The Forward Intrinsic Diagnostic

I work through the artifacts that actually shape behavior: KPIs and dashboards, scorecards, incentive and compensation structures, performance review instruments, post-incident protocols, and the language of stated organizational goals. The aim is to map what your system is formally telling people to do, and where the structure creates pressure or opportunity for those signals to be gamed.

Confidential conversations with leaders and operators across functions and levels, designed to surface tacit knowledge: what people actually optimize for, what they’re rewarded and punished for, what insight they no longer offer, and where formal incentives contradict lived experience.

Where access permits, I observe how decisions actually get made: how disagreement is handled, whose judgment carries weight, and where the metric architecture is doing visible work in the room.

I then map three layers against each other: your stated organizational goals, your formal measurement and incentive architecture, and the behavior the system is actually producing. The diagnostic identifies where the three reinforce each other and where they contradict, which is where adaptation stalls, judgment is suppressed, and risk accumulates as fraud, loss, and regulatory exposure when measurement structures push capable people into patterns the organization didn’t intend.

Before any proposed metric is formalized or built into a measurement instrument, I run it through a structured self-scoring screening. The diagnostic identifies where existing measurement and incentive structures push capable people into behavior the organization did not intend. A replacement metric, introduced to correct that, can carry the same failure modes forward in a different form. The screening tests a proposed metric against the dimensions the published literature associates with distortion: its purpose, whether it is built to inform judgment and improvement or to evaluate and punish; its source, whether it was designed with the people doing the work or imposed on them; its complexity, whether it reduces a process that resists a single number to one regardless; and its relational effects, whether it sets managers and the people they measure against each other. Alfie Kohn’s work in “Punished by Rewards” on what happens when extrinsic rewards are attached to intrinsically motivated tasks, and Jerry Muller’s account in “The Tyranny of Metrics” of how measurement systems distort the behavior they track, inform what the screening looks for. The result is a clear read on whether a proposed metric would reproduce the conditions the diagnostic just surfaced, before it is committed to.

A free, public glimpse of how this screening thinks is open to anyone. The Risk Read reads the behavioral risk in a single metric you describe. It is a demonstration of the lens, not the screening itself.

Findings are returned as a structured account of where expertise is compounding, where trust is circulating, and where the metric architecture is producing behavior the organization didn’t intend, written in a register your leadership team can act on, not a register designed to impress them.