Self-Assessment

The self-assessment questionnaire is provided to help individuals explore how they can adopt the powerful behaviors that support systems thinking. The self-assessment questions are designed to stimulate reflection and thought about how our personal style and philosophies may affect our ability to contribute to the overarching goals of the organization. Do we understand and contribute to strategic goals? Do we know what is happening in other parts of the organization, and why? Do we trace the impact of our day-to-day activities to understand their impact on the mission of our organization and our personal goals? How are we sharing our learning with others in order to make the entire organization stronger?

The questionnaire requires you to reflect honestly on your attitude toward your work and your interactions with others in your organization. Context is also important. You could choose a number of perspectives for the assessment, i.e., your current job, a previous job, or an ideal job. We believe it is most beneficial if you place yourself in the context of your current work and seek to understand both your strengths and potential areas for growth. We also realize that there are real barriers in your work situation that may prevent you from taking part in certain activities or being as proactive as you would like to be in terms of interacting with others in the organization. As you are going through this assessment, you will want to think carefully about those barriers and how it might be possible to break through them.

There are no correct or incorrect answers to the questions posed in the assessment. We want to give you ‘food for thought’—whether your role is that of manager, a member of a team or an individual contributor. Each one of us has the capacity to influence others in our work no matter what our role is at a given time.

We assume that you will want to take some time to think about how you respond to the questions posed in the self-assessment tool. For this reason, we suggest that you download the PDF version, print it out, reflect on your own style of working and interacting with others, and then complete it without feeling the time pressure that you might experience in taking an online survey.

While responses to the self-assessment instrument are anonymous, it will be helpful for benchmarking purposes if you also complete the online version of the survey. After working through the questions in a hard copy format, it should take about five minutes to complete the online version. An objective of the Systems Thinking Perspective Project is to determine if behaviors of information professionals change over time after becoming acquainted with systems thinking philosophies. One way to assess our readiness to embrace systems thinking and then measure behavior changes is to take initial responses to the assessment tool and compare them with responses when the survey is re-launched in six months

We hope that you will use this self-assessment as a personal benchmark to set professional development goals for yourself. We also hope that the questions will help you to establish innovative strategies for outreach and impact on organizational goals.