Fixed form
24 behaviorally anchored items; every respondent receives the same form.
Organizational Readiness Index · Technical note
What the 24-item ORI measures and what it does not establish
This note documents the production short-form instrument, its scoring rules, interpretation safeguards, and current validation state. It is intentionally separate from the longer adaptive Executive Organizational Diagnostic.
- Instrument
- conditions-v3
- Effective date
- August 25, 2026
- Validation state
- Developmental; not empirically calibrated
Intended use
The ORI is a structured executive conversation diagnostic. It provides a directional reading of Attention, Alignment, Authority, and Adaptability and identifies the condition to investigate first. A single result is a hypothesis to test with operating evidence and additional perspectives.
It is not a legal, compliance, cybersecurity, enterprise-risk, clinical, employment, or statistically validated organizational audit. It does not estimate the probability that a transformation will succeed and it does not establish that the lowest-scoring condition caused an outcome.
Instrument design
Balanced coverage
6 items per condition, drawn from at least 3 operating domains.
Healthy-high scale
Each item uses five observable descriptions. A higher value always represents the healthier described condition.
Interleaved administration
Conditions rotate throughout the form so respondents are not shown the scoring taxonomy while answering.
Scoring
Each condition score is the unweighted arithmetic mean of its six item responses, rounded to one decimal place. The unweighted rule is deliberate: a facilitator and leadership team can reproduce the result without proprietary software.
condition score = sum of six responses ÷ 6
The ORI is the equal mean of the four condition scores, linearly expressed on a 100-point index. It is an index, not a percentage or probability.
ORI = ((mean of four condition scores − 1) ÷ 4) × 100
The lowest condition is labeled the primary constraint for communication. That phrase means the indicated condition to investigate first. It is not a causal conclusion.
Coverage by condition
| Condition | Items | Operating domains sampled |
|---|---|---|
| Attention | LEAD-15, STR-12, EXE-17, LEAD-03, LEAD-04, STR-10 | leadership · strategy · execution |
| Alignment | CHG-13, STR-07, GOV-11, EXE-15, STR-01, STR-04 | change transformation · strategy · governance · execution |
| Authority | EXE-16, DEC-01, RISK-13, GOV-08, LEAD-14, DEC-03 | execution · decision making · risk · governance · leadership |
| Adaptability | DEC-14, EXE-05, CHG-09, LEAD-09, RISK-07, RISK-14 | decision making · execution · change transformation · leadership · risk |
Interpretation safeguards
Appropriate uses
- Frame an executive conversation about present operating conditions.
- Identify evidence and perspectives to gather next.
- Compare independently completed team perspectives.
- Track directional change when the same instrument and context are used.
Do not use it to
- Make employment or individual-performance decisions.
- Claim audit assurance, compliance, or a formal risk opinion.
- Compare an organization with unpublished population norms.
- Treat small score differences as proven capability differences.
Current validation state
Executive Organizational Diagnostic: Short Form has structural and automated software tests covering its fixed item set, response anchors, domain breadth, scoring, band boundaries, aggregation, divergence, and version separation. These checks establish that the software follows the specified rules; they do not establish measurement validity.
No published study currently establishes internal consistency, test–retest reliability, factor structure, convergent or discriminant validity, criterion relationships, measurement invariance, population norms, or meaningful-change thresholds for this instrument.
Before any validated-measure claim, the planned sequence is expert content review, cognitive interviews, a diverse multi-organization pilot, reliability and factor analysis, group-invariance testing, and relationships with observable operating measures such as priority churn, decision latency, work in progress, outcome alignment, and evidence-to-action time.
Content-review program status
Round 2 review infrastructure is complete. Every production item now has a documented content target, construct rationale, role-visibility classification, and explicit hypotheses for independent reviewers to challenge. The review design uses separate expert and cognitive-interview packets so intended users are not taught the scoring taxonomy while explaining what an item means to them.
Independent review and cognitive interviews are not yet complete. No production wording has been changed from the internal audit alone. Any revised stem, anchor, item membership, reference period, or missing-response rule will create a new instrument version rather than silently altering conditions-v3.
Version and comparison rules
conditions-v3 contains six items per condition and supersedes the 20-item conditions-v2 instrument. Results from different versions must not be pooled, benchmarked, or trended as though they were the same measure without an explicit bridging study.