By Vilner Rasmussen
Most organisations believe they can see themselves clearly. Ask a leadership team how a given capability — master data, onboarding, procurement, whatever it is — is doing, and you’ll get an answer. Usually a confident one. Usually wrong, or at least unverified.
That’s not a criticism. It’s what happens when “seeing” a capability means asking the person closest to it how they feel about it, rather than checking it against anything. Impressions drift. The person closest to it changes jobs. What felt fine eighteen months ago may not be fine now, and nobody would necessarily know.
SEE IT, the first step of the Capability Method, means something narrower and more useful than “pay attention to it.” It means scoring the capability’s records against a fixed Readiness Score — the same structure every time within a domain: named dimensions, a handful of critical controls that cap the score, a number from 0 to 100 read off the record itself — so the answer doesn’t depend on who you ask or when you ask them. It means writing down what you find, so it can be checked again later against the same baseline, not a new impression.
This matters more than it sounds like it should, for one simple reason: you cannot steer or keep something you haven’t actually seen. Every STEER IT pilot we run and every KEEP IT structure we put in place starts from a heatmap score, not a hunch. When a client asks whether a capability has improved, we can show them, against a number we wrote down before we touched anything.
The uncomfortable part of SEE IT is that it sometimes tells you something you didn’t want to know — that a capability everyone assumed was fine is, on paper, thin. That’s the point. A capability that’s actually seen can be fixed. A capability that’s only ever been assumed about generally isn’t.
If you want to know what SEE IT looks like in practice — the actual tool, not just the idea — Inside the Method walks through the Capability Heatmap in full.
Related: SEE IT · Business Case · Inside the Method · Digital Transformation · Home
