Nothing organisational is ready in the abstract, only relative to what a particular plan demands.
Why it matters when the plan changes
Readiness is usually assessed as a general property, which produces a score that cannot be acted on. Asked against a specific plan it becomes a list: these four decisions have no owner, these two interfaces have no sequence, this role has outgrown its mandate. Research on strategy execution found only eleven per cent of managers believed all their company's priorities had the resources needed for success, and only nine per cent said they could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time. Those figures describe readiness gaps, and the list built against a specific plan is what makes them actionable.
The tension is timing. The assessment is most valuable before commitment, when access to the organisation is often weakest and the pressure to proceed is highest. After commitment the access improves and the finding has become a problem to manage rather than a decision to inform.
In practice
A board asks whether the organisation is ready for a market entry. The honest answer is a question: ready for which version of it. Under the phased entry, three roles need clarifying. Under the accelerated one, two functions need an owner for a shared decision that currently has none. Readiness was never a single number.
Evidence
Most managers do not believe stated strategic priorities are properly resourced, which is the most common readiness gap.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)Cross-unit commitments are the least dependable part of execution, which is where readiness usually fails.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)
What it cannot tell you
Organisational readiness says nothing about whether the plan itself is sound, only whether the organisation is arranged to carry it. A perfectly ready organisation can still execute a poor strategy well. The assessment is also specific to one plan at one moment; it does not generalise to a different plan or a later date.
Questions
It can be presented that way and it loses what makes it useful. Research by Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull found only eleven per cent of managers believed their company's strategic priorities were properly resourced, a gap a composite score would hide. Reporting by pillar with the weakest visible is what allows action.
Before commitment, when the finding can still change the plan, the sequence or the price. Harvard Business Review's 2015 review of strategy execution found cross-unit commitments the least dependable part of delivery, precisely the readiness gap that surfaces only when checked early. Assessing afterwards turns the finding into an integration input instead.
Not obviously troubled. Usually it looks like a functioning business whose decisions take slightly too long, whose cross-functional commitments slip quietly, and whose priorities outnumber its capacity. Those are readiness failures and they are invisible until a plan tries to run through them.
No. Most plans start with known gaps, which is reasonable. Readiness assessment makes the gaps explicit and gives each one an owner and a date, so the plan proceeds knowing what it is carrying rather than discovering it at the first milestone.
Whenever the plan changes what it demands, or the organisation changes what it supports. Six events do that reliably: new strategy, new ownership, new operating model, new pressure, new dependency and new evidence. Any of them makes a prior reading out of date.