The VACE Strategic Diagnostic

1. The Stagnation Audit: Does your organization explicitly measure "Value" as the transformation gap between current state and potential, or do you merely track output volume (tickets closed, features shipped)?

2. Complexity Amplitude: When you add complexity (new tools, new hires, new processes), does it amplify the system's total output (Positive Complexity), or does it simply increase the maintenance load (Bureaucratic Debt)?

3. Dead System Detection: Can you identify—within 24 hours—where flow has stopped transforming into impact? (If flow does not transform, the system is dead).

4. The "Why" Alignment: Is every strategic initiative directly traceable to a specific ROI or "Delta of Potential," or are teams executing based on legacy inertia?

5. Structure vs. Flow: Look at your org chart. Do you see static functional departments (Silos), or do you see "Value Highways" designed solely to accelerate ideas to market?

6. Friction Elimination: Do you have a ruthless, designated mechanism for identifying and eliminating architectural friction, or is "navigating bureaucracy" considered a necessary skill for your leaders?

7. Signal Fidelity: When a C-Level decision is made, does it reach execution without dilution, or does the message degrade as it passes through management layers?

8. Dynamic Geometry: Can your organizational structure fluidly reshape itself around a problem (Living Conduit), or is it rigid and brittle when facing new market demands?

9. Bandwidth as an Asset: Do you treat "Cognitive Bandwidth" as a finite, expensive resource that must be protected, or do you treat employee attention as an infinite consumable?

10. The Deep Work Ratio: What percentage of your top talent's time is spent in "Psychological Flow" solving complex problems versus switching contexts between low-value administrative tasks?

11. Wisdom Extraction: Does your system treat humans as "processors of wisdom" by offloading rote tasks to automation, or are high-paid architects doing low-value data entry?

12. Noise Cancellation: Do you actively engineer "Clarity Buffers" to shield decision-makers from operational noise, ensuring their decisions are high-leverage?

13. Linear Rejection: If you doubled your revenue targets tomorrow, would you instinctively try to double your headcount (Linear Growth), or would you look to technology to decouple output from labor?

14. Agentic Integration: Are you currently deploying autonomous AI agents to multiply the outcomes of your human workforce, or are you still using AI merely as a "helper" for individual tasks?

15. The Scale of Leverage: Is your technology stack designed to extend humanity and realize value at a scale unimaginable to the past, or is it just digitizing 20th-century workflows?