This isn't a page most advisory practices publish. Most lead with confidence and let you discover the limits later, if you discover them at all.
We think the more useful thing to hand a skeptical reader is the actual test — the specific conditions under which this instrument is doing real work, and the specific ways it could be failing without anyone noticing. If you're the kind of person who evaluates a claim by asking what would falsify it, this page is for you. If a consultant has never invited you to ask that question, that's worth noticing too.
One
The five conditions have to be findings, not a filing system.
Authority, Orientation, Risk, Temporality, Agency — five categories flexible enough to absorb almost anything that comes up in a conversation aren't diagnosing an organization. They're telling a story about it after the fact and calling the story a map.
For the Structural Assessment to be real, what gets surfaced in each conversation has to be discoverable independent of our expecting to find it there — not retrofitted into whichever category fits best once the conversation is already over.
If two different practitioners, reading the same set of conversations, sorted the findings into noticeably different conditions — the categories are elastic, not structural. Ask us this directly. We should be able to show you why a given finding is Authority and not Orientation, not just assert it.
Two
The oblique method has to surface something a direct method can't — not just something that feels more sophisticated.
We don't ask your leadership team to fill out a survey about their own organization. We read for what shows up in how five separate conversations sit next to each other — the hesitation before an answer, who looks at whom before speaking, the sentence that gets reframed halfway through.
That's only worth anything if it catches something a transparent, direct conversation would have missed. If oblique and direct methods produced the same map, the obliqueness would be theater.
If the Floor Map only ever confirms what your leadership team would have told you if you'd simply asked them directly — the method isn't earning its name. Ask what the Assessment found that a direct, honest conversation with your team would not have.
Three
The Floor Map has to predict something — not just describe something.
Describing why an organization is struggling, after it's already struggling, is not difficult. Almost anyone with experience can produce a plausible account of that after the fact.
The real test is whether a Floor Map delivered before an initiative launches correlates with whether that initiative holds — at a rate that beats what an experienced operator in the room would have guessed without it.
If, six months after a mapping session, the initiatives it flagged as fragile succeed at the same rate as the ones it didn't flag — the instrument isn't predictive. It's narrative. This is the single most important claim on this page, and the one we're most exposed on, because it can only be shown with evidence over time, not argued in a meeting.
Four
The repair has to hold after we leave — not just land well in the room.
We don't implement the fix. Your leadership team designs its own repair from the Floor Map, because a repair handed to you by an outside party doesn't restore the thing most often missing in the first place — the standing to act on what you now know.
That's a strength if the repair actually changes what happens six months later. It's an excuse if the diagnosis was accurate and nothing measurable ever moved.
If organizations receive an accurate map, design a thoughtful repair in the room, and the same pattern is fully back in place two quarters later — the diagnosis was real and the theory of change was wrong. That's a distinct failure mode from the map being wrong, and it's one worth naming rather than blurring into "it didn't work."
Five
Structure has to be more than philosophically correct. It has to be more actionable than the alternative it's replacing.
We hold a specific position: nothing comes from a vacuum, and behavior is downstream of the structural conditions it emerges inside — the way weather is downstream of terrain. We think that position is defensible on its own terms.
But being philosophically sound and being the more useful lever aren't automatically the same thing. You can't rebuild a coastline. You can still build a seawall. For this to be worth your time and not just worth agreeing with, addressing structure first has to actually outperform addressing behavior first — not just outrank it in an argument.
If, across enough engagements, organizations that received a structural repair fared no better than comparable organizations that ran a well-designed behavioral intervention instead — the theory would still be true and the practice would still not be worth commissioning. We'd want to know that as much as you would.
None of the five are disproven. They're the standards we hold ourselves to on every engagement — and the ones we report against.
What each of the five actually requires is the same thing: a real engagement, a real Floor Map, and enough time afterward to see whether it predicted anything. That's not a weakness we're disclosing reluctantly. It's the most honest thing we can tell you before you commit anything to finding out.