Transformation Readiness Sprint
Find out where your rollout will meet resistance while you can still do something about it.
Before you roll out the change you're accountable for, spend four weeks identifying where the human side is most likely to put your first 90-day milestone at risk, and leave with up to three targeted moves designed around what you find.
You already have a rollout plan.
There's a leadership presentation, an all-staff meeting, carefully drafted emails, a training schedule, and stakeholder conversations on the calendar. It's a good plan and it took real work to get here.
You've probably also had one conversation about this rollout that didn't sit right. A function went quiet. A question came back sharper than you expected. You noted it and moved on, because there wasn't time.
And if you've rolled out something at this scale before, you know how the months after launch can sound:
"Everyone agrees in the meeting, then nothing happens."
"People feel like this change was done to them. Now I need them to help make it work."
"Two teams keep escalating the same issue to me."
"Nobody is against it. Nobody is doing it either."
Those sentences get spoken months after launch. What produces them is usually in place before launch day, and it usually has to do with what people are being asked to give up, renegotiate, or do differently. That rarely appears anywhere in the rollout plan.
The cost of launching without that precision
Most organizations don't find out they got the human side wrong until months in — through avoidable resistance, surface-level compliance, role ambiguity, repeated escalation, quiet disengagement, and a second or third round of communication trying to repair a launch that didn't land the first time.
By then the credibility of both the change initiative and the people steering it has already suffered.
What you're aiming at instead
The Sprint is built to make a different day 90 more likely. The group you were least sure about was brought in early, the thing people were actually losing got named out loud, and the two functions that would have escalated to you all quarter settled it between them.
At day 90 you can say something specific about whether your milestone moved, instead of reporting that the rollout is underway and communication continues.
What the Sprint actually does
Over four weeks, KONU works with you and a targeted cross-section of your stakeholders to find where the human side is most likely to put your first 90-day milestone at risk.
Our diagnostic tools come out of the adaptive leadership work at Harvard's Kennedy School. Several were used in a program evaluated by a randomized controlled trial in Research on Social Work Practice. That study measured what participants reported, not whether transformations moved. [Read the study →]
We have done this work inside Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, research institutions, and national foundations going through consequential change.
How it works
Frame the transformation. A working session with you clarifies the change, the first meaningful 90-day milestone, and where you already suspect the launch could struggle.
Read the landscape. We engage a targeted set of stakeholders across about 8 to 10 diagnostic conversations, whether 1:1 interviews, focus groups, or team observations. This is built to test and sharpen your starting assumptions, not to produce a representative survey.
Diagnose the human transition. We synthesize what we heard into a concise read on what groups are being asked to adapt to, what they may reasonably be protecting, and where resistance, avoidance, or coordination gaps are most likely to surface. We test this with you before designing anything.
Design up to three priority moves. Not picked from a standard menu, but built around your specific diagnosis. Each has a purpose, an owner, and a timeline. They might bring a skeptical group into the design before launch, change how leaders talk about a real loss, or clarify decision rights between two functions before another meeting tries to paper over it.
Prepare the launch. We end with a working session rather than a findings presentation. We might rehearse a hard conversation, refine a stakeholder meeting, or work through exactly how a move will unfold.
You leave with a Transformation Launch Map: the 90-day milestone, the critical human dynamics in play, the priority moves, who owns each one, and the early signals to watch for once you launch.
Day 30 check-in, 30 minutes. Are the priority moves happening, and what has surfaced that we didn't anticipate.
Day 90 debrief, 60 minutes. What moved, what didn't, and what you'd do differently in the next stretch.
Three moves will not determine the outcome of a complex transformation. They will give you a more accurate read on what you are walking into, and a small number of actions built for it.
We will not add a workstream. If we find that your existing plan already handles the human side well, we will tell you that rather than invent work. You leave with no more than three moves, a plan your own team can run, and no obligation to bring us back.
Who this is for
Maybe it's a new strategy, a reorganization, an operating-model change, an AI or technology rollout, a leadership transition, or a major policy shift. The decision is made and you are launching it largely with your own people.
This isn't the right fit if the underlying strategy is still undecided, or if another partner already owns the human and organizational side of your rollout.
Who you’d be working with
Michael Koehler, CEO and Co-Founder. Teaches on the Doctor of Education Leadership program at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Carrie O'Neil, Engagement Manager. Fifteen years across USAID, Mercy Corps, and philanthropy. Taught senior executives at the Federal Executive Institute.
Joshua Albert, Associate Partner. Country Director and COO of Last Mile Health in Liberia, including through the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Gene Sun, Senior Associate. Masters in industrial and organizational psychology. Builds the measures that show whether a move is landing.
We are running the Transformation Readiness Sprint with three organizations at no fee.
The Sprint will be priced at $20,000 once it is out of pilot. We are not charging for these three because we are still learning what the strongest version of this looks like, and because we want to follow the work far enough to know whether it made a difference.
That second part is the actual price. In exchange for the Sprint, we ask for four things.
Access. Eight to ten conversations across the groups most affected, within a four-week window.
Room to change the plan. If we find something that matters, you need to be able to act on it. If the launch is locked, this is the wrong moment.
Ninety days of visibility. A short check-in at day 30 and a working debrief at day 90, so we can see how the moves landed and you get a second read at the point where most rollouts drift.
A written case study and one reference conversation. We will draft it, you approve every word, and you can stay anonymous at the organizational level if that is what makes it possible. The reference conversation is one call with a future prospective client.
If we get four weeks in and conclude your existing plan already handles the human side well, we will tell you that and we will still do the 90-day debrief. Knowing your plan is sound is worth having.
About the pilot
The Transformation Readiness Sprint is currently in pilot. Format, timeline, and pricing may evolve as we learn from early engagements.