Instrument research
What a research contribution is, and how to take it back.
The Executive Organizational Diagnostic has not been validated against outcomes. We publish that rather than bury it, and validating it needs responses from real organizations. This page is the whole agreement: what a contribution contains, what it never contains, how long it is kept, and the mechanism that withdraws it.
Who is asked, and when
Only participants in a team diagnostic are asked, and only after they have submitted their answers and been shown their own reading. A contribution can therefore never gate, delay or change the thing you came for, and declining costs you nothing.
The free instruments you can run on your own, including the short organizational readiness form, the individual diagnostic, the Builder Orientation Profile and the leadership self-check, are never asked. Those pages say your answers are never sent to us, and that promise is worth more than the sample would be. They run entirely in your browser and this programme does not reach them.
What is contributed
- Your answer to each question
- A number on the response scale, including where you recorded insufficient evidence.
- The instrument and its exact item set
- An identifier and a content fingerprint, so responses to two different versions are never pooled.
- Organization context, as broad bands
- Sector, size and transformation stage, from the list your organizer chose.
- Function and level, where recorded
- From a fixed list, never a free-text job title.
- How long the diagnostic took
- Elapsed minutes, not the time of day you answered.
- An opaque organization key
- A one-way key derived from the organization name, so responses from one organization can be grouped without the name being stored.
What is never contributed
- Your name, email or job title
- None of the three reaches the research store, and the function that writes a record cannot see them.
- Your organization by name
- Only the opaque key above.
- Your team, your link, or your stored response
- The research record carries no team identifier and no response identifier.
- When you answered
- A timestamp could be matched against the roster, so only the month of contribution is kept.
- Anything joining this to you
- By design there is no path from a research record back to a person, including for us.
What it is used for
One thing: testing whether this instrument measures what it claims to. The analyses were written down before any response existed, each with the minimum sample it needs and the result that would count against the instrument, and they are published in the technical note and validation status pages. Fixing them in advance is what stops an analysis chosen after seeing the data being reported as a test of the instrument.
A contribution is never sold, never published as your organization's result, never used to market to you, and never shown to your facilitator, your organizer or your colleagues. Nothing about it can be shown to them, because nothing connects it to you.
How long it is kept
Up to 5 years from the date of contribution, then deleted automatically. Five rather than indefinitely, because a corpus with no stated end is a corpus nobody deletes, and the number covers the whole planned sequence including outcome measures gathered a year after an engagement.
This is separate from the ninety-day retention on team diagnostic data, which is unchanged. Your operational response is still deleted at ninety days, still unlinked from you, and still not retrievable by anyone including your facilitator.
Access, correction and deletion
A de-identified record has an unusual consequence worth stating plainly: we cannot show you your own contribution, and we cannot correct it, because we cannot find it. There is no identity attached and no lookup by person. What the code buys is deletion, which is the one right the design can actually honour.
If you would rather not rely on a code, do not contribute. The result you came for is identical either way.
Withdraw a contribution
Enter the code you were shown when you contributed. Withdrawal is immediate and permanent. An analysis already published states the sample it was computed on, which cannot be changed after the fact; every analysis from that point forward excludes your record.
Questions
The privacy policy describes this programme alongside everything else the site collects, and the trust page covers the measurement rules the product follows. Ask us anything about it before you decide.