Stage 2 of 6 · A
Assess: Are you ready, really?
Evaluate readiness across leadership, workflows, data, and governance, with talent, culture, and technical debt running through all four. AI will not scale if leadership commitment, data quality, workflow design, or governance are weak.
- Managerial question
- What can this organisation actually absorb now?
- Related engagement
- AI Readiness Diagnostic
The diagnostic question
Score 1 to 5 on Leadership Commitment, Data Usability, Workflow Clarity, and Governance. Who owns closing the lowest one, by name, in the next sixty days?
Assess runs in weeks three and four of the Diagnostic, in a single scoring room with the executives who own the pillars, not their delegates.
Artefacts this stage produces
- The four-pillar score
- Leadership Commitment, Data Usability, Workflow Clarity, Governance, each 1 to 5, with the dissent recorded.
- The sixty-day remediation owner
- One person, one pillar, one date.
Done properly
- The four pillars are scored in one room, out loud, not by anonymous survey.
- Disagreement about a score is recorded rather than averaged away.
- The lowest pillar has one named executive against it and a sixty-day close date.
- Technical debt is priced as a constraint on sequencing, not listed as a risk.
Commonly faked
- A maturity score produced by a vendor questionnaire nobody in leadership completed.
- All four pillars scoring 3, which means the exercise measured politeness.
- An owner recorded as a department, a committee, or a function.
- A readiness report with no consequence: nothing in the plan changes because of it.
Audit checklist
Take these into your next leadership meeting
If the room cannot answer these without preparation, this stage has not been completed.
- 01Can leadership state the AI commitment in budget terms, not intent terms?
- 02Is the data for the candidate workflow usable today, or usable after a project?
- 03Has the workflow been mapped end to end by someone who does the work?
- 04Does a governance forum exist that can say no, and has it ever said no?
- 05Who closes the lowest-scoring pillar, and by what date?
Failure modes
How this stage goes wrong
- Scoring capability instead of absorption.
- Letting the strongest pillar set the pace of the programme.
- Assessing the company when the unit of work is a workflow.
Next step
Run Assess with us
Assess runs in weeks three and four of the Diagnostic, in a single scoring room with the executives who own the pillars, not their delegates.