Toolkit
The Dynamic Markets Model
Five stages describing how a market’s structure changes as a technology diffuses. Answers what kind of market something is going to be, rather than how large it will get. Checked stage by stage against the fixed internet, cloud infrastructure, and the smartphone industry.
The Trilemma Test
A step scenario planning usually skips: checking whether a system’s own stated objectives are compatible before building scenarios around them. Bounds the space by constraint, establishing what a plan cannot have rather than what it might get.
The Depth Test
Four questions, run in order, on any sovereignty claim: which layer it reaches, how deep that layer is, whether both jurisdiction and institutional freedom are held, and whether the position is a weapon or a guarantee of a seat. Most claims fail, and telling apart the failures that matter is most of the value.
The Opaque Surprise Test
Separates the third kind of surprise from the other two. Asks whether what is missing from a picture is genuinely unknowable, or merely unexamined, since only one of those answers leaves anything to do.
The Acquisition Test
Four questions run before a deal reaches a term sheet, on public data. Where does the target’s layer — not the target — sit on its own diffusion curve; does the valuation assume the layer’s future or its past; what does the seller know about that layer; and, for early buyers, is the infrastructure beneath it actually in place.
The Boundary Test
Four probes run before a scenario model exists, one for each place a future disappears: the unit of account, the voiding future, the constraint structure, and the clocks. The last finds phase risk — a plan that works at every level it examines and fails on the relative timing between them.
The Lead-Time Test
Four questions for any contest that looks zero-sum: what the slowest physical constraint is and how long it runs, how long the decision horizon of the people allocating is, whether the commitment can be unwound, and whether the participants can observe each other. Dates the interval in which the fight is rational, and the point at which it stops being so.
The Portability Test
Four indicators, dated at or near an industry’s peak firm count, that classify its capital as portable or anchored: a published secondary-market price for the principal asset, lending against it that survived the downturn, buyers of exiting firms’ assets from outside the industry, and plant documented as turned to another product. Crossed with the strength of increasing returns, it predicts how long a shakeout runs and what it leaves behind. Reduced to one question: who buys this if we are wrong, and at what fraction of cost?