Requirements for the Consulting Organization Conducting R6 Engagements
Version 0.1 — February 2026
This document specifies the requirements for a management system to be established, implemented, maintained, and continually improved by a consulting organization conducting organizational alignment engagements based on the R6 model.
It applies to any entity—firm, independent consultant, or internal team—that uses the IOD Core framework (S-O-I) and its associated methodology to:
a) diagnose the alignment between an organization's strategy, organizational capabilities, and individual competencies;
b) support the transformation or strengthening of that alignment;
c) integrate the alignment cycle into a management system conforming to international standards (ISO 9001, ISO 42001, etc.) within the client organization.
This document covers the full engagement cycle, from initial scoping through sustainability of outcomes and competency transfer.
It does not cover:
The following documents are essential for the application of this document:
R6-03 — Specification: Organizational Alignment Management System. Requirements for the organization implementing the specification.
IOD Core — Founding Axioms. Structural principles of the R6 model: isomorphic S-O-I architecture, three axes (Stance, Coordination, Execution), two polarities per axis (agentic and instrumental), maturity levels.
IOD Core — I6 Framework. Specification of the six individual pivot competencies and their proficiency scale (EQF 1–8).
IOD Core — O6 Framework. Specification of the six organizational capabilities and their maturity scale (Incomplete → Innovating).
IOD Core — S6 Framework. Specification of the six strategic logics and their maturity scale (Implicit → Regulated).
IOD Core — Critical Incident Interview Protocol. Standardization of data collection at each S-O-I level.
ISO 9001:2015. Quality management systems — Requirements.
IMS2 (Integrated Management System Methodology). Methodology for the deployment of integrated management systems.
For the purposes of this document, the following terms and definitions apply.
The measurable degree of coherence between an organization's strategic intentions (S6), its collective capabilities (O6), and its individuals' competencies (I6). Alignment does not denote an absolute optimal state, but the functional compatibility between the three levels.
One of the three structural registers of the R6 model, identical at each S-O-I level: Stance (direction), Coordination (connection), Execution (action).
Each of the two complementary orientations of an axis. The agentic pole (a) and the instrumental pole (b) form a tension to be balanced, not resolved. The appropriate balance depends on the organization's context and strategy.
A concrete, observable, time-bounded situation reported by an organizational actor and used as a unit of analysis for assessing individual behaviors, organizational routines, or effective strategic logics.
A consulting intervention using the IOD Core framework to diagnose and improve the S-O-I alignment of a client organization. An R6 engagement may cover one or more levels (I, O, S) and one or more application scenarios.
The entity subject to an R6 engagement, i.e., whose S-O-I alignment is diagnosed and, where applicable, supported.
The entity conducting the R6 engagement. The consulting organization may be a firm, an independent consultant, or a mandated internal team.
The level of mastery of an individual competency, assessed on the EQF scale (1–8) from coded critical incidents.
The level of development of an organizational capability (O6) or strategic logic (S6), assessed on the scale of the applicable framework.
A detected gap between two S-O-I levels on the same axis or across axes, likely to produce organizational dysfunction. A misalignment is not inherently negative: it may be deliberate (transition phase) or unintended (organizational debt).
The functional compatibility between levels S, O, and I on the same axis. Vertical coherence is the central criterion of the R6 diagnosis: it takes precedence over the isolated performance of any single level.
An expert or entity with domain-specific competencies (data governance, information security, environmental management, etc.) intervening in cooperation with the R6 consulting organization in the context of a joint engagement.
The consulting organization shall determine the internal and external issues relevant to its purpose and that affect its ability to conduct R6 engagements in conformity with this document.
It shall take into account, in particular:
a) its positioning in the organizational transformation consulting market and the evolution of that market;
b) the regulatory and normative framework applicable to its activities and those of its clients (evolution of ISO standards, sector regulations, certification requirements);
c) the availability and competency of its consultants on the IOD Core framework;
d) partnerships with specialized experts (DATA/AI, security, environment, etc.) required for joint engagements;
e) the economic, cultural, and geographic context of its operating territory.
The consulting organization shall identify the relevant interested parties and their requirements:
a) client organizations: quality of diagnosis, relevance of recommendations, adherence to timelines, data confidentiality, competency transfer;
b) client organization executives: readability of results, measurable impact on performance, avoidance of excessive operational disruption;
c) client organization employees: respect for interview anonymity, honest and non-manipulative reporting of results;
d) the organization's own consultants: clarity of protocols, continuing education on the framework, ethical working conditions;
e) specialized partners: clarity of scope allocation, coherence of joint deliverables;
f) certification bodies (where applicable): conformity to applicable normative frameworks.
The consulting organization shall determine the boundaries and applicability of its management system, taking into account:
a) the internal and external issues referred to in 4.1;
b) the requirements of interested parties referred to in 4.2;
c) the types of R6 engagements it performs (diagnosis only, diagnosis + support, joint engagements with specialized partners);
d) the S-O-I levels covered by its internal competencies.
The scope shall be maintained as documented information.
The consulting organization shall establish, implement, maintain, and continually improve a management system in conformity with this document.
This system shall cover:
a) the processes required for conducting R6 engagements, their interactions, and their control criteria;
b) the resources required for these processes;
c) the associated responsibilities and authorities;
d) the risks and opportunities identified in accordance with Clause 6.
The organization shall maintain a process map for its engagements as documented information.
Top management of the consulting organization shall demonstrate leadership and commitment with respect to the management system by:
a) taking accountability for the effectiveness of the system;
b) ensuring that the policy and objectives of the system are established and are compatible with the strategic direction of the organization;
c) ensuring that the system requirements are integrated into the organization's business processes (and not treated as a parallel documentation exercise);
d) promoting continual improvement;
e) ensuring that the ethical principles of the IOD Core framework (non-normativity of diagnosis, anonymity of interviews, transparency of results) are upheld in all engagements.
Top management shall establish an R6 engagement management policy that:
a) is appropriate to the purpose of the organization;
b) provides a framework for setting objectives;
c) includes a commitment to satisfy applicable requirements;
d) includes a commitment to continual improvement;
e) explicitly states the following ethical principles:
The policy shall be available as documented information, communicated within the organization, and accessible to interested parties.
Top management shall ensure that the following responsibilities and authorities are assigned and communicated:
a) engagement director: responsible for the scoping, oversight, and overall quality of each R6 engagement; accountable for deliverable coherence and schedule adherence;
b) R6 consultant: responsible for conducting critical incident interviews, coding data, and performing S-O-I analysis; accountable for compliance with the standardized protocol;
c) specialized partner (where applicable): responsible for their domain scope; required to coordinate their deliverables with the R6 consultant to ensure overall coherence;
d) quality manager: responsible for management system conformity and indicator tracking; this role may be combined with the engagement director role in smaller organizations.
The consulting organization shall, taking into account the issues (4.1) and requirements (4.2), determine the risks and opportunities that need to be addressed to:
a) give assurance that the management system can achieve its intended results;
b) enhance desirable effects;
c) prevent, or reduce, undesired effects;
d) achieve improvement.
The organization shall identify, assess, and address the following risks in particular:
a) collection bias: insufficient or unrepresentative interview sample; leading question formulation; client pressure on the scope of interviews;
b) coding bias: subjective interpretation of critical incidents; coding inconsistency between consultants on the same engagement;
c) reporting bias: self-censorship in the face of results unfavorable to the client; selective data presentation;
d) competency risk: insufficient mastery of the IOD Core framework by a consultant assigned to an engagement; absence of a specialized partner for a critical domain component;
e) confidentiality risk: leakage of nominative critical incidents; indirect identification of respondents in small organizations;
f) scope risk: confusion between the R6 diagnosis (S-O-I alignment) and an individual assessment service (assessment center, competency review), which may generate misaligned client expectations.
The organization shall retain documented information on identified risks and the actions taken to address them.
The consulting organization shall establish measurable objectives, consistent with its policy, for its management system. These objectives shall cover at a minimum:
a) engagement quality: client satisfaction rate, deliverable conformity to protocol, schedule adherence;
b) diagnostic reliability: inter-coder agreement rate, S-O-I level coverage rate per engagement;
c) consultant competency: continuing education hours on the IOD Core framework, participation in calibration sessions;
d) framework improvement: number of lessons learned captured per period, interview protocol updates.
When the organization determines the need to change its management system (evolution of the IOD Core framework, new engagement type, new partner), changes shall be planned and carried out in a controlled manner, taking into account their purpose, their potential consequences, and the availability of resources.
The consulting organization shall determine and provide the resources needed for the establishment, implementation, maintenance, and continual improvement of its management system.
The organization shall have a sufficient number of qualified consultants to conduct R6 engagements within the timelines agreed with clients, without compromising diagnostic quality.
The organization shall determine, provide, and maintain the necessary infrastructure, including:
a) tools for critical incident collection and coding;
b) secure data storage systems for engagement data (compliance with confidentiality requirements);
c) S-O-I results analysis and visualization tools;
d) standardized deliverable templates.
The organization shall determine and manage the environmental conditions necessary for the quality of critical incident interviews: location confidentiality, absence of interruption, conditions conducive to the free expression of respondents.
The consulting organization shall:
a) determine the competencies required for each role defined in 5.3;
b) ensure that persons assigned to these roles are competent on the basis of appropriate education, training, or experience;
c) where applicable, take actions to acquire the necessary competencies and evaluate the effectiveness of those actions;
d) retain documented information as evidence of competence.
The minimum competencies required for the R6 consultant role include:
Persons doing work under the organization's control shall be made aware of:
a) the R6 engagement management policy;
b) their contribution to the effectiveness of the system, including the positive effects of improved performance;
c) the implications of not conforming to the system requirements (particularly ethical risks: breach of anonymity, reporting bias, scope overreach).
The organization shall determine the internal and external communications relevant to its management system, specifying what to communicate, when, to whom, and by what means.
Critical communications shall include at a minimum:
a) pre-engagement communication with the client organization (explaining the approach to respondents, guaranteeing anonymity);
b) inter-consultant communication during the engagement (coding calibration, sharing observations);
c) findings communication (deliverables to the client, collective debriefs to teams where applicable);
d) communication with specialized partners in joint engagements (scopes, timelines, dependencies).
The organization's management system shall include the documented information required by this document and any documented information the organization determines is necessary for the effectiveness of its system.
When creating and updating documented information, the organization shall ensure appropriate identification, format, review, and approval.
Documented information shall be controlled to ensure its availability, suitability, and protection (particularly the confidentiality of engagement data).
The organization shall maintain at a minimum:
a) critical incident interview protocols (current versions for each S-O-I level);
b) coding rubrics and their decision criteria;
c) deliverable templates (diagnostic report, misalignment map, action plan);
d) engagement files (raw data, codings, analyses, delivered outputs);
e) consultant competency records;
f) captured lessons learned.
The consulting organization shall plan, implement, and control the processes needed for conducting R6 engagements by:
a) determining the requirements specific to each engagement;
b) establishing criteria for the processes and for the acceptance of deliverables;
c) determining the resources needed;
d) implementing control of the processes in accordance with the criteria;
e) retaining documented information to the extent necessary.
Before the start of any engagement, the organization shall:
a) conduct a scoping meeting with the client (client organization's leadership) to determine:
b) select the appropriate intervention scenario:
c) define the respondent sample, ensuring representativeness by S-O-I level, by unit, and by function;
d) formalize the engagement letter, specifying the selected scenario, perimeter, timeline, expected deliverables, mutual commitments, and confidentiality terms;
e) determine, where applicable, the need for specialized partners and formalize their respective scopes.
Data collection relies exclusively on standardized semi-structured interviews using the critical incident method. Each interview is conducted in accordance with the IOD Core protocol applicable to the relevant level (I, O, or S).
The organization shall ensure that:
a) each respondent has been informed in advance of the interview's purpose, the anonymity guarantee, and how the data will be used;
b) questions are asked in accordance with the protocol, without leading reformulations;
c) the interview is documented in a manner that enables subsequent coding (notes, recording with the respondent's consent, or both);
d) the critical incidents collected cover three registers of experience (success, difficulty, failure) to avoid confirmation bias.
Level I (individual): interviews with operational staff about concrete situations they have experienced, enabling assessment of proficiency across the six I6 competencies.
Level O (organizational): interviews with managers and supervisors about coordination mechanisms, collective routines, and actual processes (as opposed to documented processes), enabling assessment of maturity across the six O6 capabilities.
Level S (strategic): interviews with leadership team members about historical strategic decisions, trade-offs, and underlying theories of action, enabling assessment of maturity across the six S6 logics.
Each collected critical incident shall be coded using the rubric applicable to the relevant level. Coding assigns each incident to one or more axes and polarities of the framework, with a proficiency level (I6) or maturity level (O6, S6).
The organization shall implement coding reliability mechanisms:
a) independent double coding on a representative sample of incidents per engagement;
b) calibration sessions between consultants in case of disagreement;
c) inter-coder agreement rate documented and tracked over time.
The analysis shall systematically:
a) assess each level (S, O, I) across its six dimensions;
b) analyze vertical coherence between levels on each axis;
c) identify misalignments, distinguishing those that are deliberate (transition in progress) from those that are unintended (organizational debt);
d) produce a visual map of results (heat maps, radar charts, coherence matrices).
The principle of non-normativity applies: the analysis assesses the coherence of the system, not its conformity to an ideal profile.
No diagnosis may be based on a single level. S-O-I triangulation is mandatory: conclusions shall systematically cross-reference data from all three levels to validate hypotheses.
The organization shall report the diagnostic results to the client in a structured report comprising at a minimum:
a) a summary of the methodology applied (scenario, sample, coverage);
b) results by S-O-I level;
c) a map of detected misalignments;
d) prioritized recommendations;
e) limitations of the diagnosis (sample coverage, any reservations).
The report shall preserve respondent anonymity. No critical incident shall be attributable to an identifiable individual.
Following the report presentation, the organization shall facilitate a co-construction workshop with the client and, where applicable, their leadership team, to:
a) validate the interpretation of results;
b) prioritize the misalignments to be addressed based on their strategic impact;
c) define interventions (training, reorganization, role clarification, etc.);
d) establish an action plan with owners, timelines, and tracking indicators.
When the engagement includes a support component (Scenarios B and C), the organization shall:
a) deploy interventions in accordance with the validated action plan;
b) measure the evolution of S-O-I maturity through intermediate data collections (re-interviews at agreed intervals);
c) adjust interventions based on observed results;
d) document lessons learned to feed framework improvement.
When an engagement requires the intervention of a specialized partner (DATA/AI expert, security, environment, etc.), the organization shall:
a) formalize the scope allocation: the R6 consultant is responsible for the S-O-I diagnosis and for human and organizational factors support; the partner is responsible for their technical domain;
b) organize the coordination checkpoints necessary to ensure deliverable coherence;
c) ensure that the partner's technical recommendations are compatible with the S-O-I diagnosis (a technical recommendation that is inapplicable given the organizational maturity level is an inadequate recommendation);
d) produce an integrated joint deliverable, not two juxtaposed reports.
Before closing an engagement, the organization shall ensure that:
a) the client organization has the minimum knowledge needed to interpret results and sustain the alignment cycle autonomously;
b) tracking tools (indicators, simplified rubrics) have been delivered and explained;
c) an engagement review has been conducted with the client;
d) the engagement file is archived in accordance with 7.5.3.
The consulting organization shall determine what needs to be monitored and measured, and the methods and frequency, to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of its management system.
The organization shall monitor at a minimum:
a) diagnostic quality: inter-coder agreement rate, S-O-I level coverage rate per engagement, number of critical incidents collected vs. planned sample;
b) client satisfaction: post-engagement evaluation by the client (relevance of diagnosis, usefulness of recommendations, relationship quality);
c) commitment adherence: schedule conformity, scope conformity, deliverable conformity to protocol;
d) measurable impact (for engagements with support): evolution of S-O-I maturity indicators between initial diagnosis and follow-up measurements;
e) framework reliability: stability of coding results over time, predictive relevance of detected misalignments.
The organization shall monitor customer perception regarding the fulfillment of their requirements. It shall determine the methods for obtaining, monitoring, and reviewing this information.
The organization shall conduct internal audits at planned intervals to provide information on whether the management system conforms to the requirements of this document and is effectively implemented and maintained.
Audits shall cover in particular:
a) adherence to interview and coding protocols;
b) deliverable conformity to defined templates;
c) adherence to confidentiality and anonymity rules;
d) currency of engagement documentation.
Top management of the organization shall, at planned intervals, review its management system to ensure its continuing suitability, adequacy, and effectiveness.
The management review shall take into account:
a) the status of actions from previous reviews;
b) changes in internal and external issues;
c) information on engagement performance (indicators per 9.1.2);
d) captured lessons learned;
e) opportunities for improvement of the IOD Core framework;
f) results of internal audits.
Outputs shall include decisions on improvement opportunities, needs for changes to the system, and resource needs.
The consulting organization shall determine and select opportunities for improvement and implement necessary actions to meet customer requirements and enhance customer satisfaction.
When a nonconformity occurs (including those arising from complaints), the organization shall:
a) react to the nonconformity and, as applicable, take action to control and correct it, and deal with the consequences;
b) evaluate the need for action to eliminate the cause(s) of the nonconformity, in order that it does not recur;
c) implement any action needed;
d) review the effectiveness of any corrective action taken;
e) make changes to the management system, if necessary.
Nonconformities specific to R6 engagements include: breach of anonymity, deliverable non-conforming to protocol, diagnosis based on insufficient data, unauthorized scope overreach, recommendation conflicting with the principle of non-normativity.
The organization shall continually improve the suitability, adequacy, and effectiveness of its management system.
Continual improvement shall focus in particular on:
a) the IOD Core framework: enrichment of the frameworks, refinement of coding rubrics, update of interview protocols based on field feedback;
b) diagnostic methods: integration of new analysis tools (data analytics, visualization), strengthening of triangulation mechanisms;
c) consultant competencies: continuing education program, inter-consultant calibration sessions, supervision of new practitioners;
d) knowledge management: each engagement shall produce a documented lessons-learned output, feeding a knowledge base accessible to the entire team;
e) alignment with ISO standards: monitoring the evolution of standards (ISO 9001, 42001, etc.) and adapting the management system to maintain compatibility.
R6-02 — Version 0.1 — February 2026 IOD Ingénierie SARL