Which rung of the ladder should I start on?

Almost always one rung lower than the one you want to announce.

The Scope Ladder has five rungs, from a personal habit you build in an afternoon to a company you re-align over a year. The instinct, especially right after a good board meeting, is to reach for the top: re-form the whole function, re-align the enterprise. The instinct is wrong, not because the ambition is wrong but because the higher rungs are built from the lower ones. You cannot re-form a function whose individual roles have never been amplified. You would be drawing an org chart with nothing running inside it.

So here is the honest first move for most companies. Start at rung two, the workflow. Pick one process that carries real weight for the science or the business, not the easiest one and not the one with the loudest AI request. Give it a single owner whose job is the outcome, not the software. Rebuild it around what these systems can actually do now, rather than bolting a model onto the version you inherited. That is small enough to finish this quarter and large enough to teach you something a personal habit never will.

Why not rung one? You probably already have rung one, whether you named it or not. Someone on your team is quietly using these tools well. That is worth surfacing and celebrating, because it is how belief spreads, but it is not yet a transformation of anything.

Why not rung four or five? Because you have not earned the information yet. Every rung you climb teaches you what the next one costs, where your data is weak, and which habits are load-bearing. Skip that and you are budgeting a restructure on guesses. Do one workflow all the way through, learn from it, and let what you learn tell you whether the next move is a second workflow, the same person’s whole role, or the function around them.

The whole method is one honest rung at a time, in order. It is the same answer as where to start at all: one workflow, one owner, one real question, done before you start the next.

Cheers,
-Titus