Ask most executives whether they have a clear picture of what is happening inside their organizations, and the honest answer, if they give it, is: not really.
They have survey data. They have what people tell them in one-on-ones and town halls. They have the read they get from walking the floor. But they also know that all of those inputs are filtered. People tell leaders what they think leaders want to hear, or what feels safe to say, or what they can articulate without a framework for translating what they actually observe into something coherent.
Dustin Snyder built his methodology around a specific insight: the information needed to fix most organizations already exists inside them. Employees know what is broken. They experience it every day. The gap is not awareness. The gap is translation. Employees lack the framework to articulate what they observe in ways that are objective, cohesive, and actionable for leadership. And the tools most organizations use to gather employee input were not designed to bridge that gap.
Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping, or SWIM, was. The methodology, deployed through his firm Wayforward, cuts past the structural filters that corrupt organizational data before it reaches the people who need it. The output is a diagnostic report that maps the systemic factors generating dysfunction, turnover, failed initiatives, and stalled performance in a specific organization, specific enough to act on rather than interpret.
Snyder knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end. While running a 600-person company through 2020, a year when the business was already on a difficult financial footing before the pandemic hit, he applied an early version of SWIM to himself and his executive team. What he found was not comfortable. A significant portion of the dysfunction he had been trying to manage traced back to conditions leadership was creating or sustaining, not to the workforce. He describes the moment of recognizing how much wisdom existed on the front lines of the organization that he had been failing to tap into as genuinely humbling. It was also the turning point.
Acting on those findings required the kind of intellectual honesty that he now recognizes as the hardest part of the work for most of his clients. The instinct when a diagnosis surfaces uncomfortable findings is to contest them, to look for the methodology flaw, to find the reason the data does not quite apply. Working through that instinct is what separates organizations that change from organizations that commission a report and go back to what they were doing.
Emma Smalley, CEO of Good Neighbors Credit Union, described the experience directly: “I think most other staff surveys are sorta bullshit. But SWIM lets the staff’s true experience shine through.” Her workforce saw the moves leadership made based on what they had trusted SWIM with. That visibility, she noted, created a level of engagement that no previous initiative had produced.
© Dustin Snyder
His book, Sink or SWIM, is for executives who want to understand what the methodology surfaces and how to commission it. A companion volume, Learn to SWIM, is for internal practitioners building the capability themselves. The foreword is by the President of the American Medical Association. Snyder serves on the Harvard Business School Research Advisory Group.
The information to fix your organization is already there. The question is whether you have a methodology that can actually get it to you.
