Since the Stall Points site went live about two months ago, we have handled a tremendous amount of traffic. The majority of site visitors came to us after reading our article “When Growth Stalls” in the March issue of Harvard Business Review, in which we invite readers to take our Red Flags diagnostic self-test. As we explain in the article, after we completed our case studies of Fortune 100 company growth stalls, we assembled the team and asked the somewhat unfair question: “What warning signs could (should?) management teams have seen in the external markets or inside their organizations that would have alerted them to an impending stall?” We eventually boiled this down to a set of 50 questions covering finance, strategy, marketing, innovation, human resources and governance issues. It’s a really good, really provocative list.

We’ve placed the diagnostic on our site in a confidential, easy-to-use format, and we encourage management teams to take the test and then to compare results to identify three patterns of response:

• Where do we agree that we are in trouble? This is a good coverage check to make sure that central issues are being covered adequately.
• Conversely, where do we all agree we are in the clear? Odds are that these areas are indeed OK, but it’s always wise to do a backtest for groupthink.
• Most interestingly, where are areas where we disagree? This is the richest area for discussion, because our case files reveal that stalls were typically not a surprise to the entire organization. Most often, some one or two individuals were aware of the danger, but were not able to mobilize action. Remember the largest lesson of our research: It is the assumptions underneath your strategy that you’ve believed the longest, or the most deeply, that are likely to bring you down, because it is no longer career-advancing to question them. That’s the phenomenon we’re describing here.

Just to tease you even further to take the test, the following are the top three current concerns of executives who have taken the diagnostic so far:

Top Three Red Flags of Current Concern to Executives

1. Key customers are increasingly unwilling to pay a premium for brand reputation or superior performance.
2. Our future success is highly dependent on the continued productivity and contribution of a core group of specialized hard-to-replace employees.
3. Time and resources meant to be allocated to long-term strategy and top-line growth drivers are routinely diverted to annual planning and near-term earnings concerns.
   

Each of these issues has been behind one or more company stalls. If any of them is a current concern for you or your organization, that’s probably a pretty good indicator that you should investigate your stall risk a little more deeply.