Identifying Your Businesses' Harmonizer Opportunities
Note: Throughout Growth Isn’t One Sided, we’ve explored why organizations need Harmonizers who bridge operational excellence with innovative discovery. But where do you actually find these opportunities in your business? This bonus chapter provides the diagnostic framework for identifying your highest-value Harmonizer gaps, and gives some concrete steps for filling them.
One Takeaway: Real change starts with small steps in the right direction. You don’t need to restructure your entire organization to begin thinking like a Harmonizer.
Understanding the need for Harmonizers is one thing. Putting these ideas into practice is another. You don’t need executive approval, budget allocation, or an org restructure to start. You can begin applying Harmonizer thinking immediately, regardless of your role or company size.
Below you’ll find a 5 minute check up and multiple 4 week plans depending what your role within your company is. These are perfect to put into action at the beginning of 2026.
The 5-Minute Check-Up
Before diving into solutions, you need to know where the problems are. Consider asking yourself these questions:
Cross-Team Problems:
What problems keep showing up in meetings but never get resolved?
Where do departments have conflicting goals that hurt overall performance?
Which initiatives stall because “it’s not anyone’s specific responsibility”?
Data vs. Reality Gaps:
Where do your numbers look good but customers or employees have shared frustration?
What “weird” data points does your team regularly dismiss or explain away?
Where do front-line workers see problems that don’t show up in dashboards?
Innovation Roadblocks:
What opportunities does everyone “know about” but no one pursues because they don’t fit current objectives?
Where do new ideas die because they’re “too small to matter” or “too risky to try”?
Which markets or customer segments get ignored because they don’t scale immediately?
If you identified several areas, you’re not alone. These gaps exist in every growing organization. The question isn’t whether you have Harmonizer opportunities—it’s which ones to tackle first.
Three Entry Points: Choose Your Starting Place
Individual Contributor: Start Where You Sit
Your opportunity: You see problems others miss because you’re closest to the work. Your advantage is detailed knowledge of what actually happens versus what’s supposed to happen.
Your 4-week plan:
Week 1: Document one recurring problem that spans multiple teams. Don’t solve it yet. Just map out why it keeps happening.
Week 2: Talk to someone from each affected team to understand their perspective on the problem.
Week 3: Propose a small test that addresses the problem without requiring formal budget or approval. Think about breaking this into an action that requires the least amount of buy-in, but that could cause a visible change.
Week 4: Run the test, gather results, and share learnings with relevant stakeholders.
Team Leader: Create Space for Harmonizer Thinking
Your opportunity: You can influence how your team approaches problems and interacts with other departments. You can experiment with different incentives and processes.
Your 4-week plan:
Week 1: Ask your team, “What problems do we know about but aren’t working on because they’re not measured or assigned?” or “What’s a company goal that seems too big for us to make a difference on, but we’d like to go after anyways?”
Week 2: Pick one cross-functional issue and assign someone to understand it deeply. Not solve it yet, just understand it.
Week 3: Hold a session with a related team to share perspectives on the issue.
Week 4: Define a small joint experiment and commit to trying it together.
Executive: Enable Harmonizer Culture
Your opportunity: You can change how success is defined and measured across teams. You can create formal space for non-scalable work and cross-functional problem-solving.
Your 4-week plan:
Week 1: Ask each leader to identify one problem affecting multiple departments but not clearly belonging to any single team.
Week 2: Choose one problem and assign a temporary “owner” from an unexpected department, but who shows an interest. Give them 30 days to dive in and recommend next steps.
Week 3: Create a small “exploration budget” that teams can use for testing cross-functional solutions.
Week 4: Review progress and determine whether the temporary owner model should become permanent for certain issues.
Common Early Problems
“This isn’t my job”: True, it’s not. That’s exactly why it needs doing. Frame it as professional development and learning rather than additional responsibility.
“We don’t have time for experiments”: Start with understanding, not solving. Even 30 minutes mapping a problem often reveals quick wins.
“Other teams won’t cooperate”: Start with listening, not proposing. The goal is to connect, not create conflict. Most people will share their perspective if you’re genuinely curious about their challenges.
“Leadership won’t support this”: Begin with low-risk, low-cost initiatives that improve existing work rather than adding new work.
“How do I measure success?”: Focus on learning and relationship-building initially. Measurable results often follow once you understand problems better.
What to Expect
First 30 Days: You’ll primarily be in learning mode. Your goal is understanding problems more deeply, not solving them completely. Success looks like clearer problem definition and stronger relationships with other teams.
Months 2-3: You’ll potentially start seeing small wins from initial experiments. Some tests will fail. That’s OK. Other tests will reveal bigger opportunities worth pursuing.
Months 4-6: You’ll begin recognizing patterns in where Harmonizer thinking adds value. Your reputation as someone who “connects the dots” will grow, leading to more opportunities.
Beyond 6 Months: Harmonizer approaches become part of how you naturally work. You’ll find yourself gravitating toward messy, cross-functional challenges that others avoid. You’ll likely discover that these challenges often hold keys to significant growth.
Start Your First 30 Days of the New Year Now
The check-up questions above will help you identify where Harmonizer thinking can create value. Pick one area that stood out. Don’t try to tackle everything at once.
Choose your entry point based on your current role and influence. Whether you’re an individual contributor, leader, or executive, you have the power to start bridging gaps that others are ignoring.
Remember the key insight. Your organization’s next breakthrough is probably hiding in a problem everyone knows about, but no one owns. The person who takes ownership of that problem, and builds the bridges needed to solve it, often discovers opportunities that create significant business value.
Start with one small step. Document a problem, have one conversation, run one small experiment. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s progress toward understanding how Harmonizer thinking works in your specific context. We all want to make the biggest contribution, but we need to start with making actual contributions first.
Your journey from understanding Harmonizers to becoming one starts with action, not analysis. Your first step could be documenting a cross-team problem or holding a conversation between departments. The important thing is to start.
Ready to dive deeper into implementation? The ideas in this minibook are just the foundation. For detailed frameworks, assessment tools, and step-by-step guides for developing Harmonizer capabilities, connect with me on LinkedIn and subscribe at EconomicsFor.com. When we connect, please share a cross-functional challenge your organization is facing. Let’s build a new way to do business together.