Most transformation projects measure the wrong thing. They track go-live dates, adoption rates for a new tool, completion percentages on a rollout plan… all useful, and all silent on the one variable that determines whether a change actually sticks: whether the people living through it believe in it.
That’s what the Buy-in Score is built to track.
Adoption isn’t buy-in
A team can technically “adopt” a new system: log in, complete the mandatory training, stop complaining out loud, without ever buying into the reason behind the change. That gap is where transformations quietly fail eighteen months after everyone declared them a success. The dashboard says green. The org chart says the reorg is complete. But nobody has rebuilt the trust, the informal cooperation, or the discretionary effort that made the previous way of working function in practice.
The Buy-in Score is designed to surface that gap before it becomes expensive, because unlike a go-live date, buy-in isn’t binary. It moves, it can regress, and it needs to be tracked at intervals that match how people actually process change, not how a project plan is scheduled.
Measured at 60 and 180 days
We check in at two points that matter for different reasons.
At 60 days, the initial shock has passed but the change hasn’t yet become routine. This is where early resistance either gets addressed or gets buried, and it’s the point where a targeted intervention (a workshop, a conversation with a specific team, a visible fix to a pain point raised in week one) has the highest return. It’s also the point tied to our engagement guarantee: a minimum of +10 points of buy-in within the first 60 days of a Pulse mission.
At 180 days, we’re looking for something different: has the change become “how we do things”,genuine cultural adoption, or is it still being maintained through active management effort that will collapse the moment attention moves elsewhere? This is the real test of whether a transformation is finished or merely paused.
What goes into the score
The score draws on structured interviews and pulse surveys across a representative sample of the organisation, not just leadership, and not just the loudest voices in either direction. It looks at three dimensions: understanding (do people know what’s changing and why), trust (do they believe the people leading it), and agency (do they feel they have a role in shaping how it plays out, rather than just absorbing it).
Low understanding with high trust looks different, and needs a different response, than high understanding with low agency. A single “engagement” number flattens that distinction. The Buy-in Score is built to keep it visible.
Why it matters more than the go-live date
A go-live date tells you a system was switched on. A Buy-in Score tells you whether the humans on the other side of that system are actually going to use it the way it was designed to be used, six months from now, without anyone standing over their shoulder. That’s the number that predicts whether a transformation was worth the investment, long after the project team has moved on to the next mission.
If you wish to be supported during your transformation projects, we invite you to schedule a meeting with The Change Society Office.
