What's driving it?

Before you go very far, you should find out what the organizational vision and mission statement says. There might be a particular ideology behind them. While you're at it, find out what its current organizational values and core business are supposed to be.

There are often two main parts. The first is a statement of several sentences saying what the organization is trying to achieve and its core values. The second is a very concise statement that focusses everybody's attention on the goal.

Check with stakeholders that it is still current, or update it as necessary. This review needs to be done from time to time, and it is often a more difficult task than it looks. It is actually as much a final result of the whole organizational review as a starting point. If these are good, it might not take much work to steer the organization to keep going in the right direction. If the organization is not doing well, however, you'll almost certainly have to revise these later. But at this stage, it's enough to find out what they are supposed to be.

Try these questions:

1. Is your organization's philosophy written down clearly?
2. To what extent does your organization use its philosophy to drive its processes?
3. Is your organization's philosophy appropriate to the needs of clients and stakeholders?

Perhaps your organization has them somewhere, but hardly anybody knows what they are. (This is likely if a bureaucrat or an outside consultant wrote them but senior management failed to communicate them, or they are so out of date that everybody has forgotten about them.) And if nobody knows, you'll at least find out that nobody knows. You can start on them from scratch.