Welcome to a deep dive into “Harmonious Workplaces” Episode 113, where hosts Rich Cruz and Ben Kleinman explore how organizations can truly sustain their continuous improvement ecosystems. Building on their previous discussions, they emphasize that meaningful feedback and improvement must go far beyond the traditional rollout of a new project.
The Knowledge-to-Performance Tree
To understand how feedback operates within an organization, the hosts utilize their Knowledge-to-Performance Tree model, a framework featured in the December 2025 issue of TD Magazine.
In this powerful metaphor, an organization is visualized as a growing tree:
- The Roots (Foundational Inputs): This substrate captures your vision, purpose, strategic objectives, systems, processes, and corporate culture.
- The Trunk and Branches (Development Drivers & Behavioral Enablers): This includes formal and informal learning, strategic planning, alignment, and goal setting.
- The Fruit (Outcomes): The visual result of performance and output.
However, the most critical element for sustaining this tree’s lifecycle is the “soil” and “fertilizer,” which symbolize your feedback loops. Healthy soil continuously reinserts knowledge and lived experiences back into the foundation to reinvigorate the entire growth cycle.
Capability Building: Beyond the Project Tail
One of the primary goals of continuous improvement is long-term capability building. Change initiatives usually have a defined endpoint where a new organizational structure is finalized or a new technology transitions into standard business operations. Yet, true continuous improvement stretches into a long tail far beyond traditional change management, focusing heavily on enhancing organizational adaptability and resilience.
It is not solely about reducing process defects; it is fundamentally about upskilling employees, granting them agency, and ensuring they feel confident and capable in their evolving roles.
The Non-Negotiable Step: Establishing Baselines
To know if these new capabilities are actually driving business value, leaders must establish strict baselines. Kleinman notes a common and frustrating pitfall where leadership skips baseline measurements mid-initiative, leaving them unable to capture the actual delta or true value of the change by the project’s end.
Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at the foundation is a non-negotiable step. Without a baseline, executives cannot credibly prove that an initiative saved the organization money or increased productivity.
Modern Tools for Capturing Sentiment
How do we accurately capture this crucial feedback? While technical metrics like deployment status or defect rates are binary and straightforward, measuring adoption and workforce sentiment is highly nuanced.
Traditional pulse surveys are often plagued by biases, such as recency bias, where an employee’s survey response might be overly influenced by a bad morning commute or a recent compliment from their boss. Consequently, some change management professionals increasingly view surveys as a waste of time, although they remain a staple in many prominent software tools.
The hosts highlight the revolutionary potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for capturing authentic workplace sentiment. Rather than relying solely on forced surveys, organizations can look at the digital footprints of sentiment left in communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, SharePoint, and Confluence. Using existing meeting transcripts—which employees have generally consented to record for notes—and tools like NotebookLM or Google’s Gemini, companies can parse out language patterns to gauge team sentiment.
Furthermore, AI features built directly into modern productivity software, like Copilot in Excel or Gemini in Google Sheets, allow non-technical leaders to analyze data, find statistical medians, and generate word charts with ease.
Start Small and Be Intentional
Monitoring the entire organization’s digital footprint at once can feel overwhelming or overly invasive. Instead, Cruz and Kleinman recommend starting small by testing these feedback mechanisms within specific business units, functional areas, or regional teams. This localized approach makes the data actionable and helps identify early adopters and change champions.
The ultimate takeaway for leaders is to be intentional: pick one meaningful metric to track over a short span of time to see if it directionally correlates with the value you aim to bring. Start nurturing your organizational soil today, and make change your friend.
For a simple change management framework, click this link for a simple and intentional tool to use for your change initiative.
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