The Capacity Diagnostic
OHA's Capacity Diagnostic is an organizational health assessment that reads what the work costs the people doing it, across the Five Loads. In three to four weeks it gives HR and executive leaders a baseline, the load that dominates and a recommendation ready for the budget.
It measures capacity and load, not sentiment. The diagnostic separates load into five types, decisional, cognitive, emotional, relational and administrative, because each one calls for a different response. A team can look fine on volume while a single load is at breaking point.
OHA reads the organization at three levels: the individual manager, the team, and the structures that make either sustainable or impossible. The most useful findings usually sit between the levels. The diagnostic can run with managers, with frontline employees, or with both.
The volume, consequence and reversibility of the decisions a manager owns. Decisional load rises when decisions are frequent, consequential and made without a clear escalation path.
The demand placed on attention and working memory by interruption, context-switching and unstructured information. Cognitive load is what makes a capable manager feel slow.
The pressure of absorbing other people's uncertainty, conflict and distress on behalf of a team, heaviest during restructuring, layoffs and transformation.
The number and complexity of relationships a manager must actively maintain, direct reports, peers, executives, clients and cross-functional partners.
Reporting, approvals, systems work and process compliance that displaces leadership work without producing leadership value.
A baseline and a recommendation. The baseline shows where capacity, load and risk sit today across the participating managers or frontline employees, not where you assume they sit. The recommendation is specific and ready for the budget.
The diagnostic opens with a capacity baseline assessment of the participating cohort and interviews with leadership and stakeholders. The load diagnosis then names which load is consuming the cohort and where each one crosses the threshold that produces a resignation, a costly error or a claim.
The diagnostic is where the method starts. Nothing is prescribed before it runs, so the intervention is scoped to the load it found, not to a generic program. The 90-day Capacity Circle™ then takes that finding into the work.
The five stages of the OHA Method
We measure where your participating cohort's capacity stands today, before proposing anything.
We name the specific pressure driving the cost, and the point where it turns into turnover.
We intervene on the specific load we measured, inside the operating rhythm, not at an offsite.
We raise capacity above the starting baseline, then build skill on top of it.
We re-measure against your own baseline and report the result to your executive team.
In the 90-day Capacity Circle that follows the diagnostic, OHA runs the same measurement again at day 90 and compares it with your own day-one baseline. In that cycle, your leadership gets a debrief on what moved and what did not, and a specific recommendation built from your cohort's data. The cycle restarts at the new baseline.
The debrief reports outcomes, not attendance, so the result can stand up in a budget conversation: it compares two measurements of the same thing. It looks at three questions.
The three questions the remeasure answers
It is for the people who own the question and the budget: HR and People and Culture leaders, CHROs, learning and development leads and executives who need to know where capacity is going before they fund a program.
It is where most organizations start, before a cohort program or an annual partnership. OHA is based in Toronto and delivers in English and French.
In OHA's work, an organizational health assessment is the Capacity Diagnostic: a measured read of the load the work places on people, across the Five Loads, that ends in a baseline and a named dominant load. It reads what the work costs, not how people feel about it.
An engagement survey asks people how they feel about working here. A capacity diagnostic asks what the work costs them to do, and the two readings can diverge for a while. That is why an engagement score can look steady while load builds.
An EAP is the response layer: it supports people who need help. The diagnostic works earlier, on the load that sends people there, and sits alongside EAP and clinical support, never in place of it.
It runs three to four weeks. The investment is given on request: book a Capacity Diagnostic and the conversation starts there.
