What it reads
Two axes, taken from the drift versus design matrix: how much an organisation notices about the decisions its systems now make, and how much it can still do about them. Awareness without agency is the Stuck. Agency without awareness is the Programmed. The Index reads where an organisation sits and, from the second edition, which way it has moved.
Underneath that sit the questions this estate has spent seven years arriving at: which decisions have quietly moved, who can stop each one, whether anybody has, and what the people around the system can still do without it.
It is a reading of judgement, not of adoption. Adoption is already measured by everybody and tells a board almost nothing it needs.
The cadence, stated in advance
First edition December 2026. Then every December, and the date is published before the work begins rather than after it, so it can be held against me.
That is the whole discipline. An annual reading that slips becomes a report, and a report is a thing somebody once wrote. The value of an index is that it is the current number, and the only way it stays the current number is that the next one is already dated.
What it will not claim
It will not claim to be a validated psychometric instrument. It is practitioner research: a structured reading, with a stated method, a stated sample and a stated list of what it does not establish, published alongside the reading rather than buried behind it.
It will not report a finding the sample cannot carry. Where the first edition is too small to say something, the first edition will say that instead.
It will not be sold. The reading publishes free, in full, with the method, on the same day for everyone. What is chargeable is the work that follows for one organisation, which is a different thing and is priced as advisory.
For a board
A board cut publishes alongside the main reading: the same instrument, read for the questions a board has to be able to answer about its own oversight rather than for the organisation's operations.
If the board wants its own reading rather than the national one, that is the board work, and the reading is the starting point rather than the deliverable.
