Diagnostic Frameworks
A growing library of diagnostic lenses for enterprise leaders. Each one pairs a sharp metaphor with a measurement system you can actually score. Together they say what's really happening inside your organization.
“Every review layer that adds time without adding genuine insight is a tax on your metabolism.”
Three diagnostics. One institution.
RADAR audits whether the AI shape inside the company is real or performative. FGKD audits whether the people machine is fit for the AI era. CoG measures where the org's center of gravity actually sits versus where the strategy claims it should. Together they map the structural reality of an AI-era institution: tech shape, talent shape, and behavioral physics.
The Human Margin
"Will AI take your job? Find the corner your work actually lives in."
A job lives in the band between the work worth funding and the work a machine can do well enough for less. Two axes place your work in one of four corners: demand elasticity (does cheaper mean more?) and frontier distance (how far is the machine from doing it?). Then the financial-margin gate asks whether your employer can afford to fund it at all. The individual-level companion to the Margin Thesis. Anchored by the essay The Human Margin.
STACK Operating Model
"The integrated operating model every enterprise services org needs. They just don't know it yet."
Strategy, Transformation, Automation, Content & Knowledge. Five capabilities that every services organization runs as disconnected silos. STACK says: these are not five teams. They are one system. Invented at Google for People Operations at a 200,000-person company. Applicable to any enterprise with services at scale.
Agentification Prioritization Framework
"How to compare and sequence 83 AI agent opportunities when their impact dimensions are incommensurable."
A structured methodology for identifying, scoring, and sequencing AI agent opportunities across an enterprise. Four impact dimensions (Efficiency, Quality/Risk, Speed, Strategic Elevation) multiplied by three feasibility dimensions. Four strategic weight profiles let leadership choose their posture. The weights are the strategic conversation. The ranking is the consequence. Applied to 83 real agent opportunities at a 200,000-person organization.
Organizational Metabolism Index
"How fast can your organization absorb AI?"
Measures how fast an enterprise can absorb and operationalize AI. The binding constraint is metabolism, not capability. Most orgs have plenty of capability sitting unused because absorption speed is the floor.
Emotional Metabolism Index
"Does your organization have the immune system to retire workflows without rejecting itself?"
The follow-up to OMI, built on Fiona Cicconi's insight that retiring a workflow can feel like retiring an identity. The Purpose layer adds three organs of the adaptive org (Purpose · Metabolism · Immunity), Phase 0 (Purpose Audit and Rediscovery) gating the EMI 25-question diagnostic, the Same-Breath Principle as named operating discipline, and five dimensions read through the Purpose lens. Five named pathologies: Hill to Die On, Ghost Workflows, Allergic Reaction, Inner Circle, Quiet Quitting, plus Purpose Fog when the operating system is missing.
Human Ether Index
"What's the real productivity of your workforce.after all invisible overhead?"
Quantifies the gap between theoretical capacity and actual output. Most organizations assume 80% productivity; reality is ~16%.a 6.3x multiplier hiding in plain sight. HEI measures the invisible overhead that eats capacity before work even begins.
The Margin Thesis
"How exposed is your organization to the AI margin-compression cycle?"
Four-plus trillion dollars of committed AI capex forces a margin-compression cycle on every exposed firm, regardless of whether the capex bet itself pays off. Five firm-level factors predict whether you absorb the squeeze or get absorbed by it.
C²: The Agentic Multiplier
"Agent readiness is multiplicative, not additive: Content × Context."
Two axes, two five-level ladders, a 2×2 of named failure modes. Most enterprise AI pilots die between demo and deploy because organizations clean up content and call it readiness. Without context maturity, high content produces confident wrong answers. Without content maturity, high context produces brilliant routing pointed at an empty warehouse. The dimensions co-evolve. C² is the readiness math nobody is doing.
HR AI Impact Scorecard
"Did AI actually move HR, and for whom? Twenty metrics across four audiences."
Most HR teams measure AI the way the vendor demo does: hours saved, tickets deflected, a cost line that bends down. That proves value to one audience and leaves three unconvinced. Four lenses (Operations, Roles, Employees, Leadership) ask four different questions of the same program. Twenty metrics, each shipped with the guard that closes its loophole, because a metric is a behaviour contract and the lazy way to hit it is usually the wrong way. Measures reimagination, not automation.
Product Rx
"What's the right prescription for your product portfolio?"
Every feature is a medicine: Painkillers (urgent pain), Vitamins (long-term health), Antibiotics (systemic rot), Vaccines (prevention), Diagnostics (reveal issues). PRX measures whether you're prescribing the right mix, or overdosing on Vitamins while users bleed out.
RADAR
"Why is your AI transformation stuck?"
Five signals every AI transformation must transmit: Reimagination, Agentification, Data & Context, Absorption, Rails. Miss any one and the outcome is predictable: Faster Horses, PowerPoint AI, Hallucination, Organ Rejection, or Pilot Purgatory. Your weakest signal names the pathology you're closest to.
FGKD · Find. Grow. Keep. Deploy.
"Is your People Operations architecture fit for the AI era?"
Find. Grow. Keep. Deploy. Four verbs for the talent lifecycle, rewritten for the AI era. Find is thesis-fit, not skills-fit. Grow is structural participation across four currencies (scope, authority, decision rights, economics). Keep is written mechanisms, not trust-me promises. Deploy is moving scarce people and their expertise to the highest-value work fast, the axis most functions ignore and the one that is usually the binding constraint. Tier-calibrated against four player tiers (Native / Compounder / Fortress / Spectator). Anchored by the essay The Last Moat.
CoG · Center of Gravity
"Where is your org's mass, and does it match the strategy?"
The behavioral physics of the institution. Apex is what sits at the top of the status hierarchy. Orbit is what the operating cadence rotates around. Drift is the gap between stated strategy and observed gravity. The gravity is the institution; the strategy deck is the pitch. The wider the gap, the faster talent reads the company. Anchored by the essay Where Is Your Gravity?
GPO 2028 Readiness
"Are you the GPO of 2018, or the GPO of 2028?"
A diagnostic for Global Process Owners. The GPO role is shifting cognitive shape — from deterministic and case-by-case to probabilistic and system-by-system. Four quadrants from the paper 'The Future of the Global Process Owner': Process Surface, Policy Authoring, Quality Design, Exception Handling. Get your Tier (A, B, C, or D), your bottleneck quadrant, and a quarter's worth of moves.