Where will your institution's capacity to act early actually break down?
Most institutions are built to respond to crises, not to prevent them — and most cannot say, in advance, where their own anticipatory capacity will break down. The Institutional Readiness Score answers exactly that question for a specific risk, scoring the institution 0–5 on each capability required to act early.
The output is not an average but a radar profile that shows the binding constraint — because the pillar that fails is the one that makes an institution act late, however strong the others are. In a public-evidence pilot assessing the EU and the US on readiness to act against AI-driven information disorder, both scored lowest on implementation for opposite reasons: the EU 'aware but unable,' the US 'capable but unwilling.' One generic prescription would have misdiagnosed both.
The instrument is built on an anchored scoring rubric and is validated out of time: scoring global pandemic preparedness on pre-2020 evidence alone, the profile anticipated the specific shape of the 2020 failure — high awareness, but low capacity, financing, and implementation.
The seven pillars
Strategic awareness
Does the institution detect the risk early and read it correctly?
Political incentives
Is acting early rewarded, or only punished if it turns out wrong?
Institutional capacity
Do the expertise, tooling, and standards to act exist in-house?
Financing
Can prevention be funded against a benefit that stays invisible?
Public legitimacy
Is there public mandate and trust to act before the crisis is undeniable?
Technology
Can the institution keep pace with the technical frontier of the risk?
Implementation
Do mandates convert into binding, resourced, operational action?