Score your own organisation's readiness

What you will learn Not a chapter to read but one to do. Put your own organisation against the three failure modes from the last chapter, score it, and find the items you cannot produce evidence for.

What you need

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□ 40 minutes□ A sheet of paper or a spreadsheet□ Ideally two or more people from different departments   · alone, this ends at "we're fine"□ One AI initiative under way or under consideration (if none, use "evaluating")

Keep that third line. The goal is not a good score — it is finding the points where departments answer differently. A split answer is the result.

Step 1 — Score the three (10 min)

Take the three straight from how transformations fail. Score separately and compare afterwards.

Failure mode	For us	Score
1. Adopted without a purpose	Can you say in one sentence what problem this solves?
2. No measure of effect	Is it already decided what success is measured by?
3. Workflow left untouched	Whose order of work changes after adoption?

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Score: 2 = you can answer right now       1 = roughly exists, but not written down       0 = does not exist / people answer differently

A total of 6 will mostly be cut down in step 2. That is normal.

Step 2 — Produce the evidence (15 min)

This is the point of the exercise. For each item, write down where you would look to find it. Not a description — a document name and a location.

Item	Where the evidence is	Did you open it?
The problem being solved	(e.g. March proposal, p.2)	□
The success criterion		□
The workflow that changes		□

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Evidence rule:  ✓ you can name a document and a page        -> keep the score  △ "it's somewhere" / "it was in emails"      -> drop to 1  ✗ nothing                                    -> 0

"We covered it in a meeting" is not evidence. Ask the same question of someone who was not there and you get a different answer. Ask the person next to you right now.

What usually shows up here

The success criterion reads "improve efficiency." That is a wish, not a target. The failure with no measure starts exactly like this.

"The workflow that changes" is blank. The most common one. If the tools grow and the procedure does not, people experience it as one more job on top of the job they already had.

Step 3 — Take the lowest two (10 min)

Re-total the scores and keep only the two lowest items.

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□ 1st (        ) — current score□ 2nd (        ) — current score

Do not try to fix all three. Two is the limit of what actually moves in thirty days.

If departments scored differently

That item is your first priority. The split matters more than the score — it means the delivery team and the people doing the work are holding different pictures, and adopting in that state produces "why are we doing this again?" three or four months later.

Step 4 — Write the next thirty days (5 min)

For each of the top two, write one line containing a person and a date.

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✗ "Define the success criterion"                     <- no subject✓ "By 14 March, K pulls the current case volume   and writes the baseline as one line in the doc"   <- person, date, artefact

Rank	Who	By when	What is left behind
1
2

If "what is left behind" is empty, delete the line. A plan that leaves no document makes you hold the same meeting again next month.

Self-check

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□ You each scored the three items separately□ At least one score dropped once evidence was demanded  <- if none, you were generous□ You identified an item where departments disagreed□ The top two have a person and a date attached

If the second is unchecked, go back to step 2 and actually open the documents. Answering "it exists" without opening it is the most common wrong answer in this exercise.

Check yourself

1. Why is "we covered it in a meeting" not evidence?

Answer

Because someone who was not there answers differently. What the organisation shares is what was written down; the rest is each attendee's memory.

2. Why does a split score become the first priority?

Answer

It means people hold different pictures. That is worse than a low score — a low score is known to everyone, while a split has each side proceeding in the belief that it exists, until they collide months later.

3. Why not fix all three at once?

Answer

Two is the limit of what actually moves in thirty days. Take all three and all three produce documents and nothing else. Finishing one, with evidence, makes the next discussion far easier.

That is why transform. In the next part we look at what to do first, and how to choose when there are several candidates → Three questions for choosing work