Dynamic Capabilities Assessment
Dynamic Capabilities Assessment audits how well an organisation senses change, seizes the opportunity and reconfigures itself in response, the three abilities that decide whether an edge lasts or gets copied away.
Follow the audit through five steps: test each capability in turn, then score the evidence and name the weakest link.
Reach for this when…
- Your advantage keeps getting copied within a year and you don't know why it isn't sticking.
- You want to know if the organisation can actually execute the strategy, not just write it.
- Leadership disagrees about whether the business is too slow to change or moving fine.
How to run it
- Assess sensing: how well does the organisation spot shifts before they're obvious?
- Assess seizing: once spotted, how fast can it commit resources and act?
- Assess reconfiguring: can it actually change structure, process or skills, or does it revert?
- Score each against evidence, not opinion: name the last three times each happened.
- Prioritise the weakest of the three; it caps the other two.
A worked example
Situation. Min-ho Kim ran Kim Freight, a regional trucking business in Busan, South Korea, convinced the company was innovative because it kept spotting opportunities early.
Applied. The assessment showed sensing was genuinely strong, but seizing was where things died: good ideas sat in committee for months while smaller rivals moved.
Result. He gave one person budget authority to greenlight small pilots without committee sign-off. The seizing gap closed and two stalled ideas from the year before finally shipped.
The catch
The three capacities sound distinct but overlap in practice, so scoring is often interpretation rather than measurement, and the assessment can flatter organisations that talk about adaptability more than they practise it. It also says nothing about whether the capability, once built, is aimed at anything worth doing.
Sensing without seizing is just a well-informed organisation that still loses to slower-moving rivals.
Origin: David Teece