Tool 1 — Fragility Diagnostic Scorecard

See the fragility before the operating review pretends it is a surprise.

Rate each area from 1 to 5. 1 is major fragility. 5 is strong and well governed. The written report is emailed to the address below. Use a work email you can open.

1 = major fragility  ·  3 = works until it doesn’t  ·  5 = owned, tested, and recoverable. Name a first-pass owner even if the title is approximate.

1. Hidden Dependencies

Where do we depend on one person, vendor, system, data source, approval body, or customer concentration?

e.g. month-end close lives in one controller’s spreadsheet; 40% of revenue sits with one customer; one cloud region runs the portal with no failover.

Typical first owner: COO or the process owner; vendor manager if the concentration is a supplier.

2. Brittle Processes

Which workflows work only when inputs, timing, handoffs, and exceptions behave exactly as expected?

e.g. onboarding works only if HR, IT, and the manager hit the same Friday; a blank field stops claims processing.

Typical first owner: COO or process owner; CHRO if the break is in people and handoffs.

3. Decision Latency

How long does it take a meaningful signal to reach someone with authority to act?

e.g. quality drift shows up Tuesday; the change board meets the third Thursday. A shipment pause needs four approvals.

Typical first owner: CEO or COO for the decision-rights map; the functional VP for recurring decisions in that domain.

4. Incentive Asymmetry

Where does one team capture upside while another absorbs risk, burden, rework, or customer impact?

e.g. sales is paid on bookings; operations eats the implementation. Tickets “close” while the call-back queue moves next door.

Typical first owner: CHRO with the CFO; CEO if local targets are beating the enterprise.

5. Cultural Silence

Where are problems, near misses, dissent, or customer concerns not being surfaced early?

e.g. a safety near-miss is fixed quietly and never written down; people know an AI pilot invents policy answers and will not say so in the steering meeting.

Typical first owner: CEO models it; CHRO measures it; managers carry the signal.

6. Strategic Lock-In

Where have we committed too early to one vendor, architecture, workforce assumption, market path, or operating model?

e.g. a five-year ERP with no exit; the board has been told “we are an X-only shop”; hiring is frozen to one skill profile while the work is already changing.

Typical first owner: CEO and CIO for architecture and vendors; strategy lead for market-path bets.

7. AI / Technology Exposure

Where do data quality, permissions, model access, human review, or vendor dependence create unmanaged exposure?

e.g. a helper bot can see shared drives that still hold customer files; every pilot uses a different vendor with no stop rule; customer answers go out with no named reviewer.

Typical first owner: CIO or CISO for data and model risk; CHRO for workforce impact; a named executive sponsor for scale.