Organizational Assessments
The Novare Center’s Organizational Assessments provide a starting point for meaningful conversations about an organization’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities for change, helping leaders discern next steps within their unique context.
The Novare Center for Organizational Formation provides is a suite of organizational assessments that grew out of a recurring observation: organizations often have plenty of ideas for change, yet the deeper conditions that shape whether change can take root are much harder to see. Many of the challenges facing theological education are organizational formation challenges. Over time, institutions are shaped by their narratives, values, practices, structures, relationships, patterns of authority, and assumptions. Those patterns influence how an organization understands its identity, defines problems, imagines possible futures, and responds to change.
The Organizational Assessments were developed to make some of those patterns visible. They provide organizations with a structured way to surface differences in perception, identify areas of alignment and misalignment, and create a shared starting point for deeper conversation.
Innovation Readiness Assessment
This assessment brings focus to an organization’s readiness for innovation by examining the perceived need for innovation, the perceived capacity to innovate, and the presence of institutional barriers to innovation. The resulting data creates a foundation for early conversations about organizational dynamics that could strengthen or undermine innovation over time.
Collaboration Readiness Assessment
This assessment sheds light on an organization’s readiness to collaborate by examining organizational barriers to collaboration, institutional openness to collaboration, and current collaborative practices. It equips organizations to have productive conversations about the culture, structures, and practices that may accelerate or impede collaborative work.
Organizational Alignment and Shared Reality Assessment
Many efforts at innovation and change stall because stakeholders use the same words to describe different hopes and different understandings of organizational reality. This assessment measures the extent to which an organization shares a common understanding of its identity, purpose, current reality, and definition of the problem it is trying to address. It is designed to surface assumptions and differences that may otherwise remain hidden until an initiative is already underway.
All of the Novare organizational assessments follow the same basic implementation process. Each assessment is designed as a conversation starter. The purpose is to create useful data that an organization can interpret in light of its own history, purpose, context, and sense of where God may be leading.
Broad participation matters. In most cases, Novare recommends inviting all board members, staff, and faculty to complete the assessment within a defined window of time. Adjunct or affiliate faculty can also be included when they are meaningfully involved in institutional conversations about organizational change. Other stakeholder groups may be included depending on the organization and the purpose of the assessment.
Each organization receives its own survey link, keeping its data distinct from other participating organizations. Responses are anonymous. Results can be segmented by stakeholder category, such as board, faculty, staff, or administration, while protecting the identity of individual respondents.
After the response window closes, Novare analyzes the data and prepares a customized report. The report highlights patterns in the responses, areas of alignment and divergence, possible organizational barriers, and questions that may warrant further exploration.
The report is the beginning of the process. Depending on the organization’s desired level of engagement with Novare, each assessment can conclude with the written report or include a series of debrief conversations facilitated by Novare. During those conversations, participants interpret the data together, explore what may be contributing to the patterns they see, and identify questions or next steps that deserve further attention.
Each assessment is designed to help an organization foster valuable conversations about where God may be leading it. The resulting data can identify variations in the institutional narrative, potential challenges related to innovation or collaboration, gaps between values and practices, differing definitions of the problem, and patterns of governance or authority that deserve closer attention.
Organizations that complete the same assessment may also be invited into shared learning opportunities. These gatherings allow participants to compare patterns, exchange insights, and learn from others engaging similar questions while preserving the confidentiality of organization-specific data.
- Define the assessment group: Novare and the organization determine who should participate and establish a response window.
- Distribute the survey: Participants receive the organization’s unique survey link by email and complete the brief assessment anonymously.
- Analyze the responses: Novare reviews the results, including patterns across the organization and relevant differences among stakeholder groups.
- Prepare the report: The organization receives a customized report with findings, observations, and questions for further conversation.
(The last two are optional and tied to level of engagement with Novare)
- Facilitate the debrief: Novare guides a conversation to interpret the findings in the organization’s context and identify possible next steps.
- Continue the learning: The organization may engage additional Novare learning experiences, capacity-building opportunities, or future assessments as its work develops.
Interested in learning more about Novare’s Organizational Assessments?
Novare’s organizational assessments provide a starting point for meaningful conversations about an organization’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities for change, helping leaders discern next steps within their unique context.