Readiness is measurable. It has nothing to do with how excited leadership is, and everything to do with whether the underlying process is stable enough to be made instant, repeatable, and hard to reverse.
The seven questions
- Can two people independently describe this process the same way?
- Do you know its current error rate, or only that it feels fine?
- Is there a written definition of a correct output?
- Who reviews the result, and do they have time on the calendar to do it?
- What is the cost of a wrong output reaching a customer?
- Can you explain the decision to a regulator, a client, or a judge?
- What would make you switch this off?
How to score
Score each question 0, 1, or 2. Zero means no answer exists. One means an answer exists but lives in someone's head. Two means it is written down and someone owns it.
- 11–14 — Automate. You have a real process and the supervision to hold it.
- 6–10 — Fix first. Write down the two weakest items, then reassess.
- 0–5 — Do not automate. You would be scaling ambiguity.
The most common failing answer
Question four. Teams almost always have an owner in name and nobody with review time in the calendar. Supervision that is not scheduled does not happen, and unsupervised automation drifts quietly until a customer finds the drift for you.
We are not born tough. We are built tough — and systems are no different.
Mindvelocity™ walks through the full scoring model with worked examples from real operations, including what to do with the steps that fail.
The guided version of this scoring exercise.
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