Learning a New Work System: First-Week Readiness AssessmentThe week before you know where anything is.
Sixteen situations in a system nobody has explained, on one four-point ladder, with the credit table printed on your report. About forty minutes.
The market tests whether you already know a tool. That answer goes out of date with the tool.
Every job now starts with a system somebody assumes you already know. A new rota tool, a new ledger, a new board, a new ticketing queue, a dashboard whose numbers you have to explain by Thursday. What gets assessed in this market is proficiency in a named product, which is a fact with a shelf life. What actually predicts how the first week goes is something else: how much you find out before you act, and whether that amount is decided by the situation or by your temperament.
Sixteen situations put you in front of a system you have not been trained on, and every one of them offers the same four intensities. Act on it now. Try it where a mistake is cheap. Find out how it works first. Stop and get the owner involved. One of those is right for each situation and the other three cost something, and which one is right is decided by what the action would do rather than by how careful a person you are.
Four of the sixteen warrant each intensity. That is the design and it is what makes the instrument work: somebody who always acts and somebody who always escalates score exactly the same, and both score far behind somebody who reads the case. The credit table is printed on your report in full — read a row as the situation and a column as your answer — and every column of it has the same mean value across the sixteen, which is why the four temperaments land on the same figure. The report demonstrates that on your own sixteen situations rather than claiming it.
Twenty-four further exercises cover the rest of the first week. The order of steps that costs least when you meet something new. What a test on a copy of a file actually proves and what it cannot. Four estimates of what a change is about to do before it does it, because knowing the blast radius is what makes a probe worth running at all. And how to spend somebody else's fifteen minutes so it answers something a document could not.
The two directions of the error are named in the words of the work and counted apart: going in cold, and stopping for something that could not have hurt you. They need opposite advice and a single accuracy figure would call them the same mistake.
What you walk away with
How closely your intensity matched what each situation warranted, drawn as a band with the 68 and 95 per cent spans written out.
All sixteen cells of the scoring model, so you can see what each answer was worth and disagree with it rather than take it on trust.
What always acting, always probing, always looking it up and always escalating would each have scored on your own sixteen situations.
How much you find out against how well that matched, with a time box, an irreversible-actions list or three small unchecked jobs written into the corner you land in.
Went in cold, and stopped for nothing. Opposite errors with opposite fixes, counted separately.
Chosen from your own lean, naming a specific situation and a specific behaviour rather than a quality to work on.
Inside your report
Illustrative sample — your report is generated from your own responses.
| Warranted ↓ / chose → | Act now | Probe cheap | Look it up | Get the owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Act now | 3 ✓ | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Probe cheap | 2 | 3 ✓ | 1 | 0 |
| Look it up | 0 | 1 | 3 ✓ | 2 |
| Get the owner | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 ✓ |
Every column of this table has the same mean value across the sixteen situations. That is what makes a fixed habit worthless.
Four situations warrant each intensity, so the four temperaments land on the same figure and all of them land behind reading the case.
Each corner carries an action rather than an adjective: a time box, an irreversible-actions list, or three small things done without checking.
Built for
- Anybody joining a team and inheriting systems nobody has time to explain
- Operations, finance and support teams where a wrong click reaches a customer
- Managers assessing how somebody will behave in a tool they have never seen
- Teams rolling out new software who want to know who needs what
Sixteen situations, one ladder, four intensities that all cost the same
40 exercises across five formats · about 40 minutes · a match figure with both spans, the credit table printed in full, every temperament priced, and a quadrant with an action in every corner.
₹999 (incl. GST) · assessment and full report, nothing further to pay
Frequently asked questions
No, and that is the point. Every situation is written in plain English about a described system, and none of it depends on any named product. Knowledge of a tool goes out of date with the tool; how much finding out you do before acting does not.
Only where the situation warrants it. Four of the sixteen situations warrant each of the four intensities, and the credit table is built so that every column has the same mean value. Always escalating and always acting score identically, and both score far behind reading the case.
Because the whole scoring model fits in a four-by-four grid and hiding it would make the score unarguable in the wrong way. Printed, you can see what each answer was worth, check the arithmetic behind every figure, and disagree with a specific cell rather than with the result.
It has no pass mark and it is not built as a screen. It reports a figure with its band, the two directions of your error, a quadrant with an action in it, and a receipt for every situation. The report says plainly that it says nothing about the fourth week of a system, when the questions have run out.
About forty minutes for forty exercises. ₹999 in India, inclusive of GST, or US$9.99 elsewhere, one-time, for the sitting and the full report.
Each one takes a single capability, puts you inside the situations where it is actually tested, and scores your choices against published evidence — with a report designed for that capability alone, not a template. They span hiring, compliance, education, operations and personal skill.
Browse the catalogue →Methodology: Forty original exercises across five formats: sixteen situational-judgment items on one four-point intensity ladder, six ordering exercises, eight select-every-that-applies items, four blast-radius estimates on a slider, and six true or false claims. Construct statement: it measures how much finding out somebody does before acting in a work system they have not been trained on, whether that amount matches what the situation warrants, and whether they can size a change before making it and use another person's time well. It does not measure knowledge of any named product, typing or navigation speed, general intelligence, technical aptitude, or suitability for any particular role. Declared response instruction: behavioural tendency on the sixteen situations - what you are most likely to do, not what should be done - and knowledge on the twenty-four supporting exercises, which are reported as their own strand and never mixed into the ladder score. Scoring: a WARRANTED-LEVEL MATCH. Every situation offers the same four intensities and each situation carries the intensity it warrants; credit is graded by how far the chosen intensity sits from the warranted one, with the direction of the error priced by what that error actually costs in that situation. Four of the sixteen situations warrant each of the four intensities, and the credit table is built so that the mean value of every intensity across the whole bank is identical: always acting, always probing, always looking it up and always escalating all score the same, and all of them score far below reading the case. Both directions of the error are named in the words of the work - going in cold, and stopping for something that could not have hurt you - reported separately and never averaged. The score is chance-corrected against an authored prior on every option rather than against a coin, so zero means no better than a respondent answering the way people typically answer. Reliability is reported as McDonald's omega rather than alpha and stated as an assumption until observed data replaces it; any part too short to carry a number receives a three-way placement with the arithmetic printed. Construct grounding, drawn across sources rather than from one framework: exploration against exploitation as a decision about how much to find out before committing (March, 1991); the value of information and the point at which further enquiry costs more than the error it prevents (Raiffa and Schlaifer, 1961; Howard, 1966); reversibility as the property that should govern how much deliberation a decision receives (Bezos on one-way and two-way doors as a management practice; Reason, Human Error, 1990 on error recovery); the exploration behaviour of people learning unfamiliar interfaces and the productive-paradox finding that people prefer acting to reading (Carroll and Rosson, 1987; Carroll, The Nurnberg Funnel, 1990); situation awareness and its three levels of perception, comprehension and projection (Endsley, 1995); safe-to-fail probes and the distinction between complicated and complex domains (Snowden and Boone, 2007); psychological safety as what makes asking a question in a new team possible (Edmondson, 1999); help-seeking that is instrumental rather than dependent (Nadler, 1998); the change-control principle that separates reversible from irreversible operations; payment-diversion guidance on verifying a bank-detail change on a channel already held; McDonald's omega in place of alpha (McDonald, 1999); and the standard error of measurement as the reason a band rather than a point is reported (AERA, APA and NCME Standards, 2014). All items are original works. No item, scale name or report section is taken from any commercial instrument, and no affiliation with or endorsement by any vendor is claimed or implied.