What a result tends to look like once you can actually see the gap, and what tends to happen next.
Both case studies below describe real 37 Questions engagements. Details that could identify the organisation or the people involved have been generalised, and we don't publish specific scores here.
An organisation just over fifty people, five years on from a small founding team, ran the team version. Growth had been fast, and the CEO, genuinely excellent in the earliest stages, was still leading. But the feeling in the organisation had shifted. Original team members described meetings that had turned heavy, ideas that got beaten down the moment another department heard them, and a general sense that the openness the place used to have had gone quiet. On the surface it looked like a resourcing problem, departments effectively competing for the same limited budget, so if one team's idea won, another team's lost out.
The team result told a different story to the one leadership expected. Capacity was still genuinely strong, particularly among the original team, curiosity and creative instinct hadn't gone anywhere. What had changed was climate, and it wasn't spread evenly across the business. It was concentrated in how ideas moved between departments, engagement and job satisfaction both dropped sharply at exactly the point where one team's proposal had to compete with another's for the same resource. It wasn't a money problem. It was a climate problem that had been quietly reshaping itself into what looked like one.
Rather than a business-wide engagement push, the fix was narrower and more specific, changing how cross-department proposals were resourced, so teams weren't structurally set up to beat each other. That restored some of the openness the organisation had when it was smaller. The people hadn't changed. The room they were working in had.
A small tech team, fewer than a dozen people, with strong talent and a culture people genuinely liked, took the team version. The directors had each worked somewhere before where the culture soured over time, slowly enough that nobody really noticed until it was hard to undo, and they wanted a way to check they weren't drifting in the same direction, rather than relying on what people around them chose to say out loud.
Results largely confirmed what the directors hoped, capacity and climate both came back strong, and close together, a small gap rather than a wide one. The value wasn't in the confirmation itself. It was that the result came from a structured, private process rather than from casual conversation, which tends to get more polite the closer people are to the person asking.
Nothing needed fixing. What changed was the habit, the directors built the assessment into a regular rhythm rather than a one-off check, treating it as an early warning system for the kind of drift they'd both seen happen elsewhere, rather than something to reach for only once a problem was already visible.
37 Questions is a commercial programme built on research into playfulness, adaptability and human thriving at work, carried out by The Playfulness Lab, a UK non-profit.