Readiness Assessment · 10 min
Readiness Assessment · 10 min
Three phases. Nine moves. Five rituals. Six anti-patterns. The minimum viable set of things a leader actually does to shift a culture from rollout to movement. No frameworks worth printing on a mug. Start Monday.
← Back Talk to an AdvisorStop pretending the rollout hasn't started. 75% of your people are already using AI in private. Your first job is to make the shadow visible — without punishment.
"We don't have the answers. We have a direction and a willingness to figure it out with you. I'd rather we be wrong fast together than right slowly apart."
A 45-minute all-hands. One question: what are you already using AI for that nobody on this call knows about? No slides. No recording. No retaliation. Document every workflow that surfaces.
Pick three roles. Shadow them for an afternoon. Find the seams — the handoffs, the rework, the rituals that exist because someone, sometime, decided they should. These are the leverage points.
Relevance. Trust. Capability. Identity. Put them on a slide. Say the words. Watching a leader name the unspoken halves the room's anxiety on the spot.
Movements need a place to try things before they're load-bearing. Without a sandbox, every experiment becomes a referendum on someone's job.
"This experiment is allowed to fail. If it fails, we share what we learned. If it succeeds, we share what we did. Either way, the next person goes faster."
Pick ten people closest to the work. Give each a small budget, a coach, and 90 days. The only deliverable is a public writeup — what they tried, what they learned, what they'd do next.
30 minutes, every Friday. Three people share one prompt, one workflow, one failure. No prep slides. Just screens and stories. Record nothing. The room will fill itself.
Draft, today, the email you'd send when an experiment fails publicly. Share the template with the team. The whole point is to lower the cost of being wrong.
Tools spread on their own. Cultures don't. By day 30, the conditions that make AI compound should be visibly embedded in how you operate, hire, promote, and measure.
"Here is what we believe today. Here is what we believed last quarter that we no longer believe. Here is what we don't yet know. The document will keep changing because we will keep learning."
Add "evidence of reinventing your own work with AI" to the next promotion cycle. One line. People optimize for what gets people promoted.
Kill license utilization as your headline number. Replace it with a workflow metric — hours reclaimed, cycle time cut, decisions made faster. Measure reinvention, not consumption.
A living document. One page. What you believe about AI, what you're trying, what you've changed your mind on. Update every 90 days. Sign your name.
Movements run on cadence, not memos. These are the only five recurring practices you actually need.
Three demos. No decks. One prompt, one workflow, one lesson. Voluntary. Recorded only if the presenter opts in.
One person publishes a prompt they actually used, with the input, the output, and what they'd change. Shipped in #ai-in-practice, not buried in a wiki.
Three people present an experiment that did not work. Goal is pattern recognition, not post-mortems. The org learns where the walls are.
Leader publishes the current organizational stance on AI. What's changed. What's still uncertain. Signed, dated, public.
Small-group conversation, manager-led: what does it mean to be good at your job now? No agenda. Coaching, not communications.
Every item on the left is seductive because it's familiar. Every item on the right requires you to give something up.
You will get what you measure. Pick numbers that reward reinvention, not consumption.
| Retire | Adopt |
|---|---|
| % of licenses activated | % of teams that reinvented a workflow this quarter |
| Hours of training completed | Number of workflows publicly demoed |
| Survey: "Do you feel supported?" | Survey: "Did you try something this month that scared you?" |
| Adherence to the roadmap | Velocity of belief change in leadership |
| Number of approved use cases | Number of experiments that failed publicly |
Most of activation is interpersonal, not institutional. These are the lines worth rehearsing.
"You're right that we don't know if this will work. That's exactly why we're keeping the bet small and the learning loud. What would you need to see in 60 days to update your view?"
"You're already two steps ahead. I don't want you to slow down — I want you to teach. What would it take to make your workflow legible to the team?"
"Your craft isn't disappearing. It's relocating. The question I want us to sit with is — what part of your judgment is now the most valuable thing you do?"
"We're optimizing for learning velocity this year, not headline ROI. The companies that compound are the ones whose people reinvent their own work. That's the line we're measuring."
A Baker Communications advisor will follow up within one business day.