Don Schmincke’s
Organizational Diagnostic Results
Whether you got here from my speech, website, or a trusted colleague gave you the Diagnostic link, welcome.
This report shows the results for all the diagnostic yes/no questions.
The ones you answered YES to are most relevant for you, but you may see clinical evidence in the others that you may want to consider.
Every organization depends on five critical organizational domains. When one becomes diseased, execution begins to fail. When several fail together, performance deteriorates rapidly.
Your responses indicate that one or more of these domains may currently be diseased.
This report will help lay out the expectations of the journey ahead, the exercises you can do to improve, and what you need to consider in order to begin this journey.
Every organization survives through five critical domains.
- Reality
- Choice
- Action
- Adaptation
- Competitiveness
Disease develops when any one of these domains begins to fail.
- Reality fails — information degrades.
- Choice fails — decisions stall.
- Action fails — decisions never become behavior.
- Adaptation fails — yesterday consumes tomorrow.
- Competitiveness fails — departments celebrate while competitors win.
Here are your diagnosis for the questions you answered:
If you answered YES to "We don't have honest conversations. We have safe ones."
Your Diagnosis
Domain Affected: Reality
Disease: Truth Deficit
Research Finding: Organizations rarely fail because people lacked information. They fail because the people who knew the truth decided it wasn't safe to say it. Months later the silence appears as quality failures, customer losses, compliance breaches, and opportunities that never reached leadership.
Don's research identifies this symptom pattern as:
The Freeze Response
Silence isn't politeness — it's biology. The same freeze reflex that keeps prey still near a predator shows up in a meeting as staying quiet: afraid of looking ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. So people withhold bad news, avoid disagreement, and sugarcoat problems.
Leadership calls it alignment. The room calls it staying safe.
Reflection: What hasn't your team told you yet?
If you answered YES to: We wait for consensus on decisions that never require it.
Your Diagnosis
Domain Affected: Choice
Disease: Decision Gridlock
Research Finding: Organizations don't become slow because people are unintelligent. They become slow because fear drives indecisiveness. More discussion, more stakeholders, and more consensus create the illusion of better decisions while delaying action. Consensus feels safer. But it only works until decisions stall. This explains why 60% of executives feel their decision time is largely ineffective. That's payroll trapped inside indecision, not thoroughness.
Don's research identifies this symptom pattern as:
Solution Rot
Self-protection, decision fatigue, and forced consensus slowly replace self-initiative. Decisiveness gets abdicated by surrendering it to committees, AI, and processes blindly followed. Problems emerge without solutions. Agreement gets confused with commitment. Decisions focus more on alignment to make everyone feel like they’re part of the process rather than finding the most effective solutions. Problems get discussed. Solutions don't. Everyone participates. Nobody commits.
Reflection: Which important decision has everyone discussed but nobody made?
If you answered YES to: Projects start with commitment and die of neglect.
Your Diagnosis — Execution Decay
Domain Affected: Action
Disease: Execution Decay
Research Finding: The problem usually isn't making the wrong decision. It's watching the right one die before it reaches the front line. After it is made, execution stalls because approval processes, organizational layers, competing priorities, and resource constraints gradually weaken ownership until the initiative survives only on PowerPoint. Slow execution has a name in the research: the ‘Slowness Tax.’ Companies lose billions every year to missed market windows, stalled initiatives, and strategies that never become reality.
Don's research identifies this symptom pattern as:
Directive Deterioration
It starts with an Alignment Illusion—one study found 82% of employees believed they were aligned with strategy. When tested directly? Real understanding was just 23%.
Then Managerial Layering begins. Every management level adds its own interpretations, priorities, approvals, and constraints. Each layer subtly reshapes the directive until it barely resembles what leadership intended. Ownership diffuses. Accountability evaporates.
By the time it reaches the front line, they're faithfully executing something leadership never intended. The strategy wasn't wrong. It simply didn't survive the trip.
Reflection: Which strategy are you still pretending is underway?
If you answered YES to: Success creates gravity. Yesterday keeps pulling resources away from tomorrow.
Your Diagnosis
Domain Affected: Adaptation
Disease: Legacy Gravity
Research Finding: Gravity isn't visible. You only notice it when you're trying to escape it. Organizational success creates the same force. Yesterday's products, budgets, relationships, and assumptions create more mass every year until tomorrow can't escape the past. Organizations say innovation is critical. Their budgets say otherwise. Budgets defend yesterday as they simply keep investing in what they already have.
Don's research identifies this symptom pattern as:
Escape Velocity Failure
This isn't weakness — it's the opposite. The organization stays busy at exactly the same strong formula that used to work. Strategies, relationships, and values that built past success calcify into blinders the moment the market moves. Yesterday's successes become tomorrow's budget priorities, even after the market has moved on. This “Yesterday Tax” makes abandoning old products, old systems, old structures, and old assumptions feel riskier than protecting them.
Reflection: What part of your budget exists only because nobody knows, or wants to admit, it's obsolete?
If you answered YES to: People focus on their department winning versus the company winning.
Your Diagnosis
Domain Affected: Competitiveness
Disease: Internal Warfare
Research Finding: The greatest cost of workplace conflict isn't disagreement. It's misplaced protection — every hour spent defending turf is an hour competitors spend serving customers. Organizations don't lose competitiveness because competitors become stronger. They lose competitiveness because internal conflict redirects attention away from customers and toward colleagues. U.S. workplace conflict burns an estimated $359 billion in productivity every year managing tension instead of doing the job.
Don's research identifies this symptom pattern as:
Predator Blindness
Energy meant to battle the real enemy gets spent on the person across the table. Time and attention meant for customers gets redirected toward colleagues. Internal rivalry blinds executives to the external threats that actually threaten survival. Departments win internal battles while competitors win the market.
Reflection: Who inside your company consumes more energy than your biggest competitor?
Clinical Impression
These execution diseases are active within your organization; a reinforcing system that quietly degrades execution, decisions, innovation, and financial performance.
Left untreated, they rarely improve on their own because each one strengthens the others.
This diagnostic identifies the pathologies,
but not what they cost you.
The Financial Bleed Analysis™ does that.
Your next step: Estimate the economic impact with a self-analysis.
See What These Diseases Cost You
