The Grid
The map can be redrawn. It cannot be redrawn silently.
What this page is for
This page is the Lab’s map of results. Five capabilities, four practices, twenty cells. Each cell will eventually hold a verdict — delegable, assisted, or human-only — earned under the method. A new version of this page is published each time a cell changes; the version history is the history of the evidence.
The grid is the Lab’s instance of a general rule: verdicts must land on a map that was drawn before the evidence arrived. Anyone adopting the method draws their own grid — different capabilities, different practices. The map below belongs to this Lab, because the claim under test is about these four practices.
How to read it
- ? — no evidence yet.
- Expected: — a declared prior: a prediction put on record so it can be wrong. An expectation is a prior, not a soft verdict.
- Only results earned under the method change a cell’s state.
The grid
| Capability | Transformation | Portfolio | Programme | Leadership |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Triage — what deserves attention | ? | Expected: assisted | Expected: assisted | Expected: human-only |
| Drafting — artefact production | Expected: assisted | Expected: delegable | Expected: delegable | Expected: assisted, in-role only |
| Assurance — is this sound | ? | Expected: assisted | Expected: assisted | Expected: human-only |
| Decision-preparation — framing the call | Expected: assisted | Expected: assisted | Expected: assisted | ? |
| Stakeholder sensing — reading the room | Expected: human-only | ? | Expected: human-only | Expected: human-only |
One boundary drawn in advance
For Leadership, drafting means only work issued in-role to a governed audience: board narratives, sponsor updates, decision memos in the leader’s voice. Public writing and doctrine are artefacts that inform leadership; they are scored under Programme and Portfolio, not here. Leadership does not have a drafting column like the others — it has the preparation of words for presence.
The declared hypotheses
Three expectations are put on record before the evidence arrives, so the evidence can embarrass them.
- The asymmetry. The grid is asymmetric by the nature of the practices: Portfolio and Programme are rich in artefacts an agent can touch directly, while Leadership and much of Transformation are enacted on people and in timing, where an agent prepares the work but cannot perform it. If the asymmetry holds, it is the most important finding on this map. If it breaks anywhere, that cell is a headline.
- The two rows. The drafting row will over-perform and the sensing row will under-perform, with the most instructive territory in between — where what an agent can do and what an institution will accept part ways.
- The deliberate failures. Roughly a third of the experiments will run where failure is expected, because a boundary is only mapped from both sides.
Off the grid
Not everything the Lab tests fits these twenty cells. Some experiments apply the method to work outside the four practices altogether. They run under the same six steps, earn the same verdicts, and are published as notes like any other — but they occupy no cell. Their value lies elsewhere: they test whether the discipline transfers, which is one of the four questions.
If work off the grid becomes sustained and starts bearing on the claim, the grid itself can grow — by published amendment, under the same rule that governs every change to these pages.
The map can be redrawn. It cannot be redrawn silently.