ITXF Readiness Diagnostic
Most transformation fails on its structure, not on its people.
This diagnostic places your programme on a five-stage maturity ladder across seven dimensions. It takes about seven minutes and shows you your stage without asking for an email address.
- 21 questions
- About seven minutes
- Stage, breakdown and scorecard
The argument
When a transformation stalls, the first explanation offered is usually resistance. People are said to be reluctant, change-fatigued, not yet on board. I have rarely found that to be the real constraint.
What I find instead is incoherent structure. Decision rights that nobody can state plainly. Sponsorship that is measured by attendance rather than by outcomes. Reporting that flatters. Measures agreed after delivery began. People behave sensibly inside the structure they are given, and an incoherent structure produces the behaviour that gets called resistance.
The evidence points the same way. McKinsey finds that transformations are nearly four times more likely to succeed where leaders model the behaviour changes they ask of everyone else. Prosci finds that programmes with effective sponsorship are nearly threefold more likely to meet their objectives. Both findings are about what leaders structurally do, not about how willing anyone feels.
That is a more useful diagnosis, because structure can be changed deliberately. This instrument is built to show you where yours is incoherent.
What the instrument measures
Seven dimensions, drawn from the ITXF framework. Each is assessed on its own and reported separately, so a single weak dimension is visible rather than averaged away.
Strategic alignment
Is the change portfolio connected to strategy, and is strategy shaped by what the organisation can absorb?
3 items
Leadership engagement
Is sponsorship a capability the organisation develops, or a title conferred by seniority?
3 items
Stakeholder management and communication
Does engagement change what the organisation does, or only what it says?
3 items
Organisational learning
Does the organisation get better at change, or only more experienced at it?
3 items
Governance and decision rights
Are decisions made where they should be, including the decision to stop?
3 items
Methodology and delivery discipline
Does the method survive contact with a deadline?
3 items
Absorption capacity
Does the organisation know how much change it is carrying, and what happens when that is too much?
3 items
What you receive
- Your placement on the five-stage maturity ladder, shown on screen as soon as you finish. No email address is required for this.
- A breakdown by dimension, with your score and stage for each, and where to look next.
- A scorecard as a PDF, which you can keep or take into a steering discussion.
The breakdown and the scorecard are sent to an email address you give us. That is the only point at which we ask for one.
Method and credibility
ITXF came out of doctoral fieldwork rather than from practice looking for a theory. It examines three things: whether the architecture of a transformation holds together, whether it performs, and whether anyone adopts it. Governance and measurement run across all three, because they are where the other three are usually lost.
The research behind it was a doctorate at the University of Portsmouth, studying a shared-services programme across five centres. The instrument you are about to take is a short version of what that work produced.
The instrument is a structured self-assessment. It reports what you observe about your own programme, and it is designed to be answered candidly rather than defensively.
Who it is for
This is written for people accountable for a transformation rather than for people delivering one.
- You have a transformation running and cannot tell whether it is landing.
- You are about to commit to something large and want to know what the organisation can absorb.
- You have been told the last change failed because people resisted it, and you suspect that is not the whole story.
How your data is handled
Your answers are integers. There is no free-text box asking what your organisation is doing, because there is nowhere in the system to put one.
Your answers and your result are stored in Switzerland. If you ask for the full breakdown, your name, email address and organisation are stored alongside them.
One strictly necessary cookie keeps your session together so you can resume, for seven days. There is no advertising, no profiling and no tracker that follows you elsewhere.
You can ask for your data to be deleted at any time, and we will do it.