Weisbord's Six-Box Model
Weisbord's Six-Box Model diagnoses an organisation across six areas, Purposes, Structure, Relationships, Rewards, Leadership and Helpful Mechanisms, asking one plain question in each box to find where the real gap is.
Five boxes space out evenly around a circle, Leadership named at the centre where they all meet.
Reach for this when…
- Performance is off and everyone blames a different department.
- You've redrawn the structure chart twice and the same friction keeps coming back.
- You're inheriting a team and need a fast, structured read on what's actually wrong.
How to run it
- Purposes: are people clear and agreed on what business we're in?
- Structure: does how we've divided the work actually fit that purpose?
- Relationships: how do people and departments here work together, and where's the friction?
- Rewards: do the formal and informal incentives point people at the right things?
- Leadership: is someone actively keeping the other boxes in balance?
- Helpful Mechanisms: do the coordinating systems, planning, budgeting, meetings, actually help or just add process?
A worked example
Situation. Cormac O'Sullivan managed Lee Valley Agri Cooperative, an agribusiness cooperative in Cork, Ireland, where milk buyers and field agents were constantly at odds and output kept missing forecast.
Applied. He ran the six boxes with his management team and found Purposes and Structure were both fine. The real gap was Rewards: field agents were paid on volume bought, buyers on price paid, directly opposed incentives.
Result. He unified both roles under a shared margin-based bonus. The friction dropped within one buying season, without changing a single reporting line.
The catch
The six boxes are easy to fill in shallowly, from opinion rather than evidence, which produces a tidy diagnosis that's wrong. It treats Leadership as the box that balances the rest, so a weak leader tends to mark their own box fine. And it's a snapshot: rerun it, because the answers move as the organisation does.
If your Leadership box reads 'fine' while every other box shows a gap, check that box again - it's rarely a coincidence.
Origin: Marvin Weisbord