ORGANIZATIONAL FITNESS PROFILE (OFP) - the Process To Improve Your Organization

Organizational Fitness Profile (OFP) Process

OFP helps identify weaknesses of an organization and taking corrective actions.

Why OFP

Even the best CEOs can be blind to core personal and organizational weaknesses that are hidden within the business structure and create obstacles and barriers that prevent their business units from achieving optimal performance.

Organizational Fitness Profile (OFP) by HBS

Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer and consultant Russel A. Eisenstat developed an innovative OFP process that can help corporate renewal, X-ray your organization, identify its weaknesses, and take corrective action.

The OFP Process

① Orientation and Planning

▪ Members of the top management team commit themselves to an enquiry that will dig into the efficiency of their organization and leadership principles.

▪ The top management sets the ground rules for nondefensive communication, defines the game plan and objectives.

▪ The top management team develops a "Statement of Strategic and Organizational Direction" that articulates the links between the company's competitive context, performance goals, business strategy, and needed organizational and cultural changes.

▪ The top management team composes a task force of a cross section of middle managers from different functions and appoints it to collect the organizational information.

② Data Collection

▪ Members of the employee task force are trained to conduct open-ended interviews with employees and customers and collect information about specific management practices and arrangements that help or hinder the implementation of specific strategies.

▪ Consultants conduct interviews with members of the top management team about their effectiveness.

③ OFP Meeting

Completing and analyzing the feedback gained from interviews

▪ Sited in an outer circle, the top management team listens to the task force, seated in an inner circle, discuss its findings. This process is "carefully orchestrated to allow the task force to present a complete and accurate picture of even the most politically sensitive barriers to strategy implementation. Guided by ground rules for nondefensive communication, the top team dialogues with the employee task force at the end of each presentation".

▪ After the dialogue concludes, the task force departs, and consultants feed back a summary of the major themes from their interviews with the members of the top management team. The issues related to the role or style of any team member, including the CEO, that is helping or impeding the top team effectiveness, are discussed.

Using a systemic model, the top management team assesses the consequences of organizational deficiencies identified by the task force and then evaluates their causes.

Using the OFP, the top management team develops a broad model and vision of how the company should be redesigned to implement the new strategy more effectively, and an implementation plan.

The top management team gathers with the task force to review the findings and what they plan to do.

Meeting separately, the task force evaluates the proposed changes and the implementation plan, and gives its reaction to the top management.

Developing a template for ongoing organizational learning and improvement:

▪ defining a continuing role for the task force in evaluating the organizational progress and identifying areas of weaknesses and opportunities;

▪ "implementing a project management system for the ongoing commissioning, conduct, and review of organizational improvement efforts";

▪ annual or bi-annual readministration of OFP for the business as a whole.