Knowing how to accurately determine your business challenges’ source is a vital skill. Without it, you risk wasting time developing and implementing unnecessary solutions to problems you don’t have.
In a survey of C-suite executives, 85 percent agreed that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, with 87 percent saying those mistakes carried significant costs.
So, how do you accurately identify problems within your company? Through a diagnostic tool called the congruence model, created by organizational theorist David Nadler with Harvard Business School Professor Michael Tushman and Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Charles O’Reilly. Tushman and O’Reilly co-teach the online course Leading Change and Organizational Renewal.
By utilizing the congruence model, you can achieve a deeper perspective on your business’s inner workings and become a more effective leader. Explore what the congruence model is and how you can implement it in your organization.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is the Congruence Model?
The congruence model is a method of organizing company data to determine the root cause of a business issue. This diagnostic work is frequently called root cause analysis, for which the congruence model serves as the core component. By implementing the congruence model in a root cause analysis, you can gain insight into inefficiencies, better align your internal goals with fellow stakeholders, and enhance problem-solving across complex interdepartmental issues.
Tushman, O’Reilly, and Nadler developed the congruence model to prioritize mapping organizational alignment—and, in the process, identify when and where misalignments occur.
“To do this diagnostic work, it’s helpful to have a conceptual model,” Tushman says in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal. “Charles and I, along with my friend David Nadler, developed the congruence model to help leaders organize their data gathering in service of understanding the systemic root causes of their organization’s performance gaps or their opportunity gaps.”
Performance gaps are ways your organization falls short or fails to deliver based on measurable market results like profits, sales, or stakeholder goals. Opportunity gaps are ways in which current aspects of your company prevent you from pursuing new markets, adopting emerging technology, or generally creating value in an innovative way.
Related: How Gap Analysis Can Drive Strategic Change in Your Organization
The congruence model is meant to provide leaders with exceptional field vision across all aspects of organizational structure.
“Diagnostic work is key,” Tushman says in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal (LCOR). “Instinctually, most leaders go straight to solutions. A core LCOR idea is you must do a thorough diagnosis first, determine the root causes of your gap, and only then can you move to an integrated intervention based on this diagnosis.”
Tushman and O’Reilly refer to this diagnostic approach as “viewing the company from the balcony.” This higher perspective offers a comprehensive and unvarnished view of your business, enabling those in leadership positions to make informed decisions based on data rather than assumptions.
“The leader, with their team, must step back and take a hard diagnostic look at the organization before they then move down on the field and coach their colleagues to take diagnosis-driven, system-wide interventions,” Tushman says in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal.
Core Components of the Congruence Model
In Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, Tushman details the congruence model’s key elements. They include:
- Component tasks: Work processes that support the company’s short- and long-term goals
- Interdependencies: How different work processes affect one another—in other words, any process where key stakeholders need to collaborate to get component tasks done
- Capabilities: Your employees’ knowledge and skills
- Formal organization: The hierarchy of how your workforce is grouped, such as team structures, formal roles, or leadership
- Culture: Your company’s unique social make-up
While each element provides valuable insight into your business’s inner workings, Tushman identifies two elements as the most vital: component tasks and interdependencies.
“As a leader, your diagnosis of the root causes of your gap must start with component tasks and associated interdependencies,” Tushman says in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal. “What are the pieces of work that must get done, how are they different from each other, and to what extent are these pieces of work interdependent with each other? All other elements of the congruence model must then be designed around and aligned to that work.”
Utilizing the Congruence Model
In Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, former CEO of athletic apparel brand Lululemon Christine Day shares how she conducted an organizational analysis upon joining the company in 2008. At that time, sales were in a slump due to a performance gap. Before jumping to conclusions, Day carried out a comprehensive examination of Lululemon’s organizational structure using the congruence model:
- Component tasks: First, Day researched how Lululemon’s stores and corporate offices operated.
- Interdependencies: Next, she noted how those operations depended on different branches of Lululemon’s organization, team members, and the public.
- Capabilities: Day analyzed the skills being fostered across the company.
- Formal organization: She continued analyzing how leadership was conducted across corporate and store locations.
- Culture: As the first CEO after the company’s founders, Day took a deep dive into Lululemon’s ethos—from its loftiest goals to its daily realities.
As Day’s data sets became more robust, she began identifying several misalignments across Lululemon’s organizational structure—many of which overlapped elements, as can often be the case when utilizing the congruence model.
For example, Day noticed a misalignment with Lululemon’s real estate strategy between the stated corporate goals regarding store location and the on-the-ground reality.
“The core customer is that 32-year-old urban customer,” Day says in Leading Change and Organizational Renewal. “What was happening was the desire curve wasn’t matched with the real estate strategy. You had stores in the outer ring of Chicago, for instance, rather than in the inner core where the yoga classes were and where the street scene, and the dressing, and the change actually occurred.”
The established leadership goal was to place Lululemon stores in high-traffic urban areas with nearby yoga studios and gyms. In practice, however, stores were more commonly placed in suburban malls, which were high traffic but farther from the active lifestyles and culture-leading customers Lululemon was trying to connect with. This misalignment existed across two elements within the congruence model: formal organization (the initial leadership directive on real estate) and component tasks (the company procedures around securing store real estate).
Once Day identified the misalignment, she could analyze its root cause and formulate a solution.
Optimizing Your Organizational Vision with the Congruence Model
An effective leader has comprehensive insight into how their business operates. By utilizing the congruence model, you can develop a deeper understanding of the elements that comprise your business—and effectively discern misalignments across it. Your observations further enable you to diagnose your performance or opportunity gaps’ root causes and create an actionable strategy to close them.
The congruence model is a useful framework that provides lasting leadership benefits. If you want to dive deeper into it, consider taking Leading Change and Organizational Renewal to learn about it directly from the renowned faculty who developed it. Through interactive learning exercises and in-depth case studies featuring experienced leaders from top companies worldwide, you can gain the practical knowledge to take your career to the next level.
Do you want to enhance your organization’s performance? Explore Leading Change and Organizational Renewal—one of our online leadership and management courses—and download our e-book on becoming an effective leader.
