The Grid

Giovanni Leonardi·August 2026·3 min read

An expectation is a prior, not a soft verdict.

The map this Lab is filling in

Five capabilities, four practices, twenty cells. Each cell will eventually hold a verdict — delegable, assisted, or human-only — earned by experiment under the Lab’s method. This page is the live state of that map, updated as verdicts land. A new version of this page is published each time a cell changes.

How to read it

A question mark means no evidence yet. Where a cell shows an expectation, that is a declared prior — a prediction put on record so it can be wrong in public. 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 that the evidence can embarrass them.

  • 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 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.
  • Roughly a third of the experiments will run where failure is expected, because a boundary is only mapped from both sides.

The state today

Twenty cells, no verdicts. The expeditions are designed, the instruments are under construction, and the first cells under test sit in Portfolio and Programme. This page will change.


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