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ch. 05 · methodology

The 6 C's.

Six dimensions of AI adoption, each anchored in research. The diagnostic measures the leader's read on each; the bearing names the pattern they're sitting in.

The 6 C's is HBAI's framework for naming where an organisation sits in its AI adoption. It draws on BIT AI ADOPT, ScienceDirect, Nature, BCG/MIT and adjacent literature, but the synthesis — the six axes, their thresholds, the named patterns they resolve into — is ours.

01

Clarity

Do people know what is being adopted and why — is the purpose articulated beyond "stay competitive"?

anchored in
  • AI transparency / job-role-clarity research — ScienceDirect, 2026 — the link between purpose articulation and adoption fidelity
02

Capability

Do people have actual hands-on skills, not just training hours on a slide?

anchored in
  • Technology readiness segmentation literature — Established frameworks for measuring practical fluency vs declared training
03

Confidence

Do people believe they can succeed with these tools, or are they anxious / quietly disengaging?

anchored in
  • Self-efficacy research — Bandura & successors — perceived agency as a predictor of sustained adoption
  • AI-anxiety / replacement-fear studies — Nature, 2025 — quantifying replacement-fear effects on team performance
04

Culture

Does the environment reward AI-augmented behaviour, or punish it (overtly or quietly)? Psychological safety to experiment?

anchored in
  • Psychological-safety + ethical-leadership literature — Edmondson + downstream — the substrate of any change effort
  • BCG / MIT culture-as-primary-barrier finding — Recurring finding: culture is the binding constraint on AI adoption, not capability
05

Cadence

Is the pace of change matched to the org's actual capacity to absorb it? Or paralysed / over-rushed?

anchored in
  • Change-readiness research — Pace-of-change literature on absorption capacity
06

Calibration

Is impact being measured honestly — including the human costs — or is the org performing success?

anchored in
  • Performance measurement research — The Patagonia / honesty register — measuring what matters, including what's costly to know

v1.0 · 2026 · revision-pending

This page is being expanded with full citations and per-dimension question rationales. If you'd like the current draft of the methodology, ask.