The minimum group of five

Readiness data is the most sensitive thing a change practice holds. A sentiment snapshot that says a team is resistant, or a training needs assessment that says a team lacks a capability, is a statement about people. Aspen records both, and two rules govern how they are shown.

Nothing renders for a group under five

No sentiment aggregate and no training-needs result renders for a group of fewer than five people. The floor is the same for both. The reason is arithmetic rather than policy: in a team of three, "one of three responded negatively" is a statement about a person, whether or not a name is attached. At five the aggregate stops being readable back to individuals.

The floor is applied at render time, not at collection time. Responses from a small team are still collected and still contribute to the aggregate one level up, where the group is large enough. What is withheld is the view, not the data.

Anonymity that is structural

Pulse surveys are short, per-change, and distributed by link with no respondent login. Anonymity is configurable per survey, and when a survey is private the anonymity is a property of the storage: who was invited is held in one place, what was answered in another, and there is no key joining them.

That phrasing is deliberate. An anonymity setting that hides a column in a report can be unhidden by someone with enough access. A join that does not exist cannot be made by anyone, including KRD.

What stakeholders see

A stakeholder's own view shows the changes that affect their team, when, and the description an analyst wrote for them. It never shows sentiment, and never shows an assessment about the stakeholder's own team. The view is there to inform, and is designed never to alert or antagonise.

Sentiment is recorded, not derived

One more rule, about honesty. A readiness snapshot is per team and subject, where the subject is a change, a project, an initiative or a programme. A team can favour a change and dislike the project delivering it. Aspen records both and derives neither from the other, because a tool that inferred the project's sentiment from the change's would be inventing a fact about people.