An assessment as the foundation
for organizational development.

Why an assessment comes first

Most organizational-development projects start too early with the solution. A new tool gets introduced, a strategy review gets kicked off, or a culture workshop gets booked, without anyone first describing together what they’re actually working on. A clean assessment prevents exactly that — it sorts visible and invisible topics, makes silent assumptions negotiable, and creates a shared language in which further steps can begin to make sense.

The full version — externally facilitated, with interviews

I run a complete assessment as an external consultant — with eight to fifteen confidential one-on-one interviews across your organization, an analysis across multiple perspectives, and a written synthesis that names tensions, blind spots, and levers clearly. The value of this version lies in what only becomes visible in confidential conversations:

• Voices that otherwise don’t get heard. Staff at the operational level, former staff, external stakeholders.
• Contradictory perceptions. Most organizational problems only surface once you let three people describe the same situation from three perspectives.
• Political complexity. Conflict areas where internal self-diagnosis would be structurally impossible.
• External friction. An outside perspective that can say, with goodwill, what no one inside can say anymore.

The effort typically runs four to eight weeks with a corresponding fee — and for many questions, exactly that depth is the right choice.

The mini version — digital, AI-supported, available right away

But there are also situations where a first, structured look is enough to start working meaningfully: at the beginning of a strategy process, before a board meeting, in preparation for a consulting engagement, or simply to see more clearly internally. For exactly that, I offer a free, digital mini-assessment here — AI-supported, privacy-conscious, and designed so that you walk away with concrete insights immediately afterwards.

From my consulting practice I’ve picked a few particularly helpful and revealing models, to show you in broad strokes how organizational development looks at your work. So it’s not a generic block of questions, but a deliberately curated set of perspectives — the same lenses I use in deeper engagements.

How it works

• Structured self-assessment, about 30 to 45 minutes of time needed.
• Several dimensions: mission & strategy, structure & decision pathways, culture & collaboration, funding & resilience, digitization & impact.
• AI-supported analysis of the answers into a coherent picture — with hypotheses about where your next sensible levers sit.
• Immediate feedback, no waiting room, no preceding sales conversations.

What the mini version doesn’t replace

It’s important to be honest: a 30-minute self-report from a single person can never replace what becomes visible in interviews with fifteen voices. The mini version shows where it’s worth looking more closely — not how deep each topic actually goes. It works best as a first pass, not as a final diagnosis.

Privacy and AI compliance

Because the mini version works with your organizational reality, how your answers are handled is one of the most important design decisions. Concretely that means:

• GDPR-compliant. Processing in the EU, clear purpose limitation, transparent retention periods, no sharing with third parties outside the contracted processors used.
• EU AI Act-compliant. The AI models used are transparently disclosed, the use case is classified under the EU AI Act as an aid to human decision-making — not as automated assessment of people or organizations.
• No training use. Your answers are not used to train AI models — neither by me nor by the model provider used.
• Human accountability for the final word. The AI structures and prioritizes — what you make of that is your decision. On request, I’ll look over the results with you.
• Confidentiality. Content is not published and not transferred into other consulting contexts.

What you walk away with

• A structured picture of your organization’s strengths and bottlenecks from your perspective.
• Three to five concrete hypotheses about where the next sensible levers sit.
• Suggestions on where a deeper assessment would be worth it — and where it wouldn’t.
• Language and concepts you can use to keep discussing the topic internally.

Who the mini version is suited for

• For boards and executive teams facing a strategy or structural decision.
• For OD leads who need a first structured pass before requesting resources internally.
• For founding teams who haven’t yet had their organization mirrored from the outside.
• For anyone wanting to know whether deeper consulting is even the right instrument.

Free — and why I’ll reach out twice afterwards

You can use the tool free of charge. My aim is for it to genuinely help you and be worth your time — and to check that, I’d like to be allowed to contact you twice by email afterwards.

It’s purely about exchange: what was helpful, what was missing, what I should do differently? I won’t try to sell you anything.

What’s coming next: the NGO Monitor

Our work revolves around organizations that want to grow their impact. Our medium-term goal is to share aggregated insights from the assessments with you and define concrete interventions — in a regular NGO Monitor.

If you want to receive the first NGO Monitor or follow news around its development: subscribe to the newsletter. It definitely won’t come so often that it gets annoying.