The method starts with what the company already measures.

I don't start by asking what your strategy is. I start by asking to see what you already measure.

The results dashboard. The targets book. The initiative portfolio. The minutes from leadership meetings. Every company I've diagnosed already had these instruments in place, often carefully built, refined over years, with good consulting behind them.

That's why the diagnosis doesn't start from scratch. It starts from what already exists. These instruments are the most honest picture of how the company actually manages, not what it says it prioritizes in a presentation, but what it truly tracks, holds people to, and discusses month after month.

And that's where the gap shows up. When I put the strategy the company declares side by side with the numbers it actually tracks, they're almost always two different companies. The strategy talks about growing, differentiating, transforming. The dashboard measures revenue, margin and the month's result. What the company says it wants to change isn't being measured anywhere.

Reading the instruments you already have is the first step, because they already contain the diagnosis. No one had stopped to read them with that question in mind.

After looking at the instruments, I look for three things. They aren't the only ones, but they show up in almost every company I've diagnosed, and they help explain why strategy stalls.

The first is the target with no tracking. The company sets an objective, puts it in the book, and through the year no one can really say whether it's on course. It only becomes clear at closing, when there's no longer room to react. A target you measure only at the end ends up serving to hold people accountable afterward, instead of adjusting along the way, which is exactly when the result could still change.

The second is the target with no owner. On paper it exists, often with more than one person responsible. But when I ask who actually answers for it, who loses sleep if it isn't moving, the answer dissolves. A target that belongs to everyone tends to belong to no one, and without someone carrying it, there's no one to correct course while there's still time.

The third, and the quietest, is the cause left in the dark. The company measures the result carefully, but doesn't measure what produces it. It tracks revenue, but not what generates the revenue. It looks at the month's result, but not the processes and decisions that led to it. When the number comes in bad, the search for someone to blame begins, because there's no way to show where the chain actually broke. What went unmeasured was the middle of the path, which is precisely where something could have been done.

I've noticed these three tend to appear together, and that they share a common root. The company learned to measure the result, the scoreboard, and gradually stopped measuring the path that leads to it. None of this comes from a lack of effort or competence. It comes from a way of managing that almost everyone inherited ready-made and rarely stops to question.

At the end of the diagnosis, what I hand over isn't a new plan with dozens of initiatives for the company to execute. Plans sitting untouched are what most companies already have plenty of. What tends to be missing is seeing clearly where what was declared and what gets measured stopped talking to each other.

What comes out is a verdict. A picture of where the strategy the company put on paper doesn't show up in the way it actually measures and holds itself accountable. Where there's a target with no tracking, a target with no owner, a cause left in the dark. And above all, what that is costing, because each of these fractures has a price that can be estimated.

This verdict comes with numbers, and it isn't my guess about how the company is run. It's a reading of the company's own instruments, handed back in a way leadership can look at and recognize. The strength of the diagnosis is that it uses what already belongs to the house. The one pointing out the contradiction isn't me, it's the company's own measurement.

The numbers behind this verdict belong to the company and stay with the company. That's why here I talk about the logic of the diagnosis, not about cases with names and figures. What I carry from one client to the next is never their data. It's the pattern that repeats, the signature I've seen across very different sectors, sizes and cultures. The data stays confidential, and it's the pattern that lets me get to the point quickly.