Your strategy is sound.
Will your organisation sustain it?
Most transformations don't fail on strategy — they fail when strategy, HR systems, and what people can actually sustain drift apart. ACI measures that drift, across all three levels, before it becomes performance erosion.
Three levels, three sets of respondents, one number that means something.
ACI is not another engagement survey. It measures coherence — whether what strategy demands, what HR systems enable, and what employees can realistically sustain still agree with each other under continuous change.
Frame the wave
We define the change wave under assessment — the transformation, restructuring, or AI adoption programme — and agree the respondent structure with you.
Three lenses, not one
Leadership, HR, and a workforce sample each answer only what their level can credibly see. Workforce responses are anonymous and reported solely as aggregates.
The coherence readout
The index scores each level, computes cross-level alignment, applies the well-being viability constraint, and prices in your digital-acceleration exposure.
Close the gap
A debrief with your leadership team, a written diagnostic identifying the lagging level, and a recalibration roadmap for the next wave.
Strategic intent
Is the direction clear, consistent, and communicable — or has escalation outrun the story? Plus the pace of technology-driven change as they see it.
Enabling systems
Do development, evaluation, and autonomy actually track what the strategy now demands — or are people being measured against a strategy you retired?
Agility & well-being
Skill adaptability, responsiveness, readiness for change — and whether well-being is holding. The two signals leadership optimism systematically overstates.
"Coherence is not a one-time achievement. Strategic initiatives unfold in waves, often overlapping and cumulative. Coherence therefore requires ongoing recalibration rather than static alignment."
Giugula & Dinu (2026), Strategic Change — the framework ACI operationalisesTwo moments when coherence decides the outcome.
AI doesn't break organisations. It amplifies whatever misalignment was already there.
Digital and AI-enabled acceleration raises the velocity of change — and with it, the cost of every gap between strategy and workforce. ACI measures your acceleration exposure explicitly and prices it into the index as an amplification penalty.
- Pre-deployment baseline — know your coherence before the rollout, not after the attrition
- Monitoring-and-trust check — whether digital oversight is reading as capability or as threat
- Adoption-risk readout — where discretionary effort will and won't show up
The strategy survived the board. Will it survive the organisation?
Restructures, integrations, and operating-model redesigns fail less on intent than on erosion — HR systems lagging strategic escalation, well-being quietly becoming the binding constraint. ACI shows which level is lagging while there's still time to act.
- Post-merger integration — first-100-days human-capital risk, quantified
- Portfolio diligence — will the management team's plan survive its own workforce
- Wave-over-wave tracking — coherence measured each wave, not assumed
Published construct. Transparent arithmetic. Honest limits.
ACI operationalises the adaptive coherence framework published in Strategic Change (Wiley, 2026) by Cezara M. Giugula and Daniel G. Dinu. Nothing in the scoring is a black box.
Multi-rater by design
Each construct is answered only by the level that can credibly report it. Strategic intent is not self-graded by the people who wrote it and workforce well-being is not estimated by the CHRO — the design excludes the optimism bias that makes most internal assessments worthless.
Well-being as a viability constraint, not a perk
The framework's central claim: employee well-being bounds what agility can deliver. In the index it acts as a moderator on the entire composite — when well-being falls, every capability score buys you less.
Digital acceleration as an amplifier
Technology pace is measured as an intensity, not a virtue. High acceleration with strong alignment costs nothing; high acceleration over cross-level gaps attracts an explicit penalty — misalignment gets more expensive at speed.
Anonymity with minimum cell sizes
Workforce responses are pseudonymous and reported only as aggregates, with a minimum-respondent threshold before workforce figures appear in any report. GDPR-clean by architecture: assessment data is held per engagement, never pooled with identifiers.
Repeatable by construction
The same 32 items, wave after wave. Because coherence is temporal, the instrument's value compounds with repetition — wave-over-wave movement is the finding, not the snapshot.
A note on what ACI is — and isn't yet
ACI is a disclosed-method instrument: the item structure, weights, and full computation are printed in every report, so your board can interrogate the number rather than take it on faith. Verified reports carry our review; Self-Administered reports say so. Standard licences contribute anonymised aggregates to the ACI benchmark and the ongoing research programme behind the framework — which is what makes the emerging reference ranges and benchmark comparisons you receive possible; a restricted-data licence is available for organisations that prefer to keep their aggregates out. Instruments that overstate their evidence are precisely the problem ACI exists to avoid.
Run ACI yourself. Licensed per organisation — never per head.
Every licence covers unlimited respondents within the licensed entity. Per-respondent pricing rewards shrinking the workforce sample — which is exactly how assessments go blind. Ours doesn't.
Verified, wave by wave
You run the instrument in-house; the wave becomes an official Verified report after a 90-minute remote review of your respondent structure and readout, with debrief. The recommended starting point.
Start a guided waveAnnual, unlimited waves
The full instrument, report generator, and emerging reference ranges and benchmark comparisons (as the reference dataset develops) for one organisation — run as many waves as your change agenda demands. Above 250 FTE and multi-entity groups: on application.
Licence your organisationFor consultancies
Run ACI inside your own client engagements. Requires the two-day certification (£2,500, one-off) to protect instrument integrity; client assessments are metered by credit. Volume terms on application.
Get certifiedResearch & teaching
For universities and researchers: the instrument for teaching, replication, and independent research, with attribution. Because an index only becomes a standard when others can test it.
ApplyThinking on coherence, change, and the human ceiling of transformation.
Adaptive Coherence in Strategic Change
The peer-reviewed article behind the index: workforce agility, SHRM, and employee well-being as a multilevel framework for sustaining adaptation under continuous transformation.
Read at Strategic Change →Why well-designed strategies still fail
Failure rarely starts in the strategy deck. It starts when HR systems lag strategic escalation — and nobody is measuring the gap. What the drift looks like from inside, and the early signals.
Read the briefing →AI adoption has a well-being bill. Someone always pays it.
Acceleration amplifies misalignment. Why AI programmes deployed through narrow efficiency logics erode the very discretionary effort they depend on — and how coherent HR systems change the sign.
Read the briefing →Tell us about the change wave. We'll tell you if ACI fits.
A thirty-minute scoping call, no charge. If the assessment isn't the right instrument for your situation, we'll say so — a diagnostic that oversells itself has already failed.
- 01Scoping call — the change wave, the population, the timeline
- 02Proposal with fixed fee and respondent plan
- 03Assessment window — typically two to three weeks
- 04Readout, written report, and recalibration roadmap