Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur | Start and Grow Your Own Business 1317: The "Readiness Score" That Predicts if Your Big Project Will Succeed or Fail w/ Scott Sager
Tired of launching new projects, software, or processes only to see them fail because your team won’t get on board? In this episode, Scott Sager, founder of ChangeMap, breaks down the critical difference between project management and true change leadership. He reveals why even the most perfectly planned initiatives flop and how you can bridge the gap between building a great solution and getting your team to actually use it. This episode is a masterclass for any entrepreneur looking to lead transformations with confidence, not guesswork. Scott shares how he’s using AI to measure a team’s "readiness for change," turning scattered feedback into a clear, actionable score that predicts success.
💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business
- Why "on time and on budget" is a useless metric if your team doesn't adopt the change.
- How to use AI not to replace empathy, but to scale it across your entire organization.
- The "readiness score" concept: a simple, powerful way to measure your team's capacity for change before you invest time and money.
- The critical link between organizational trust and the ability to implement new ideas successfully.
- How to identify change "saturation" and "collisions" to avoid overwhelming your team and causing burnout.
- The difference between project management (building the bridge) and change leadership (helping people cross it).
- A framework for turning scattered feedback from spreadsheets, emails, and conversations into unified, actionable insight.
📝 About Scott Sager
Scott Sager is the founder of ChangeMap, an AI-enabled platform that helps organizations navigate transformation with clarity. With over 15 years of experience leading large-scale change initiatives, he saw a recurring problem: leaders struggle to understand what's holding their teams back from adopting new systems and processes. This insight led him to build a tool that makes change management more data-informed and human-centric. Scott brings a unique blend of academic rigor and real-world consulting experience, making complex concepts like organizational readiness accessible and actionable for any leader.
🎯 Scott’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs
"It's not just curiosity. It's putting in that work to listen and being the person who's going to work the hardest to listen... There are going to be those people who want to help you make it better. Those are the voices to listen to."
📢 Memorable Quotes
- “Salesforce doesn't make you a great salesperson. Salesforce equips your organization to help you sell better... people still need to walk across [the bridge] to get to the cool stuff on the other side.” – Scott Sager
- “We injected AI into the platform not to replace empathy and engagement. We put it in there to scale it.” – Scott Sager
- "High trust environments can take on a lot of change, low trust environments not a whole lot." – Scott Sager
🔗 Links & Resources