Business · Universal Upgrade Process
The reports get longer every quarter. The next decision gets no clearer.
The people in the room are neither idle nor dim. One of the five steps every decision passes through is leaking, and the leak has a name. Twenty-two questions. About six minutes. Nothing to pay.
Why we are writing to you
Why we are writing to you about your business
A business is the one place where most people run the five steps of improvement in public, on a schedule, with witnesses. The occasion is called a meeting.
Every improvement passes through the same five steps. Someone establishes what is actually happening. Someone says what the business actually wants, in what order. Someone lays out the genuine alternatives and their costs. Someone commits, by stated criteria, to one of them. Someone carries it out past the point where it stops being new. We call the steps Baseline, Desires, Options, Decisions and Implementation.
A team that ships the product has run all five, whether it used those words or not. A team that discusses the same problem every Monday has a leak in one of them, and the minutes will not tell you which.
Most managers assume the leak is in Implementation, where the effort is visible and the excuses are plausible. We have seldom found it there.
Usually nobody measured what is actually happening, so the Baseline is a set of opinions with a chart on top. Or the decision that was minuted was never a decision but a truce: an agreement to stop talking, mistaken for an agreement to act.
The usual remedy is more reporting: a new dashboard, a longer deck, a weekly update on the weekly update. This produces activity, which is not a decision. Every hour spent reporting on a decision that has not been made is rework, paid in advance.
Upgrade IQ exists to locate the leak: 22 statements about how you run the five steps, about six minutes, no charge. At the end you have a dated number and the name of the step where your effort goes missing.
We say you deliberately. A business does not take an assessment; a person does. But whoever chairs the meetings sets their pattern, and a leak at the top runs downhill. Find yours and you have found a fair part of the company’s.
The framework
The five steps, as they happen in a business
Every meeting you have ever chaired ran these five steps, whether or not the agenda said so. Here is where each one leaks.
- 01
Baseline
Where the business actually is, measured rather than reported. A report is what someone chose to tell you; a measurement is what happened. Most companies have a great many of the former. The leak: a dashboard everyone reads and nobody believes, so each meeting opens by arguing over the numbers.
- 02
Desires
What the business actually wants, ranked, and owned by a named person. Not the mission statement; the thing you would give up the other things for this quarter. Most teams carry six priorities, which is to say none. The leak: a strategy everyone agrees with and nobody can use to say no.
- 03
Options
The genuine alternatives, costed honestly, including the one where you do nothing. In most rooms the alternatives arrive as two: the proposal on the table and leaving things as they are. The third option is usually the good one, and usually absent. The leak: a choice framed so that only one answer was ever possible.
- 04
Decisions
Commitment by criteria, not by whoever spoke last or longest. A decision names what was decided, who owns it and what would cause it to be revisited. Anything less is a truce, and truces are renegotiated every Monday. The leak: an action item that is really an agreement to stop arguing.
- 05
Implementation
Execution that is still happening at the ninety-day mark, when the launch is forgotten and the next initiative has arrived. This step takes the blame because it is the only one anybody can see. The leak: a team working flat out on a plan whose decision was never made and whose baseline was never measured.
What we have noticed
Eight things we have noticed about businesses that improve
We have watched a great many founders and managers set out to improve a business. The ones who manage it have neither the newest software nor the longest hours. They share a handful of habits, all dull enough to be reliable.
- They count before they conclude. A manager who believes the sales team is slow asks for the actual cycle time, deal by deal, before anyone is spoken to. The number often contradicts the belief. When it confirms it, the conversation that follows is short.
- They know what the business wants this quarter, in order. Not a list of priorities; a ranking. When two good things compete for the same engineer, the ranking settles it, and nobody has to call a meeting.
- They put the do-nothing option on the table. Every proposal is compared with the honestly stated cost of leaving things alone. A surprising number fail this test early, which spares everyone failing it later, in public.
- They can tell a decision from a discussion. A decision has an owner, a date and a condition for reversing it. If the minutes cannot show all three, they do not pretend something was decided. They say so, and decide.
- They treat a repeated meeting as a finding. The second time a problem appears on the agenda, the repetition itself is the evidence. Something upstream did not hold, and more discussion downstream will not mend it.
- They keep the reporting short and the decision loop tight. A dashboard tells you what happened. It does not tell you what to do, and a second dashboard does not change that. Businesses that improve spend their meetings on the decision, not the description.
- They let a change reach the ninety-day mark before they judge it. Most initiatives are called off at the awkward point where the enthusiasm has gone and the effect has not yet arrived. Waiting out that stretch is how a business tells a bad idea from a new one.
- They write down the starting point. A margin, a cycle time, a score: alone, each is a fact. Beside the same figure from two quarters ago it is a trend, and a trend can be acted on. Businesses that improve can produce the earlier number; the others remember it, differently, in every meeting.
None of this calls for a new culture, a new system or a new head of operations. It calls for knowing where the leak is, which in a business usually means whoever chairs the meeting. That is the person the assessment measures.
A case history
The meeting they stopped repeating
Every Monday, the team retold the same status updates and left with the same uncertainty. Each week the reporting grew a little: another slide, another metric, another column on the dashboard. The meeting got longer. The next decision got no clearer.
Their upgrade cost nothing. They replaced the agenda with three questions: what changed, what is blocked, and what decision must be made now. Anything that answered none of them went by email, or not at all.
The meeting shrank. More to the point, it began to produce decisions with names against them, and the next Monday opened by checking whether each had held rather than by describing the problem again.
Mark where the leak was. Not in Implementation, where the team had been working hard, nor in the reporting, which was abundant. It was in Decisions: the meeting had been producing truces — agreements to look again next week — and recording them as progress. The upgrade was a better decision loop, not another dashboard.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo da Vinci
The instrument
What the assessment measures, and what it does not
The assessment measures how you run a process. It puts 22 statements to you about the five steps: whether you measure before you act, rank what the business wants, cost the alternatives, commit by criteria, and still have a plan at the ninety-day mark. Each is answered on a five-point scale, from never true of you to consistently true. There is no right answer and no running score, so there is nothing to manage.
It returns two numbers and a diagnosis. Your Raw Upgrade IQ is what your abilities would add up to if the five steps were independent. Your Effective Upgrade IQ is what survives once a weakness at one step has taxed every step after it; that is the real number.
The gap between them is your Rework Tax, the share of your effort spent redoing work corrupted upstream. The result also reports your Baseline Clarity and names your weakest step — the leak — and your strongest.
So much for what it measures. Here is what it does not.
It does not measure your business. It measures the one person who answers. If you and your co-founder both take it you will have two results, which may explain a good deal about your Monday meetings. The instrument itself has no opinion on your company, your market or your team. It is not a strategy review, an audit or a valuation. There are consultants for those, and they charge accordingly.
It does not tell you what the business should want, only whether you have ranked what it wants and whether anyone owns the ranking. What goes at the top of the list is your affair.
It cannot tell an honest answer from a flattering one. The statements are easy to agree with, and people who describe the manager they intend to be score well and change little. Describe the one who chaired last week’s meeting.
It is a dated measurement, not a verdict. Take it again in six months and put the two side by side. The comparison is the useful part; the first number is only where you started.
Before you begin
Questions people ask before they begin
Must I own or run a business to take it?
No. The questions are about how you run the five steps, and you run them as a manager, an employee with a budget or a freelancer with one client. Choose Business because that is where you want to look, not because of your job title.
Can my whole team take it?
Each person can, separately, and each receives a private result. There is no team score and nobody can see anyone else’s. Comparing notes afterwards is up to you.
Is this about my company or about me?
About you. It measures how the person answering runs the five steps; your company’s figures, market and staff are outside it. If you chair the meetings, though, the two are not unrelated.
Who sees my result?
You do, by email. We ask for an address and nothing else: no phone number, no follow-up sequence. If you share the card, it shows only your strongest step. The rest stays with you.
Is there a catch?
A modest one. There is a paid Practitioner tier for people who want to go further; you will see it once, after your result. The assessment itself is free, and stays free.
Free · 22 questions · About six minutes
Before you commission another dashboard, find out which step is leaking.
The problems that return to your agenda every quarter do not return by chance. They escape from the same step each time, and until you know which, every hour spent on them downstream is rework. Six minutes will name the step.
P.S. If you are reading this during a meeting, finish the meeting. Then ask yourself what, precisely, was decided in it. The answer will tell you something before we do.
One email to send your result. No phone number, no drip campaign.