Eight questions that test whether an organisation is genuinely prepared to change, or has merely approved a plan that assumes it will.
Score the specific change being proposed: a restructure, a new operating model, a system that changes how people work. Fixed questions, fixed points, calculated in your browser and never stored.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Put the change plan to selected senior operators who have led comparable transitions and receive confidential challenge before the organisation starts keeping score.
Challenge the assumptions before committingAnswer for the people who must change, not for the team proposing the change.
On these answers, the organisation has a plan for the change but not the conditions for it. The case lives in leadership documents, managers have no role beyond relaying messages, and the people expected to change have little reason to believe this initiative will end differently from the last one.
Some conditions are in place, but the readiness depends on things staying as they are: a sponsor staying in post, team capacity staying free, goodwill staying intact. Change programmes in this band start acceptably and then wobble at the first reorganisation, budget review or competing priority.
The structural work is largely done and the remaining gaps are specific: often behavioural clarity for some roles, or feedback channels that exist but have not yet changed anything. This is a workable position, provided the remaining gaps are treated as tasks with owners rather than themes for the next town hall.
Sponsorship, capacity, ownership and specificity are all in place, which is a rarer starting position than most programmes admit. What strong readiness cannot guarantee is endurance: the conditions that exist at launch erode as sponsors move, priorities shift and newer initiatives bid for the organisation's attention.
A signed-off plan proves the leadership wants the change; it says nothing about whether the organisation can absorb it. The distance between the two is where change programmes go to underdeliver: budgets arrive, milestones are declared, and eighteen months later the new system is live while the old behaviour continues inside it.
People do not experience a change programme; they experience their manager's version of it. A manager who understands the change, believes in it and can answer questions about it multiplies the programme. One who learned about it in the same email as their team becomes a polite obstacle. That is why manager ownership carries the same weight here as sponsorship.
Eight questions at 0, 5 or 10 points, normalised to 100 across four bands. The score describes conditions, not destiny: low readiness is a curable state if it is named early, and strong readiness is a perishable one if nobody maintains it.
That score assesses a transformation programme as a whole: funding, data, technology, operating model. This one isolates the human conditions any change depends on, and applies equally to a restructure or process change with no technology in it at all.
More, not less. When a change must happen, low readiness will not stop it, but it will convert the change into a slower, costlier version of itself. Knowing the readiness profile tells you where the compulsory change will drag and what to reinforce first.
Someone close enough to the affected teams to answer honestly, which is often not the programme team. Better still, have the programme lead and an operational manager score it separately: the difference between their answers is usually the most accurate readiness data you will get.