Five minutes
AI Incentive Diagnostician
Describe a situation in your own words. The Diagnostician maps it across all six dimensions and returns the loop that's actually driving the behavior.
Run a diagnosis →
Stage 02 · Explore
Point the framework at something real.
Stage 02 is where Incentive Intelligence stops being a vocabulary and becomes a tool. Diagnose a situation, find the loop, and decide whether it's worth committing to a course of action.
The Stage 02 toolkit
Four ways to dig in, ordered by depth.
Twenty minutes
The III Assessment
A structured organizational read. Scores your incentive architecture across visible, hidden, perverse, missing, AI, and future incentives — and returns blind spots and interventions.
Take the assessment →Browse
The Labs
Perverse incentives, cognitive bias, logical fallacy, mental models. The pattern library for spotting incentive failures in the wild.
Open the labs →Worked cases
Case Studies
How the framework reads Musk, Bezos, Jobs, and a roster of companies you've never heard of. Useful both as evidence and as a template for your own diagnosis.
Read the cases →A workable sequence
How to actually run a diagnosis.
01
Pick the smallest unit you can name.
A team. A meeting. A metric. A handoff. Big systems are hard to see; small systems make the dynamics obvious.
02
Run it through the six.
What's visibly rewarded? What's quietly rewarded? What's rewarded that shouldn't be? What's missing? What is AI optimizing for? What signal is forming?
03
Find the loop, not the villain.
A bad outcome is almost never about a bad actor. It's about a loop that makes the bad outcome the rational move. Name the loop.
04
Test the smallest possible redesign.
You don't need to redesign comp. You need to change one signal in one loop and watch what moves. That's Stage 03 work.
Example diagnoses
Three reads from real engagements.
Dimension
AI dimension
Situation
A customer support org rolls out an AI assistant. CSAT rises. NPS quietly falls.
Diagnosis
The AI is optimizing for the metric it can see: resolution time and first-contact closure. Customers feel handled, not heard. The human reward (close the ticket) and the machine objective (close the ticket faster) are aligned with each other and misaligned with loyalty. The fix is the objective, not the model.
Dimension
Future incentive
Situation
A mid-size firm can't hire senior engineers despite top-quartile pay.
Diagnosis
The future incentive — autonomy, optionality, equity in something they believe in — is forming faster than the comp market is repricing. Talent is leaving for those signals two to three years before salary surveys catch up. The visible incentive looks healthy. The future incentive is the leak.
Dimension
Missing + Perverse
Situation
A nonprofit board obsessively tracks fundraising; program outcomes drift.
Diagnosis
Fundraising is measured weekly. Program impact is measured annually, qualitatively, by the people running the programs. Two compounding failures: a perverse incentive (raise more to raise more) and a missing one (no honest read on whether the money is producing the change the mission promises).
FAQ
Common questions at Stage 02.
What's the difference between the Diagnostician and the Assessment?+
The Diagnostician is fast and situational — describe a moment, get a read. The Assessment is structured and organizational — it scores the whole architecture across all six dimensions and produces an executive summary you can hand to a board.
Can I run a diagnosis on a personal decision, not an org one?+
Yes. The same six dimensions apply to a career move, a co-founder split, or a parenting choice. The Diagnostician doesn't care about the size of the system — only about whether you can describe it clearly.
How accurate is the Diagnostician?+
It's a thinking partner, not an oracle. Its job is to surface the dimensions you haven't named yet. The accuracy compounds the more honestly you describe what you're actually seeing.
Where should I go after I run one?+
If the diagnosis lands, the next move is usually one of three: a Workshop to redesign with peers, an Executive Course to build organizational fluency, or a conversation with the team about a tailored engagement.
Next · Stage 03
When the diagnosis lands, the work begins.
Stage 03 is where individuals, teams, and organizations commit — to the Executive Course, an enterprise license, or a keynote that turns the read into a change.