Strategic Readiness Index

A 2-minute diagnostic for your leadership team. Drag each slider to where the team feels today and see which retreat direction fits.

The Strategic Readiness Index is a two-minute diagnostic for your leadership team. You rate the team on seven dimensions — alignment, decisions, trust and communication, future, AI and transformation, energy, collaboration — and get the retreat direction that fits you, plus the team's profile on a radar. Free, no account needed.

Drag each slider to where the team feels today.

Alignment 60

Misaligned, differing priorities Aligned, shared priorities

Decisions 58

Drag on Made and kept

Trust & Communication 62

We avoid the hard stuff We speak openly

Future 55

We react We have scenarios

AI & transformation 30

It catches us off guard We know how we use AI

Energy 65

Running on empty Full of energy

Collaboration 50

Silos handing off tasks Team solving together

Team profile

What the Strategic Readiness Index measures

The Strategic Readiness Index is a self-assessment tool for management teams, boards and leadership teams. It does not measure team performance and it does not deliver a verdict. It measures one thing: how ready the team is to make — and follow through on — the decisions waiting for it.

The seven axes are not chosen theoretically. They are the seven things that, in our practice, decide whether a management retreat produces decisions or produces a flipchart. A team can score excellently on six and be stuck on the seventh — which is why the shape of the profile matters more than the average.

The seven axes, one at a time

1/7

Alignment

Misaligned, differing priorities → Aligned, shared priorities

What it measures: Whether the team is pulling in the same direction. Not whether it agrees in the meeting, but whether, back at their desks, everyone would rank the top three priorities the same way.
A low score looks like: Everyone has their own priorities, all of them "strategic". Decisions get reopened, because they were never made together.
A high score looks like: The same priorities, in the same order, described in the same words by different people on the team.
What the work is: A low Alignment score is the most common real reason a team asks for a retreat, even when the brief says something else. The work is structured prioritisation, with criteria agreed before the choice rather than after it.

2/7

Decisions

Drag on → Made and kept

What it measures: Whether decisions get made and stick. Speed matters less than whether they survive to implementation.
A low score looks like: Subjects come back to the table quarter after quarter. Meetings end with "let's discuss further", and nobody is sure what was settled.
A high score looks like: Decisions get made in the room, with an owner and a deadline, and they hold even when they become uncomfortable.
What the work is: A low score here usually points to a process problem, not a people problem: the missing piece is the rule that tells the team who decides what, and with what kind of agreement. The work involves explicit decision mechanisms and, sometimes, collaborative governance.

3/7

Trust & Communication

We avoid the hard stuff → We speak openly

What it measures: Whether the team can hold the conversations it avoids. Trust here does not mean liking each other — it means you can say what you think without calculating the cost.
A low score looks like: There is a subject everyone knows about and nobody opens. The real discussions happen in the breaks and in private channels.
A high score looks like: Disagreement is public and workable. Someone can say "I disagree with the CEO" without changing the temperature of the room.
What the work is: A low score on this axis is why a retreat facilitated by an insider does not work: what is missing is not the agenda, it is the safety to speak. The work starts with confidential interviews and a frame that puts conflict to work rather than papering over it.

4/7

Future

We react → We have scenarios

What it measures: Whether the team is ready for what is coming, or reacting to what has already arrived.
A low score looks like: Planning against a single scenario, the likely one. Any change of context leaves the team rebuilding the plan from scratch.
A high score looks like: Several scenarios exist, with signals to watch for each and a sense of what changes in the strategy if one becomes real.
What the work is: A low score is not fixed with more data but with foresight practice: building two or three plausible scenarios and stress-testing the current strategy against each. It is also the best antidote for teams that mistake the annual budget for a strategy.

5/7

AI & transformation

It catches us off guard → We know how we use AI

What it measures: Whether the leadership team has its own position on AI, or is just reacting to whatever people bring in through their own tools.
A low score looks like: AI enters the organisation at the edges, with no decision, no rules and no view of which skills become necessary.
A high score looks like: The leadership team knows where it uses AI, where it does not, which risks it accepts, and what changes in roles.
What the work is: This is the lowest-scoring axis in our practice, and by far the most talked about. The work happens at the level of the business decision — roles, processes, skills, responsible use — not at the level of a tool demo.

6/7

Energy

Running on empty → Full of energy

What it measures: What reserve the team is working from. Not morale, but the actual capacity to carry one more initiative.
A low score looks like: The team functions, but on fumes. Anything new joins an already full list, and enthusiasm costs effort.
A high score looks like: There is energy for what comes next, not just discipline for what has already started.
What the work is: A low Energy score changes the design of the retreat, not just its content: the rhythm gets built to restore energy rather than spend it. This is where applied improvisation and creative work come in — not as entertainment, but because an exhausted team does not make good decisions no matter how good the agenda is.

7/7

Collaboration

Silos handing off tasks → Team solving together

What it measures: Whether departments solve problems together or hand tasks across the boundary.
A low score looks like: Polite silos. Each function optimises its own piece, and the problems that cross the organisation have no owner.
A high score looks like: The problem has an owner, and the team organises around it regardless of the org chart.
What the work is: A low score here is often mistaken for a communication problem. Usually it is one of ownership and incentives: nobody is rewarded for what they solve outside their own piece. The work is explicit shared ownership and working agreements between functions.

How to read the result

Each axis is scored from 0 to 100, by how far you drag the slider between the two described poles. There is no total score, and we deliberately do not compute one: an average of 60 could mean a balanced team, or a team that is excellent on six axes and completely stuck on one — two situations that call for entirely different retreats.

What matters is the shape of the profile on the radar. The lowest-scoring axis determines the recommended retreat direction, because it is the constraint holding the rest back. If Energy falls below a threshold, you also get a separate signal: not because it changes the direction, but because it changes the rhythm of the day.

The result is a self-assessment, so it reflects how the team sees the situation — not how it is. That gap is itself useful information: when several members of the same team fill it in separately, the spread of their answers says more about alignment than their average does.

What to do with the result

Three things, in order of usefulness. First: put it on the table at the next management meeting, as the starting point for an hour-long conversation about where you think you stand. No facilitator, no retreat.

Second: ask every member of the team to fill it in separately, then compare. Not the scores — the spread. If Trust comes back with answers between 20 and 90, you already have the subject of your next offsite.

Third: if the recommended direction matches what you sensed anyway, let us talk for 30 minutes about what the retreat would look like. The discovery interviews will replace the self-assessment with a sharper map in any case — this tool is the starting point, not the final diagnosis.

What this tool does not do

It is not a psychometric test and it has not been statistically validated. It is a conversation structure built out of facilitation practice with management teams, organised into seven axes so it stays comparable over time.

We are not building a benchmark yet. The tool does not store submissions, so we cannot say "management teams in Romania average X on Alignment" — and we will not say it until we have the data to support the claim.

It does not replace discovery. A score of 40 on Decisions does not say why decisions drag, and the cause changes the design of the retreat entirely. That is what the one-on-one interviews are for.

Frequently asked questions

What teams ask us most often before a retreat.

How long does the diagnostic take?

About two minutes. Seven sliders, each between two poles described in words. There is no form to fill in and no account needed.

Is what I fill in saved or sent anywhere?

No. The sliders and the result run in your browser; the scores never reach us. The only thing transmitted is your email address, if you deliberately leave it to receive the retreat mini-brief.

Who should fill it in?

Ideally every member of the leadership team, separately. What you are looking at then is not the average but how much the answers differ: the spread on an axis says more about alignment than any score.

What does it mean if the team scores well on every axis?

It is rare, and it is information in itself. The next step is then not to fix something but to stay ahead of the curve — usually through a foresight direction rather than an alignment retreat.

Is this a scientifically validated instrument?

No. It is not a psychometric test and it has not been statistically validated. It is a conversation structure built out of facilitation practice with management teams, organised into seven axes so it stays comparable over time. The real diagnosis comes from the one-on-one interviews before a retreat.

Do you have a benchmark we can compare against?

Not yet. The tool does not store submissions, so there is no aggregate data set — and we will not publish benchmark figures until we have the data to back them.

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