The ECI Baseline

A full diagnostic of your company's execution coherence: where you stand today, and the clearest route to move faster without losing what you build.

What it is

The Coherence Challenge asks whether you can answer ten questions about your own company. You can then take it to the room: put the same questions to your own team in twenty minutes with the one-page version, or to your board with us in ninety. The Baseline is where the answers come from.

It’s a measurement rather than a screen. It scores your company across the four ECI dimensions, names the dimension holding the others back, and shows what that’s costing you. It measures how much more your company could take on before more starts producing less, and maps the route to raise that ceiling.

Most companies already sense that something is slower than it should be. What they usually can’t say is where the loss sits, how big it is, or which of the four things to fix first. That’s what the Baseline settles.

And if you could answer most of those ten questions and didn’t much like the answers, the Baseline does something different for you. It sizes them, puts them in order, and turns them into something a board can act on rather than debate.

What you get

A scored picture. All four dimensions, scored and banded, at company level and for each leadership team taking part.

The dimension holding the others back. One, with the evidence for that reading, and the others in sequence behind it. Not four problems to work on at once.

What it’s costing. Your constraint mapped through to where it shows up financially: delayed revenue, margin lost to rework, capital deployed without compounding, timing risk on commitments you’ve already made.

A route forward. What to do in the next ninety days, in what order, and what should change as a result.

A board-ready read. Six pages, three decisions, named owners and dates. Written to be tabled, not summarised.

How it runs

About four weeks for a single leadership team. About fifteen weeks across a large multi-division group.

Design. We agree scope, who takes part, what happens to the results, and how the findings can be used. Settled in writing before anything is measured.

Evidence. We draw on what your company already produces in the course of running itself: decision records, approval trails, plan against actual, portfolio and delivery data. The measurement starts from evidence, not from opinion.

Scored sessions. Each leadership team scores its own execution in a facilitated ninety-minute session. Individually first, in silence, then discussed. Where the room disagrees with itself, that disagreement is often the most useful finding of the day.

Readout. The picture, the constraint, what it’s costing, and the decision in front of you.

The executive team goes first. Not as a warm-up and not as symbolism: nobody two layers down scores honestly about how decisions travel upward if the people they travel to haven’t been through it themselves.

What it asks of your people

About twenty person-hours per leadership team, once. One ninety-minute session for eight people, half an hour of preparation each, and our own preparation and write-up on top.

We publish that figure because you’d work it out anyway, and because the number matters. An instrument that measures whether a company is carrying too much can’t itself be another thing to carry.

Why the numbers hold up

Anyone can produce a score. The question worth asking a supplier is what stops that score being an average of opinions collected on a good day.

Evidence before opinion. Where your systems already hold the answer, we take it from there. Self-report is the fallback, not the default.

Every measure shows where it came from. For each part of the score you can see whether it came from your records, from a proxy measure, or from the room. Nothing is presented as harder than it is.

Facilitators are calibrated against each other. Before anyone runs a scored session they score the same material as the rest of the pool, and have to land within a defined range of it. Comparable numbers across many teams come from consistent facilitation, and there’s no way to add that afterwards.

No league tables. Ever. Teams are never ranked against each other, and we’ll decline the request when it comes. Ranked scores stop being a measurement within one cycle, because everyone learns what a good answer looks like.

Small groups aren’t published. Below an agreed floor, results are folded upward. No score is ever reported in a way that identifies an individual.

What happens to the results

The Challenge asks nothing of you and collects nothing. The same principle holds at company scale: you own the findings, and we agree at the start who sees what, at what level, and whether the scores can inform anything beyond the programme itself.

That’s settled in writing before the first session rather than discovered later, because everything the instrument produces depends on people answering honestly.

When the Baseline isn’t the right thing

It measures how well a company turns decisions into delivered results. It doesn’t tell you whether those were the right decisions.

If your strategy is unresolved, fix that first. A coherent company executing the wrong plan just arrives at the wrong place sooner, and we’d rather say so at the outset than three months in.

And if you already know exactly where your constraint sits and have the mandate to act on it, you may not need the measurement at all. Go and act.

Where it leads

The Baseline names the dimension holding the others back. The 90-Day Coherence Build moves it, and the same measures are re-taken at day ninety so you can see whether it worked. After that it becomes a quarterly read, which is how you keep the speed you’ve generated rather than losing it again.

Some clients take the Baseline and run the Build themselves. That’s a legitimate outcome, and the diagnostic is written to support it.

Variants

The standard Baseline. A leadership team, a division, or a whole group.

ECI-SME. The same instrument, compressed, for smaller businesses where a staged rollout would cost more than it returns.

ECI-IV and ECI-IVD. Integration and pre-deal versions, built for acquirers and investment committees. They have their own page.

Investment

Scoped to the size of the company and the number of leadership teams taking part. The first conversation is where we work out whether the Baseline is right for you, and it costs nothing.

Common questions

Is this the ten questions from the Challenge?

No. Those are a screen, designed to be answered in a few minutes from what a board already knows. The Baseline measures twelve underlying signals across the four dimensions, most of it drawn from records rather than from asking.

Is it an engagement survey?

No. Engagement surveys ask people how they feel about working here. The Baseline measures how well the company turns decisions into delivered results.

Will it tell us things we don’t already know?

Some of it, no. Leaders usually recognise the findings. What they haven’t had before is the size of each one, the order to address them in, and something a board can act on rather than debate. The Baseline is more often a settling of arguments than a revelation.

What if our data is poor?

The instrument works either way, and it says which parts rested on evidence and which on judgement. A company that can’t say how often its own decisions get reversed has already told us something useful.

Do we have to do the Build afterwards?

No. The Baseline is a complete piece of work with its own deliverables.

Who created it?

Alice Phillips and Rob Anderson, authors of The Stillness Dividend. The ECI also appears in the SSRN working paper Protecting Organisational Judgement Under AI Acceleration.