The way work gets assigned and routed
through your organization
is collecting taxes you never agreed to pay.
Most leadership teams can name the symptoms. Decisions that keep getting reversed. Meetings that eat the calendar. People who were performing and stopped. What they cannot name is which tax their work demand design is collecting and what it is costing them. This diagnostic names it.
Performance Infrastructure for the people your organization depends on. Find where pressure is degrading judgment, decisions, and execution before the dashboard catches it.
Executive SummaryThe lowest-commitment way to put Capacity Intelligence to work on your actual problem.+
A half-day working session for managers and team leaders. Three hours. No pre-work, no homework, no follow-on commitment. You bring the execution problem you have been watching. We bring the diagnostic framework and run it live.
The diagnostic maps your organization's patterns to the five capacity taxes your work demand design is already collecting, runs the cost calculator live against your own numbers, and leaves you with a one-page summary of what surfaced and what it is likely costing you.
The diagnostic is useful on its own. It is also the entry point that most organizations use to decide whether a Capacity Audit is warranted. The audit conversation that follows is not a cold pitch. It is a continuation of three hours in which the framework already proved itself against your real situation.
Investment: $3,500 to $7,500 depending on organization size and format. No deliverable commitment beyond the one-page summary. No follow-on engagement required.
Why It Exists
The gap between the free calculator and a full audit is where most organizations stall.
The calculator produces a directional number in five minutes. The audit produces a defensible, CFO-readable cost analysis in three to four weeks. Most organizations land between those two: interested enough to want more than an estimate, not yet ready to commission a full diagnostic.
The diagnostic fills that gap. It is not a mini-audit. It is a working session that does three things the calculator cannot. It puts a trained facilitator in the room to read what the calculator cannot see. It maps the patterns your leadership team is already watching to the taxes your work demand design is collecting. And it runs the calculator live against your own numbers to produce a cost floor that belongs to your organization, not an industry benchmark.
For organizations where the $15K to $25K audit investment needs internal justification before it goes up for approval, the diagnostic produces that justification in a format leadership can evaluate firsthand.
The Five Capacity Taxes
Your work demand design is collecting these right now.
These are not new costs. They are already running. Most organizations cannot name them because they do not have a framework that treats work demand design as a cost driver. The diagnostic gives you the framework and maps your organization to it.
Meeting Tax (coordination cost)
Coordination overhead eating the hours when capacity is highest. When the calendar is full of meetings, the work that requires your team's best thinking gets whatever time is left. Which is usually none. The cost is not just the time in the room. It is the deep work that never happens.
Decision Density Tax (quality cost)
The reversed call, the missed flaw, the rework cycle. Decision quality drops as the day and week wear on. The resources high-quality judgment requires deplete under sustained demand. Errors cluster in the back half of the day and the back half of the week. Not because people are less capable. Because access to their capability dropped.
Recovery Debt Tax (attrition cost)
The replacement cost of regretted attrition. Recovery Debt accumulates when sustained demand runs without recovery built into the operating rhythm. The depletion compounds in stages. First the creativity goes. Then the replies get shorter and the ideas stop. Then disengagement. Then a resignation that surprises everyone who was not watching. Average replacement cost: 1.5 times annual salary, not including institutional knowledge.
Manager Load Tax (delay cost)
When a manager absorbs organizational noise and becomes the bottleneck every decision routes through, every team member behind them slows down. Work sits waiting for approval. Questions go unanswered for days. Team members stop raising new ideas because nothing moves. One person's depletion becomes the whole team's ceiling.
Forfeited Upside Tax (missed signals, connections, and innovation)
A depleted team member still completes the visible work. What they miss are the signals, connections, and improvement ideas that create future value. The customer cue that suggests a product gap. The cross-functional pattern that would have saved a quarter of rework. The competitive signal someone noticed but did not have the bandwidth to act on. These do not show up as a loss on any line. They just do not happen.
What Happens in the Diagnostic
Three hours. Three blocks. One cost floor.
The session is a working conversation, not a presentation. No slides, no pitch deck. The facilitator asks questions and the room produces the diagnostic.
Block 1 · Name the Cost · 35 minutes
The session opens with one question to the room: what is the execution pattern you have been watching that you cannot fully explain? One where capable people are underperforming and the usual interventions have not resolved it.
The facilitator listens for what the room does not say as much as what it does. Then introduces the core framing: capacity is how much of their own skill set people can reach right now, it fluctuates daily, and when it drops the cost concentrates in five identifiable patterns. The five taxes are introduced as a diagnostic lens, not a sales framework.
Block 2 · Find the Concentration · 40 minutes
The facilitator walks through each of the five capacity taxes and asks the room where they see each one in their organization. Not hypothetically. Specifically. The meeting that should not exist. The decision that got reversed. The team member carrying load that would be impossible to redistribute. The opportunity the team noticed and did not act on.
The room produces the examples. By the end of this block, the organization's capacity cost profile is visible in the room without a single piece of external data. That is the moment most leadership teams realize they have been watching a work demand problem without the language to name it.
Block 3 · Run Your Numbers · 40 minutes
The facilitator takes the patterns the room named in Block 2 and runs the cost calculator live against the organization's own inputs: headcount, fully loaded compensation, and turnover rate for the relevant population. The number builds on screen in the room.
The resulting figure is directional, not audited. It is built from their numbers, not industry benchmarks. That is the point. When the floor appears, it belongs to the organization in the room — not to a model that has nothing to do with them. The session closes with a clear read on which tax is concentrating the most cost and what a Capacity Audit would do with that finding.
What You Leave With
One page. Everything that surfaced. Sent within 24 hours.
The patterns named
Every execution pattern the room identified, mapped to the tax it belongs to. In the room's language, not consultant language. A record of what leadership already knew and could not fully name.
The primary cost driver
Which of the five taxes is concentrating the most cost in your organization, based on what the room identified. The dominant pattern, in your language, with the tax it maps to named explicitly.
The cost floor
The calculator output built from the organization's own numbers in the session. Not an audited figure. A defensible starting point for the internal conversation about whether the cost justifies a full diagnostic.
This is not a findings report. It is a session summary. The Capacity Audit is what produces a findings report. The session summary is what tells you whether an audit is warranted and where it should point first.
Who It Is For
Managers and team leaders who have been watching the same problem and want a clear read on what is driving it.
The session works best when the sponsor can name one specific pattern that has not responded to the usual interventions. A team that was performing and is not. A manager layer that is visibly compressed. A pipeline that has slowed without an obvious cause.
Right for a diagnostic
A leadership team of 6 to 10 with a named execution problem they have been watching for at least one quarter. An exec sponsor who will be in the room and can speak to what the team has already tried. Curiosity about whether the problem is a work demand problem or something else.
Ready for an audit instead
You have already watched the pattern long enough that you are confident it is a capacity problem, you need the defensible cost figure for a budget conversation, or you have a specific team and a specific business metric you want to measure. Skip the diagnostic and go straight to the audit.
Investment
$3,500 to $7,500.
Half-day session. 6 to 10 participants. Delivered in-person or by video. One-page session summary delivered within 24 hours.
Small leadership team
$3,500
Up to 6 participants. Half-day, remote or in-person.
Standard
$5,500
Up to 8 participants. Recommended for most leadership teams.
Extended
$7,500
Up to 10 participants or full-day format with two patterns examined.
No follow-on commitment. No upsell built into the session. If the session produces a clear case for a Capacity Audit, that conversation happens afterward on its own merits.
Where It Fits in the Engagement Path
The entry point before the entry point.
Most organizations move from the diagnostic directly to the Capacity Audit. The session summary becomes the internal document that justifies the audit budget: here is the pattern, here is the cost estimate, here is what the session pointed to as the primary driver.
You Are Here
Diagnostic
Half-day · $3.5K–$7.5K
Step 1
Capacity Audit
3–8 weeks · $15K–$25K
Step 2
Pilot
12 weeks
Step 3
License
Annual
The diagnostic is not required before the audit. Organizations that already know they want a full diagnostic should go straight to the audit. This session exists for the organizations that are not there yet.
Schedule a diagnostic.
Tell us the execution pattern you have been watching and the size of the leadership team. We will confirm whether the diagnostic is the right format, what the investment would be, and what a realistic output looks like. Most sessions are scheduled within two weeks of the initial conversation.