Alignment calculator
Ranking Concordance
Everyone in the room said yes. Do they actually hold the same order of priorities?
How much of one ranking the team really shares, and the single item the disagreement is about.
All readiness calculatorsThe math
Here is the equation, so you can argue with it.
W = 12S / (m²(k³ − k) − mΣT)
Add up the ranks each item received, measure how far those totals sit from the total an item would get if nobody agreed on anything, and scale that against the largest spread the list could possibly produce. One means the participants wrote identical orders.
- m
- Participants, each ranking the same list
- k
- Items in the list
- S
- Squared distance of each item’s rank total from the average rank total
- ΣT
- The tie correction, so a participant who ties two items is not penalized
- W
- Concordance, zero to one
Where the numbers come from
- The list of priorities the team is currently working to, between three and ten items.
- One independent ranking per participant, written down before anybody hears anybody else’s.
- Ties are allowed. A participant who genuinely cannot separate two items should give them the same number.
Your numbers
What this needs from you
Everything stays in this browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and reloading the page clears it.
Each participant’s ranking of the same priorities
One row per priority, one column per participant. Lower is higher priority, so 1 is first.
| priority | Participant 1 | Participant 2 | Participant 3 | Participant 4 | Remove |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The answer
How much of one ranking the team really shares, and the single item the disagreement is about.
These calculate and they do not diagnose. Every field asks for a figure your organization already keeps, from a calendar, a queue, a ledger, or a ranking your team wrote down, and what comes back is arithmetic on what you entered. Nothing here asks you to rate a condition from one to five, nothing here produces a score, and no answer on these pages is a reading of your organization. Where you want a measurement rather than a calculation, the diagnostics do that and they publish what they cannot tell you as well. An answer here is exactly as good as the figure you put in, which is why every calculator names where its inputs come from before it asks for them.
Kendall’s W
0.36
weak agreement
- Participants
- 4
- each ranking the same list
- Items ranked
- 5
- Consensus first
- Margin recovery
- mean rank 2
- Widest disagreement
- AI enablement
- ranks 1 to 5
What the number says
4 participants ranked the same 5 priorities. Their concordance is 0.36 on a scale where one is an identical order and zero is no more agreement than chance would produce. That is weak.
The consensus top priority is Margin recovery, with a mean rank of 2. The item they agree on most is Leadership bench.
AI enablement is where the rankings diverge furthest. Somebody put it at 1 and somebody put it at 5.
What to do about it
- There is no shared order here to plan against, so a plan built on this list will be executed four different ways by four people who all agreed to it. Put the ranking on a screen in front of the room before writing anything else.
- AI enablement was ranked first by one participant and last by another. Start the conversation there rather than at the top of the list, because that is the item where two people are already working on incompatible plans.
- Rank again after the next planning cycle with the same 5 items. A concordance that moves tells you the conversation worked, and one that does not tells you the disagreement is structural rather than informational.
Before you act on this
What this can and cannot tell you
Read this before acting on anything above. It is here to make the result more useful, not to hedge it.
1 of 4
A reading is one vantage point, not the organization
Every score here comes from what people could observe and were willing to report, from where they sit. A senior view stops where the information stops reaching it, and a team view is bounded by what the team has been told. That is a real signal about the organization, and it is not the same thing as ground truth. Treat a result as a claim to check against records, calendars, and the people closest to the work, not as a finding that has already been checked.
2 of 4
A recommendation is a hypothesis, not an instruction
What this produces is the most defensible next question given the pattern in the answers. It has no access to your funding cycle, your contracts, your regulator, your technology estate, or the person who is about to resign, and any one of those can be the real constraint while the instrument points somewhere else. The recommendation is worth acting on when your own judgment, and the evidence you can gather, agree with it. It is worth arguing with when they do not, and the disagreement is more useful than the score.
3 of 4
Outcomes are decided in execution, by people and by systems
Reading a diagnostic changes nothing. What changes an organization is a specific person with authority making a specific decision, and then the follow-through surviving contact with the work: competing priorities, staffing, incentives, contracts, data quality, system limits, vendors, and everything else outside these questions. Two organizations with identical results can end a year in opposite places, and the difference is what they did and what happened to them, not what they scored.
4 of 4
Conditions move, so a result has a shelf life
These readings describe a moment. A reorganization, a departure, a new system, or a change in demand can move a condition faster than any plan built on the old reading. Measure again rather than assuming a result still holds, and treat a number that has not moved as a question about whether anything actually changed.
What this one cannot do
Every calculator fails differently, so each says how.
This measures the rankings in front of it, not the organization behind them. It cannot tell whether the list contains the right items, whether a participant ranked honestly or ranked to agree with the room, or whether an order held in a workshop survives contact with a budget. A high concordance produced after everyone heard the chief executive speak first is a measure of the room rather than of the team.
Reading path
The argument this equation came out of, in order.
A number changes a decision only when somebody already believes the thing it measures matters. These are the pieces that make that case, shortest first.
Step 1 of 3
Alignment Is Not AgreementEveryone in the room said yes. That is not alignment. Agreement is what happens in the meeting. Alignment is what governs behavior after everyone leaves.
Step 2 of 3
The Divergence MapWhen a leadership team answers a diagnostic independently, the shape of their disagreement appears. The gap is the diagnosis.
Step 3 of 3
Alignment DebtThe accumulated cost of decisions made without shared understanding. It compounds silently and pays out in failed execution.
Where the math comes from
- Kendall, M. G., & Babington Smith, B. (1939). The problem of m rankings. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 10(3), 275-287. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177732186
- Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. doi:10.2307/2666999
Keep going
The other calculators, and the instruments that do measure.
Attention
Attention Concentration
We say we have eleven priorities. How many is the calendar actually running?
Authority
Decision Latency
How long does a decision actually wait before the person who owns it makes it?
Adaptability
Signal Response Lag
The world moved in March. When did the plan move?
Across the four
Time Saving Realization
The pilot saved two hours a week per person. What is that worth?
Where you want your organization measured rather than your own figures calculated, the diagnostics do that. See what each one answers, including what it cannot tell you.