Readiness is about whether the decisions and dependencies are in place, not about whether people feel ready.
Why it matters when the plan changes
Readiness assessments are commonly run as a sentiment exercise, because sentiment is easy to collect and produces a number. What determines whether a change lands is structural: whether the decisions it requires have owners, whether the dependencies are sequenced, and whether the people it depends on have capacity. Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull found only eleven per cent of managers believed priorities were properly resourced and only nine per cent could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time, both structural rather than sentiment findings. None of that is a feeling.
The tension is that the structural version can stop a programme. An assessment finding four unowned decisions and an over-committed management layer argues for delay, not what a sponsor with a board commitment wants to hear. That is precisely when it is worth having, before commitment; run afterwards it becomes a risk log rather than a decision changer.
In practice
A readiness assessment reports seventy per cent of staff feeling positive about the change and a strong sponsor. It does not report that three of the programme's workstreams depend on the same over-committed manager. The programme is approved on the first finding and constrained by the second.
Evidence
Most managers do not believe stated priorities are properly resourced, which is a structural readiness finding rather than a sentiment one.
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 reliable part of execution and are what readiness has to test.
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
A readiness assessment tests structural conditions at a point in time; it cannot guarantee those conditions hold once a plan is committed, since ownership, sequencing and capacity can shift as the change proceeds. It also does not measure whether the change itself is the right one, only whether the organisation is arranged to deliver it.
Questions
Whether the decisions the change requires have named owners, whether dependencies are sequenced, and whether people have capacity. Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull found in Harvard Business Review in 2015 that only eleven per cent of managers believed their company's strategic priorities were properly resourced, a structural finding, not a sentiment one.
Because a willing organisation with unowned decisions fails, and a sceptical one with clear ownership and sequencing delivers anyway. Appetite affects how pleasant the change is to live through; structure determines whether it lands at all, and only one of the two is usually measured.
Before commitment, when the findings can still change the plan, its sequence or its scope. Commissioned afterwards it becomes a risk log for a programme already running, which is useful and cannot affect the decisions it was best placed to inform.
That is the assessment doing its job, and it is why sponsors reluctant to delay a board commitment resist running one honestly. Sull, Homkes and Sull's Harvard Business Review research found only nine per cent of managers could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time, exactly the kind of unowned dependency readiness exists to surface.
Less time than most programmes assume. The structural questions are answerable from documents, decision records and a focused set of conversations with the people who hold the relevant decisions. It is the sentiment-gathering that takes weeks, and it contributes least to the answer.