The essence of managing any organization — business, charity, or government agency — is the management of change. Should we grow? Are we growing too fast? How about our products or services? Do they meet our customer's needs now? What about their future needs? What is our competition doing? What are they likely to do? Do we have the right people to manage what we are doing now? What about the future? What should we be doing now? Then what?

These questions — important as they are — are almost never dealt with in any kind of organized, thoughtful, effective way. Why not? Because change is threatening. It requires overcoming inertia, changing established habit patterns, taking risks. If any organized approach is taken it is most usually the application of a “canned” solution without real understanding of whether it has any relation to the problem at hand.

Over the years we have developed a number of tools that DO deal with these questions in an organized and thoughtful way.