The Playbook frames partnership health around three core pillars: transparency; value and relationship. These pillars give us a practical lens for measurement because they reflect how partnerships succeed or fail in real life.

Transparency is about clarity and openness. Do all partners understand the objectives, constraints and decision-making processes? Is information shared early, or does it drip-feed when problems arise?

Value goes beyond cost. It looks at whether the partnership is delivering meaningful impact – quality work, efficiency, innovation and outcomes that matter.

And relationship focuses on trust, behaviours and the human dynamics that make collaboration either energising or exhausting.

If one of these pillars weakens, the whole partnership can start to wobble. Measuring partnership health is therefore about checking the strength and balance of all these three components.

To move from anecdote to assessment, we need a clearly defined partnership assessment process – a shared way to turn that gut feel into something more visible and discussable.

The concept is quite simple and certainly not arduous, meaning it is something to which everybody should be able to fully commit. Partners agree on a small set of KPIs under each pillar of transparency, value and relationship. They need to be co-created, not imposed, so they reflect what success really looks like in a specific partnership. Each partner then scores those KPIs and the results are plotted on a radar chart. When things are healthy, the chart forms a clear equilateral triangle. When they’re not, the areas needing to be addressed are obvious.

What’s important here is not so much the score itself, but the conversations that they can trigger. The assessment should aim to guide discussion, not replace it. Helping teams focus on where alignment is slipping and what to do about it.

This approach doesn’t pretend partnerships are purely rational systems, because they’re not. Alongside the KPIs, partners are encouraged to add a simple confidence or sentiment score – essentially a structured way of asking, ‘How does this partnership feel right now?’.

This matters because trust, frustration and confidence often become evident emotionally, before they appear in delivery metrics. By formally acknowledging that instinctive element, the framework avoids the trap of over-engineering measurement, while missing the human reality. Combining KPI scores with confidence scores creates a more honest picture of partnership health over time.

It is important to embed partnership health measurement as a regular rhythm, not an emergency intervention. And this rhythm can apply across the full partnership life cycle – from activation, through evolution, to renewal or transition.

Health checks are recommended at least twice a year, with lighter check-ins built into ongoing governance. These moments sit alongside delivery reviews, not instead of them, and deliberately balance ‘what we’re delivering’ with ‘how we’re working together’. When this measurement process becomes routine, issues are surfaced earlier, conversations can be calmer and course correction feels collaborative rather than confrontational.

The partnership health measurement should not become performance management under a different name. The goal always needs to focus on improvement to maintain sustainable high-quality partnerships.

That’s why the proposed tools are deliberately easy to navigate and discussion led. One helpful practical prompt is See – Own – Do: see what’s happening; own individual and collective contributions and agree what to do next. This maintains the focus on shared accountability rather than blame and reinforces the idea that partnership health is everyone’s responsibility.

Recognition needs to also play a key role here. Celebrating examples of great collaboration – not just successful outputs – reinforces the behaviours that keep partnerships healthy over time.

Partnership health doesn’t look after itself. It needs the same discipline and attention as financial performance or project delivery. Measuring health makes the invisible visible, giving teams permission to talk honestly about trust, clarity and value before problems become entrenched.

When transparency, value and relationship are all being tracked and discussed openly, partnerships can become more resilient. They can adapt better to external pressures, handle change with less friction and ultimately deliver better outcomes.

Measuring partnership health isn’t about adding another framework to the dashboard. It’s about creating the environment for better conversations – and using those conversations to keep partnerships strong, balanced and genuinely collaborative.