A key part of the self-analysis that occurs during an assessment involves an organization’s insight into how it is doing business at the moment of the assessment. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it is not, particularly in an organization that takes an ad hoc approach to improvement. When practitioners in such organizations begin to document the way they do business, they are often surprised and nonplussed. Often there is inconsistency or confusion about the way things are done. Identifying the current processes they use becomes a valuable exercise in its own right. The assessment imposes the discipline of objectivity onto a culture of wishful thinking: It examines the way things are being done at that particular point in timenot the way things should be done, or the way someone wants them to be done. The insight is the equivalent of finding your present location on a map so that you can intelligently plot a path to your goal. As Watts Humphrey once famously remarked, "If you don’t know where you are, a map won’t help."