Q-methodology is a way of capturing and quantifying people’s subjective experiences. They are asked to rank ~60 subjective statements from most disagree to most agree. We can review average results or cluster the results to see what underlying groups of people are there within your organisation.

This method helps capture the most salient thoughts that people have in relation to an event or organisation or process. It involves asking people to draw or write out their thoughts about a given topic, then interviewing them about what they’ve written and codifying the themes that are raised in those interviews.

This is a method to elicit the “big things” people think will matter to the eventual success or failure of a project. It involves asking people to think of a hypothetical where a project or initiative has gone wrong, and to diagnose what might have caused this to happen.

This method identifies how different people go about the same process. It involves asking people what steps they take to achieve a goal and comparing the results with best practice or correlating the types of output with the historical performance of the individual.

Most business outcomes rely on connections between people. This method identifies those connections and how strong those connections are. It allows us to target interventions on the “socially referrent” people within the network, which can result in behaviours spreading through that network. This can be especially useful when interventions are expensive and time consuming.

A set of approaches to observing or recording people’s behaviour, and then codifying that behaviour. This can help provide insight into how those people approach specific situations. A good example of this is coding how a specific meeting goes, who is talking at a given point, what are they saying, and how are they communicating.

RCTs are the gold standard for identifying the causal impact of an intervention. They involve assigning people to groups, which only differ in the type of intervention used (or lack thereof). After a period of time, we measure the difference between the groups which can only be the result of the interventions. This approach is best suited for larger organisations.

Often RCTs are not possible, due to constraints in organisation size or due to other practical limitations. In these settings we can replicate elements of the RCT process to get an approximation of the causal impact of an intervention. There is also significant value in framing these interventions as “experiments” or “pilots” because it reinforce the importance of learning and measurement.

The best way of measuring the impact of an intervention or set of interventions on specific outcome, is to measure that outcome itself. However, this is often more complex than it sounds, and may involve multiple measurement approaches, and a mix of internal and external measurements.

This method is about setting objectively ways of measuring progress while you’re in the process of delivering change. Setting “success criteria” and “kill criteria” can help overcome biases and avoid wasted time on projects that aren’t delivering. You can read more about this in my previous post about “when to commit, grit or quit”.

The use of regular pulse-check surveys can allow you to track how you are doing on a much broader set of measures. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative questions can help provide the most accurate and informative data collection over time.

Accurately measuring how people feel can be challenging, especially when you are trying to understand whether an intervention was effective. Using sentiment analysis can help to more accurately categorise positive and negative free-text responses.