Where does readiness collide?

Gesell's 1925 The Mental Growth of the Pre-School Child introduced readiness as a maturational threshold: the level of physical and neural development a child must reach before instruction can take hold, so that teaching succeeds once the child is ready rather than through drill applied too early. Morphett and Washburne's 1931 When Should Children Begin to Read? gave the idea its best-known form, arguing that children learn to read more easily once they reach a mental age of about six and a half years. Here readiness is a stage of development inside one learner, not a slow brain potential before a movement, and not a workforce's willingness to accept an organizational change.[1][2]

Unit

A child's developmental threshold for benefiting from a given kind of instruction

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Gauged by developmental and mental-age assessments and by reading-readiness tests given before formal instruction

Kornhuber and Deecke's 1965 study of brain potentials during voluntary and passive movement reported the readiness potential (in German the Bereitschaftspotential): a slow, gradually rising electrical potential recorded over the scalp that begins up to a second or more before a person makes a voluntary movement. Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl's 1983 work in Brain tied its onset to the reported timing of a conscious decision to act, making it a fixture in debates on the neuroscience of will. Here readiness is a measurable build-up of brain activity preceding an action, not a child's developmental stage, and not a group's attitude toward change at work.[3][4]

Unit

A slow rising scalp potential, in microvolts, preceding a voluntary movement

Recovery means

The potential returns toward baseline after the movement is made

Measured by

Recorded by electroencephalography and averaged backward in time from the moment of movement onset

Armenakis, Harris, and Mossholder's 1993 Creating Readiness for Organizational Change defined readiness as the beliefs, attitudes, and intentions of an organization's members about how far a change is needed and how capable the organization is of making it. They distinguished it from resistance and treated it as a collective state that a change agent can build before a change is launched. Here readiness is a shared attitude held across a workforce, not a stage in one child's growth, and not an electrical build-up in the brain before a movement.[5]

Unit

A group's collective belief and intention about a proposed change, on attitude scales

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by employee surveys of the perceived need for a change and the perceived capacity to make it