We measure finances, customers, processes and productivity.

Why do we leave relationships to chance?

Every organization exists to achieve something.

For a company, that may mean profitability and growth.
For the public sector, it is about providing good public services within the limits of available resources. But the principle is the same: we want to know whether the organization is succeeding at what it exists to do.

That’s why we don’t settle for measuring the final outcome.

We measure things further up the chain. Quality, productivity, delivery times, customer or user experience, costs and a range of other factors. We try to understand what actually creates the result.

This is where I think it gets interesting. Imagine the following.

Group A launches five new services per 1,000 working hours.
Group B launches ten in 800.

Now we know that Group B performs better.

But do we know why?

Are their processes better? Do they have greater expertise? Different leadership? Better incentives?

Or do the relationships between people work differently?

Who dares to challenge a bad idea? Who asks for help when something goes wrong? How easy is it to build on someone else’s idea? Does knowledge flow through the whole group, or does it get stuck with a few people?

The productivity metric tells us what the group achieved. It tells us very little about how the people managed to achieve it together.

And yet we know that the quality of relationships affects collaboration, psychological safety and group dynamics.

So why are relationships still something we mostly just hope will work?

For me, this is an important part of Organizational Relationship Intelligence: not creating yet another KPI, but making relationships something we can systematically strengthen, understand and follow up on.