INTRODUCTION TO THE HPO DIAGNOSTIC/CHANGE MODEL

John Pickering, Ph.D., President,
Commonwealth Center for High-Performance Organizations (CCHPO), Inc.

As we promised in an earlier blog here on the ICMA Center for Management Strategies website, today’s topic is an introduction to our
organization’s roadmap for improving organizational performance. The Building High-Performance Organizations seminar, together
with the HPO Diagnostic/Change Model (HPO Model)© and the related workshops, competency development processes, leadership
team building, and performance improvement materials, was developed at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's Federal
Executive Institute and at the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service by John Pickering, Bob Matson, Allen
Hard, and later, Gerry Brokaw, Phil Harnden, and Tony Gardner.

Our HPO Diagnostic/Change Model is loosely based on Rensis Likert's Causal Model, Marvin Weisbord's Six-Box Model, the McKinsey
Company's Seven S Model, and others in the management literature to lay out an "improvement roadmap" for practitioners to use in
improving their organizations’ performance. The Model has been refined and expanded over the years, through our work with scores of
federal, state, and local government organizations, non-profit agencies, and a few private sector entities.

The HPO Diagnostic/Change Model

The HPO Model is a classic “systems model” in which every part of the model interacts and affects every other part; it moves roughly
left to right from three conceptual "Change Levers," Leadership, Vision, and Values, through three applied "Levers," Strategy,
Structure, and Systems, to impacting organizational Performance -- with a "feedback" loop to the organization's Environment. Seven
Key Diagnostic Questions need to be asked at all levels of the organization because they apply to people personally, to their
immediate units, to the intermediate units above them, and to the organization as a whole.
The Seven Key Diagnostic Questions (KDQs)

One way to get started in understanding the HPO Model is through Seven Key Diagnostic Questions (KDQs), which help evaluate
foundational assumptions and causal reasoning. The seven KDQs are:

KDQ 1: What is high performance for us?
KDQ 2: How would we know if we were high performing?
KDQ 3: According to whom are we high performing?
KDQ 4: Why do we need to be high performing?
KDQ 5: Are we doing the right “what?”
KDQ 6: How good are we at it?
KDQ 7: How are we going to treat each other and our stakeholders?

These seven questions can lead an organization or unit to define more completely the Change Levers and the work required in each
of them. These are among the most important conversations your organization/unit can have. We will examine each of these
questions and a whole host of related topics in subsequent blogs.