do. Who decided. How often does that happen. Nobody is asked to rate anything or to agree with a statement.
The answers go in as free text and come back structured. The system sorts thousands of accounts into the eight categories, records the evidence behind each one, and gives you a level for all eight with the weakest link named. Reading and coding that many accounts by hand was a research program, not a budget line, which is why these sessions have always been ten people in a room. That limit was a human processing limit, and language models lifted it about three years ago. Chapter Six of the book documents both the constraint and the moment it went away.
8M Assessment
Think of the last time a schedule slipped. What happened?
We had a shipment that was supposed to go out Thursday but the parts didn't arrive until...
The method
What it is.
Every person in scope is asked, not a sample. Every one of the eight categories is covered before any of them is scored. Every level claimed has to be backed by evidence of a stated class. The result is eight levels and a named weakest link.
Why it is worth doing
The gap between the executive view and the frontline view has a price.
Firms with a wide gap between the two views show:
16%
Lower return on assets
10%
Lower market value against asset value
48%
Higher chance of CEO turnover
The deliverable
What you receive.
Every idea, kept
Every account your people gave, in their own words, none discarded.
The issues
Each account confirmed and written as a problem statement, reviewed by a person before it goes anywhere.
The findings, prioritized
Issues traced to cause and ranked in a prioritization meeting your people sit in. The weakest link sets the order, so the ranking is not a debate.
The Weakest Link
Eight levels, shown together, never collapsed, with the specific criterion that held each one down. Not a score to file. The thing that set the order above.
Chartered teams
Each priority finding leaves that meeting as a charter: a named sponsor, released members, a signed receiving owner, an agreed value basis, and a dated effectiveness check.
The timeline
Four weeks.
Weeks one and two
Everyone gets asked.
Rounds go out one at a time and people answer when they can. A few minutes each, on a phone, resumable. Nobody is pulled off the floor and nothing stops.
End of week two
Results.
The accounts come back structured, located in the eight categories, and clustered by what the evidence supports. This is where you first see something you did not know.
The prioritization meeting
Your people, in the room.
One session. The clustered findings go in and signed charters come out, each with a sponsor, a value basis, and the check that will prove it worked. The evidence sets the order, so the meeting decides scope rather than relitigating whose problem is worse.
Weeks three and four
Teams stood up.
Members released in writing, receiving owners signed on, first teams working by the end of week four.
What it costs your people
Answering
Minutes, spread over two weeks, on their own time at work.
The prioritization meeting
One session for the people who attend it.
A chartered team
Released time for its members, which is the only real cost and the one that decides whether this works.