For Investors
The decision graph is how the organisation actually makes choices — who holds real authority, where information gets filtered at the seams, and where the formal and informal systems contradict each other. It's the layer that determines whether your capital converts into the outcomes your thesis described. Standard DD evaluates the market, the technology, and the team. It doesn't evaluate this.
Three depths, one method
Pre-investment organisational DD takes two weeks. Portfolio diagnosis on an underperforming asset takes three to four weeks. Post-investment structural redesign runs three to six months. Same diagnostic method throughout — Observe, Hypothesise, Test, Revise. The depth and the timeline change with the engagement.
Your due diligence reads the pitch deck, the cap table, and the CTO's LinkedIn. It doesn't read the decision graph — the layer that actually converts your capital into the outcomes your thesis described.
Read →Financial DD asks: is this a good investment? Technical DD asks: does the technology work? Structural DD asks the question nobody else is asking: can this organisation convert the capital into the outcomes the thesis describes?
Read →Everyone writes financial DD and technical DD. 'People DD' is a sales page term with no framework behind it. The structural assessment evaluates whether the decision graph can convert the capital into the outcomes the thesis describes.
Read →Can this founder scale? The usual assessment is personal — leadership style, coachability, self-awareness. The structural assessment asks whether the organisational design allows the founder to evolve, or traps them in early-stage behaviours regardless of capability.
Read →Climate tech is not SaaS. The operating model assumptions from software investing don't transfer to companies with hardware, regulatory dependencies, and project-based revenue.
Read →A Series B climate adaptation company with strong metrics and validated technology. The structural assessment found something the numbers couldn't show.
Read →The standard narrative says founders who can't scale need replacing. Structural assessment usually reveals the problem isn't the founder. It's the organisational design around the founder.
Read →The hire got the title, compensation, and mandate. They didn't get the authority, information access, or decision rights the role requires. The gap between formal and informal structure is where senior hires fail.
Read →The board sees 'execution problems.' The structural diagnosis sees a decision architecture that routes every product decision through the CTO, creating a six-to-eight-week delay on every release. One is a description. The other is fixable.
Read →A Series A clean energy company with missed targets, two COO departures, and board-level frustration. The problem wasn't the people.
Read →The pattern: portfolio company struggling, hire a COO, COO burns out within 18 months. The role isn't the problem. The organisational design is.
Read →The pattern isn't individual. Capella Space, Einride, Array Technologies, Sunrun, ITM Power — each replaced the CEO under different surface-level narratives. The structural mechanism is the same: the operating cadence the company needs outgrew the cadence the founder runs on.
Read →HBR owns the generic founder-to-CEO transition. The climate-specific version — where the founder's technical depth is genuinely irreplaceable and the operating model runs four cadences — is uncontested.
Read →The check is written. The company is struggling. Board advice isn't working. You've told the founder to fix the org three times. Nothing sticks. That's where structural diagnosis starts.
Read →What hiring a structural diagnostician looks like. From a two-week pre-investment assessment to six months of organisational redesign.
Read →Impact DD evaluates the market opportunity and the impact metrics. It doesn't evaluate whether the organisation can structurally deliver on either. The gap between stated mission and operational reality lives in the decision graph, not in the reporting framework.
Market narrative and physical science disagree on where climate capital is needed. The data points to sectors where small capital has outsized impact.
Read →Family office direct investing in climate tech is structurally different from fund investing. Standard financial DD misses the organizational risks that determine whether the company can deliver.
Read →Impact frameworks evaluate outputs: carbon reduced, people served, SDGs aligned. They don't evaluate whether the organisation can sustain those outputs.
Read →87% of millennial UHNW individuals consider social impact when investing. 30% of their parents do. The content industry frames this as a values conversation. It's an organisational design problem.
Read →Climate tech carries organizational complexity that SaaS frameworks can't see. The failure modes are structural, predictable, and invisible to standard due diligence.
Read →Family Offices
A venture fund with thirty portfolio companies absorbs organisational failure as statistics. A family office with five climate tech investments feels each one. The structural assessment gap between financial evaluation and organisational evaluation is where your investment risk concentrates.
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