Why preparation matters
One person may complete ORAVORN, but the assessment should not rest on one person's reading of the organisation. It asks for a grounded account of how the organisation actually works, and that is rarely visible from a single vantage point. A chief executive may understand the board-level conversation around AI but have less direct sight of how a change is interpreted by those expected to carry it out. A frontline manager may know how AI tools are being used in practice but have little access to the governance discussions that shaped their introduction. Each view matters, but each also leaves something out.
It is worth taking a little time before answering. A short pause to gather evidence and test assumptions can make the final submission more accurate, and it helps avoid recommendations being built on a view of the organisation that is too narrow or too polished.
Bring in more than one perspective
Before completing the assessment, speak to three to five people who see the organisation from different positions, not only those in senior roles. Try to include someone close to the point where AI is being used in practice. If there has already been an AI pilot, trial, or informal experiment, however small, involve someone who dealt with what happened on the ground, rather than relying only on the person who authorised it.
This is not a request for several people to complete ORAVORN separately. One person still submits the assessment. The difference is that their answers are informed by more than their own assumptions. For example, it is easier to judge whether concerns about AI lead to visible change after hearing from someone who raised such a concern, rather than working backwards from what leaders intended or believed should have happened.
Avoid completing it only from a leadership perspective
A leadership view is necessary, but it is not the same as a whole-organisation view. Senior leaders are often closest to intentions, decisions, strategy, and policy. They may be less close to how those decisions are interpreted, adapted, or quietly resisted elsewhere in the organisation. That gap is not usually the result of poor leadership. It is a familiar consequence of how information travels upwards and downwards in organisations.
For that reason, it is worth bringing in at least one perspective from outside the leadership team before completing the assessment. It gives you a better chance of seeing where formal accounts of the organisation and everyday experience do not quite line up.
Ground answers in actual AI initiatives, not general impressions
Where your organisation has real experience with AI, use it. Even a small pilot, trial, or informal experiment gives you something more reliable than a general impression. Ask what actually happened: how concerns were handled, how the initiative was communicated, and whether support continued beyond the initial launch.
If no real AI initiative exists yet, say so. That is useful information and the assessment is designed to capture it without forcing a guess.
Talk through disagreement rather than resolving it by averaging
If the people you consult disagree about how something should be answered, that disagreement is worth sitting with rather than smoothing over, disagreement itself is diagnostic information. If your leadership team believes AI governance decisions have a clear owner and your operational team isn't sure who that owner actually is, that gap is precisely the kind of finding ORAVORN is built to surface. In the Leadership Alignment construct, for example, there is an important distinction between disagreement that has been worked through and disagreement that is only being held together on the surface. If that harder conversation is skipped, the assessment is likely to lean towards the more comfortable answer, and the recommendation that follows will be based on an overly settled picture of the organisation.
Where disagreement remains unresolved, name it and choose the option that best reflects that reality, rather than the one that makes the tension disappear.
A note on preparation
These steps are not a formal condition for completing ORAVORN. One person can still submit the assessment. However, engaging in these preparatory actions make the answers more trustworthy. Without it, the assessment is more likely to reflect one position in the organisation rather than the organisation itself.