Most change initiatives don’t fail because of insufficient effort or poor execution. They fail because the people leading them never accurately diagnosed what type of change they were managing — and applied the wrong approach as a result.
This free 5-question diagnostic tool was developed by Braden Kelley — creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology and author of Charting Change — to surface the specific gaps most likely to derail your change initiative before they do. Takes 2 minutes. No signup required.
What This Diagnostic Measures
The five questions cover the dimensions of change planning that research and practitioner experience consistently identify as the strongest predictors of whether a change initiative achieves sustained adoption — not just successful implementation:
- Change type diagnosis — whether the initiative was formally assessed as incremental or transformational before planning began. This single distinction is the most underused and most consequential step in change planning.
- Implementation vs adoption timelines — whether the organization distinguishes between when the change is technically complete and when new behaviors are genuinely sustained. Most change programs conflate these, which is why so many technically successful implementations quietly revert within 12 months.
- Resistance mapping — whether likely resistance has been thoroughly assessed and planned for, not just acknowledged. Unanticipated resistance is the most common cause of change derailment in otherwise well-planned initiatives.
- Leadership modeling — whether senior leaders are visibly demonstrating the new behaviors themselves, not just endorsing the initiative. This is the single most reliable predictor of transformational change success and the most consistently underinvested dimension of change leadership.
- Behavioral success definition — whether the organization has defined what sustained adoption looks like in specific, observable behavioral terms — not just implementation milestones or outcome metrics.
What to Do With Your Results
If your results identify one or more gaps, the good news is that all five dimensions are addressable — and none of them require large organizational investment to improve. The most important step is addressing them before they become visible in the form of stalled adoption, resistant stakeholders, or a technically complete implementation that people quietly work around.
For a complete framework for addressing these gaps, the Change Planning Canvas™ and the Change Planning Toolkit™ — included with every copy of Charting Change — provide visual, collaborative tools specifically designed to build the diagnostic discipline, adoption planning, resistance management, and behavioral success criteria that this tool measures.
If you’d like to talk through your results and what they mean for your specific initiative, contact me.
About the Human-Centered Change™ Methodology
This diagnostic is grounded in the Human-Centered Change™ methodology — a visual, collaborative approach to change management developed by Braden Kelley and built around the Change Planning Canvas™, the centerpiece of the 70+ tool Change Planning Toolkit™ introduced in my latest book Charting Change (now in its Second Edition!). The methodology is designed to align with the ACMP Standard for Change Management and is used by organizations worldwide in both physical and digital formats including Miro, Mural, FigJam, and Microsoft Whiteboard.
For more on the types of organizational change and why diagnosing them correctly matters, see The Different Types of Organizational Change and Their Impact and Change Management Models: A Practitioner’s Guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does this change initiative diagnostic work?
The diagnostic asks five questions covering the dimensions most predictive of change initiative success: change type diagnosis, adoption timeline planning, resistance mapping, leadership modeling, and behavioral success definition. Each question has four response options reflecting different levels of change management maturity. Your answers generate a personalized score and a specific finding for each dimension — identifying where your initiative is strongest and where the most significant gaps are. The entire diagnostic takes approximately two minutes and requires no signup.
What does my Change Readiness Score mean?
Your Change Readiness Score reflects how well your current change initiative addresses the five dimensions most predictive of sustained adoption. A score of 80% or above indicates strong change management discipline across all five dimensions. A score of 50–79% indicates developing readiness — some good practices are in place but meaningful gaps remain. A score below 50% indicates early stage readiness — significant gaps exist in the foundational disciplines that predict whether a change initiative will achieve and sustain its intended outcomes. All five dimensions are addressable regardless of where you currently score.
What is the difference between implementation and adoption in change management?
Implementation refers to when a change is technically complete — the system is live, the process has been updated, the training has been delivered. Adoption refers to when new behaviors are genuinely sustained — when people are actually working the new way consistently, without reverting to old habits. These two milestones are often treated as the same thing in change planning, but they are almost never the same thing in practice. Adoption timelines are consistently longer than implementation timelines — sometimes by months, sometimes by years — and organizations that declare change complete at implementation consistently underestimate the investment required to achieve genuine behavioral change.
How is this diagnostic different from a change management maturity assessment?
A change management maturity assessment evaluates an organization’s overall change management capability — its processes, tools, training, governance, and track record across multiple initiatives. This diagnostic is narrower and more immediate: it evaluates a specific change initiative in progress, identifying the specific gaps most likely to affect its outcome. It is designed as a decision-support tool for change leaders actively planning or executing a change initiative, not as an organizational capability benchmarking instrument. For a broader organizational change management capability assessment, contact Braden directly to discuss an appropriate diagnostic approach for your situation.