How do you assess your life?
Suggested Reading
ADP 5-0, The Operations Process
Pages 5-1 through 5-8 based on printed document (PDF pages 75-82)
An overview of assessment in the Operations Process
This week’s Study: Are We Doing the Right Things?
All excerpts below are from ADP 5-0
Guided Discovery
Estimation of the situation is, however, a continuous process, and changed conditions may, at any time, call for a new decision.
FM 100-5, Operations (1941)
Do you structure how you assess things?
Do you include follow-on actions as part of your assessment structure?
Do you make time for assessment?
Do you make enough time for assessment?
5-2. …assessment helps the commander determine progress toward attaining the desired end state, achieving objectives, and performing tasks. Through professional military judgment, assessment helps answer the following questions:
Where are we?
What happened?
Why do we think it happened?
So what?
What are the likely future opportunities and risks?
What do we need to do?
Assessment is as much about what happened as what we need to do next. To answer these questions effectively, make decisions appropriately, and move to follow-on actions quickly requires both structure and time.
Where are you?
What is happening and why?
So what?
What opportunities or risks are presenting themselves?
What do you need to do next?
The military considers assessment to be both critical to the operations process and continuous in nature. So do companies, but assessments (formal and informal) are often one of the highest points of dissatisfaction amongst both leaders and employees.
Finding the time and mental/emotional space to truly assess your life can be even more challenging: it demands focus and vulnerability.
How should leaders structure assessment to improve decision-making and results and how should they make appropriate time?
4-1. Assessment is a continuous activity of the operations process that supports decision making by ascertaining progress of the operation for the purpose of developing and refining plans and for making operations more effective. Assessment results enhance the commander’s decision making and help the commander and the staff to keep pace with constantly changing situations.
Planning, preparation, and execution are, at their core, a series of decisions a leader needs to make. Assessment is the method by which leaders make better decisions.
One word appears with more frequency then all others in the US Army’s visualization of the operations process: assess.
5-3. Assessment precedes and guides the other activities of the operations process. During planning, assessment focuses on understanding an OE (operations environment) and building an assessment plan. During preparation, the focus of assessment switches to discerning changes in the situation and the force’s readiness to execute operations. During execution, assessment involves deliberately comparing forecasted outcomes to actual events while using indicators to judge operational progress towards success. Assessment during execution helps commanders determine whether changes in the operation are necessary to take advantage of opportunities or to counter unexpected threats.
Most organizations are challenged to adequately conduct annual assessments for performance management. Doing structured assessment on a continuous basis, including plans for how to do assessments, is orders of magnitude more challenging.
Not because it is impossible to do, but it requires two things that organizations (and individual humans) struggle with: sticking to structure and allocating time to tasks they do not enjoy.
Are structure and time allocations the biggest challenge to your organization’s (or your individual) ability to assess operations? If not, what other challenges exist?
But as a leader, you must create structure and invest the time for assessment if you want to make better decisions and take actions that allow you to arrive at desired outcomes. It requires your best effort.
5-7. Identifying what and how to assess requires significant effort from the commander and staff.
The three activities defined for assessment, Monitor, Evaluate and Recommend or Direct can seem trite, but in your life, you will probably notice that most assessment activities end at somewhere between monitor and evaluate.
5-9. Monitoring is continuous observation of those conditions relevant to the current operation. Monitoring allows staffs to collect relevant information, specifically that information about the current situation described in the commander’s intent and concept of operations. Commanders cannot judge progress nor make effective decisions without an accurate understanding of the current situation.
5-13. Evaluating is using indicators to judge progress toward desired conditions and determining why the current degree of progress exists. Evaluation is at the heart of the assessment process where most of the analysis occurs. Evaluation helps commanders determine what is working and what is not working, and it helps them gain insights into how to better accomplish the mission.
Is this where you typically see assessment processes end?
How do you help push past evaluation to recommendations?
What are the challenges?
5-20. Monitoring and evaluating are critical activities; however, assessment is incomplete without recommending or directing action. Assessment may reveal problems, but unless it results in recommended adjustments, its use to the commander is limited. Ideally, recommendations highlight ways to improve the effectiveness of operations and plans by informing all decisions.
The US Army also suggests injecting your assessment capabilities with outside-in perspective.
5-11. Staffs also identify information sources outside military channels and monitor their reports. These other channels might include products from civilian, host-nation, and other government agencies.
5-18. Commanders consult subject matter experts, both internal and external to the staff, on whether their staffs have correctly identified the underlying causes for specific changes in the situation. These experts challenge key facts and assumptions identified in the planning process to determine if the facts and assumptions are still relevant or valid.
When do you source outside data and perspective?
Does it receive equal weight in your analysis or is it discounted?
When should you seek external experts and what issues do they present?
Knowing what you are trying to achieve with assessment does not result in quality, recommendation and action oriented results. Development and execution of effectively structured assessment is what creates the result.
When most people proclaim they are ‘good at assessing situations/operations’ what they mean is that they are confident in their ability to evaluate things. Assessment is a process, evaluation is only a step within the process. Do not confuse the two.
5-23. There is no single way to conduct assessment. Every situation has its own distinctive challenges, making every assessment unique. The following steps can help guide the development of an effective assessment plan and assessment activities during preparation and execution:
Step 1 – Develop the assessment approach (planning).
Step 2 – Develop the assessment plan (planning).
Step 3 – Collect information and intelligence (preparation and execution).
Step 4 – Analyze information and intelligence (preparation and execution).
Step 5 – Communicate feedback and recommendations (preparation and execution).
Step 6 – Adapt plans or operations (planning and execution).
Being good at evaluation is not being good at assessment. Being good at assessment means starting with an approach and plan for assessment. Developed during the planning stage. Not developed right before operations start or after operations have concluded, but during the planning stage.
Being good at assessment means creating an assessment approach and plan that is specifically complimentary to and designed to run in parallel with preparation and execution.
This is the structure that is required to be successful.
How do you structure assessment - at work, in life?
What will you do differently in structuring your next assessment?
Better structure allows you gather better information. Specifically, there are two questions to answer about data collection, and many people only focus on the first.
What information do we need?
Who is best postured to provide that information?
The who is as important as the what. And the who might be lower in the organization than you think.
Better structure allows you to ask better questions, develop better recommendations, and take better actions. It also creates a system in which you can be more thorough. How often is assessment incomplete because there is not a comprehensive review of everything that can be learned and recommended?
Look at the list developed by the US Army of potential recommendation topics. Do you explore all of these:
5-29.
Update, change, add, or remove critical assumptions.
Transition between phases.
Execute branches or sequels.
Change resource allocation.
Adjust objectives or end state conditions.
Change or add tasks to subordinate units.
Adjust priorities.
Change priorities of effort.
Change command relationships.
Change task organizations.
Adjust decision points.
Refine or adapt the assessment plan.
Do you know what types of recommendations you’d like to make before assessing something
Or do you just know what recommendations you want to make before assessing something?
Good structure still requires the second ingredient of good assessment: time.
5-32. Throughout the conduct of operations, commanders integrate their own assessments with those of the staff, subordinate commanders, and other unified action partners in the AO. The following guides aid in effective assessment:
Commander involvement.
Integration.
Incorporation of the logic of the plan.
Caution when establishing cause and effect.
There it is again. The personal involvement of leaders in assessment.
Do you allocate the appropriate time to assessment?
How do team members interpret a leader’s failure to invest time in assessment?
How do you assess your life?
Questions for Individual Reflection
Is speed in assessment a competitive advantage or a strategic vulnerability?
How often do your teams confuse outputs with outcomes—and why does that persist despite experience?
What happens to trust when leaders demand action before evaluating impact?
When is “not deciding” the most strategic decision you can make?
Do leaders have a responsibility to assess the unintended consequences of their directives, or is that someone else's job?
Professional Discussion Prompts
How does your company distinguish between performance indicators and decision-making indicators?
What structures do you use to evaluate if the right people are interpreting the right data at the right time?
What barriers prevent senior leaders from making recommendations that reveal uncomfortable truths?
In your experience, where has real-time assessment provided an advantage—or caused confusion?
How do you decide what not to measure in your business?
Personal Discussion Prompts
What personal signals do you use to know when to reassess your priorities?
What are the unintended consequences of always being in 'assessment mode' at home?
How do you evaluate your own growth—and is your method still valid today?
When has feedback from a loved one forced you to re-evaluate your assumptions or behaviors?
Exercises
Reframing Metrics
Exercise:
Each team selects a key business KPI from their experience.
They redesign it to focus more on learning and decision-making than performance reporting.
Debrief:
What insights did your reframe enable?
Who in your organization might resist this new approach—and why?
What would success look like one year after this shift?
Future of Assessment
Exercise:
Teams design a next-gen assessment model using AI, real-time dashboards, and predictive analytics for a global initiative.
Must address: What still requires human judgment?
Debrief:
What surprised you about your reliance on human judgment?
Where should machines never replace leaders?
What skills will future executives need to interpret assessments?
Feel free to borrow this with pride and use with your teams, professionally or personally. If you do, please let me know how it went and tips for improvement: matt @ borrowingwithpride.com