• A brainstorming session by a group of the right people to find practical solutions to business challenges.
• Use this checklist to help decide if a work-out session would benefit your organization

• Does your organization have important business issues that need to be tackled faster?

• Do many of your critical business issues need cross-functional attention?

• Is your organization facing a crisis, but most people don't realize it?

• Does your organization have many employees who don't understand the link between what they do and the strategic priorities of the business?

• Are the only measures of your performance financial?

• Is detailed knowledge of your competitors' performance concentrated in a few hands, and unavailable to parts of the organization that should have it?

• Is your organization's customer knowledge confined to pockets of the organization such as sales, marketing, senior executives?

• Is your response to customer demands usually piecemeal or incomplete?

• Are your customers complaining or leaving, but you don't clearly understand why?

• Is your organization's decision making so concentrated that people run into delays and bottlenecks or so dispersed that accountability or power to make a decision is unclear?

• Is there a lot of red tape, with multiple sign-offs required for most non-routine matters?

• Are many of your people so afraid to make decisions on their own that they always pass them up to someone else?

• Is your top management's desired future direction not getting the attention and action it needs?

• Does your organization rarely try projects involving a cross-section of front-line employees and managers?

• Do your senior leaders fail to support one another's projects?

• Does your organization have lots of layers?

• We have lots of rules, many of them contradictory or confusing.

• Does your organization have a rigid structure that hasn't really changed in years?

• Does your organization avoid disagreement and debate, especially between levels?

• Do front-line employees think senior leaders are out of touch?

• Is the means of communication in your organization mostly one way?

• Do your organization's managers tend to protect their own turf?

• Do your people tend to avoid accountability for their results?

• Are suggestions usually greeted with "we've tried that before and it didn't work."?

• Is innovation and change in your organization mandated by senior managers rather than coming from experiments on the front line?

• Does your organization fail to reward risk-takers?

• Do your people seldom learn and share with each other?

If you answered "yes" to many of these questions, Work-Out is likely an important strategy which will significantly improve results!