Organisational Debt Diagnostic

I The problem

Rework, waiting, approval layers and knowledge held by one or two people never appear as a budget line. They appear as tiredness, attrition and projects that are always late, so nobody manages them.

II Approach

1. Measure the annual cost of compensating work by cause and by role: rework, waiting, knowledge concentration, stalled decisions and unsafe reporting climates.
2. Label every figure with its pedigree: observed, declared, taken from a published table, or estimated, with ranges on every estimate.
3. Render one canonical result into eight stakeholder views, so the CFO, the COO, employee relations and organised labour see their own view of the same number.
4. Turn the findings into a repayment portfolio and an ExCo decision brief.

III Structure

1. MeasureCost of compensating work, by cause and role
2. PedigreeEvery figure labelled by source and range
3. ViewsEight stakeholder views from one result
4. DecideRepayment portfolio and ExCo brief

IV The doctrine and dogma lens

Some organisational debt is cultural. It builds up where what an organisation says it values and what it actually rewards have drifted apart. The diagnostic can add three checks that read this gap from records rather than from opinion.

1. Reward gap. Set the stated values beside the record of promotions, recognition and escalations. Where a stated value repeatedly loses to something else, the record shows which one actually ranks higher.
2. Mistake test. Compare how decisions are treated when reasoning and outcome disagree: a sound decision that turned out badly, and a careless one that turned out well. An organisation that says it encourages experiment should stand behind the first and look hard at the second.
3. Symbol scan. List the terms that carry weight in the organisation's language. For each, ask whether it has a definition, an owner and a decision rule it changes. Terms that have none of these are ceremony, and ceremony has a cost in time and trust.

Like the rest of the diagnostic, these checks work on patterns across decisions. They never measure, name or rank individuals, and they report what the record shows, not what anyone intended.

V Craft and next

Diagnostic · Decision economics · Stakeholder reporting

In an illustrative sample, a fictitious 180-person claims department spends about one working day in five compensating for unfinished upstream work. The diagnostic never measures, names or ranks individuals.

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