What we do
Self Assessment

All of the diagrams below have been taken from Learning to Fly with permission of the authors Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell.

You can download a PowerPoint Presentation containing the images from the Download Page.

River Diagram

The River Diagram is a way to look at the results of Self Assessments carried out a range of communities. In addition, it allows you to see where a particular community sits within the group. The key to being able to do this is that the Self Assessments have been carries out against a common set of Practises to a common set of measures (the Self Assessment Framework).

Step 1

The results from the Mae Chan Community Self Assessment are plotted on the diagram. The community will have scored itself between Level 1 and Level 5 for each practise.

The Mae Chan results are shown by the green line. So Mae Chan scored itself at Level 2 on the first practise (Acknowledgement) and at Level 3 on the next practise (Care and Change) and so on for all of the practises

The second diagram shows the Self Assessments from all of the other communities, including Mae Chan.

The third diagram shows the range of levels for all of the communities.

So for the first practise (Acknowledgement),the highest score of Level 4 came from the Light Blue Community and the lowest score of Level 2 came from the Green Community (Mae Chan). So the range of scores for Acknowledgement goes from a low of 2 to a high of 4. This is shown in the blue vertical line with arrows.

The Mae Chan score is still shown in the green line.

The blue vertical lines showing the range of scores across the communities is now filled in as the blue 'river'. The maximum scores make up upper bank of the river and the minimum scores make up the lower bank of the river.

Mae Chan's scores are now sitting in the river. Sometimes its scores sit on the lower bank, sometimes on the upper bank and sometimes in the middle of the river.

The banks of the river are now shown in dark green.

So the scores of all of the communities sit within the Blue River. No community has assessed itself so highly as to fall within the upper green bank. And no community has assessed at such a low level that it falls within the lower green bank.

And now in the final step, Mae Chan sets target levels for where it wants to go. For the first practise (Acknowledgement), it wants to improve to Level 3 and this is shown in red.

For the seventh practise (Adapting), it wants to move from Level 3 to Level 4 and for the final practise (Mobilising Resources) it has decided that it want to leap out of the river and go from Level 0 to Level 4.