The audit fires the constraint while the deal sponsor is still drafting — not after the IC memo lands. Twelve specialized agents grounded in Kahneman, Klein, and Tetlock. The audit log carries the provenance, so the corp dev lead routes the flagged signal to the sponsor without spending personal political capital on the challenge. The methodology backbone (taxonomy, frameworks, regulatory map) lives further down the page for procurement readers.
This is a general-but-detailed walk-through of our methodology. It omits proprietary weights and prompts by design. Everything you see here is public-safe, citable, and reproducible against the academic record.
Selectively citing evidence that supports the dominant hypothesis and dismissing evidence that would reverse the call.
Suppressing dissent to maintain group harmony. The memo reads like unanimous consensus where there should be friction.
Senior-voice framing replaces independent judgment. The argument defers to position, not evidence.
Stated certainty far exceeds what the evidence supports. Confidence language without commensurate calibration.
Timelines and costs estimated bottom-up instead of against comparable reference classes. Understated by design.
Preference for the current path dressed up as strategic discipline. Inaction gets the benefit of every doubt.
Strategic Adjacency Audit. Zook core-vs-adjacency framework on the target's distance from the acquirer's core.
Synergy claims pattern-matched against BCG triad (mechanism / owner / 90-day milestone). Reference Class Forecast benchmarks projections against the 143-case base rate.
Full toxic-combination pass. Boardroom Decision Twin simulates 5-persona IC vote. Pre-mortem fires prospective hindsight (Klein & Mitchell 1995).
Deal Fever Check: scans final documents against original screening memo for escalation language and anchoring drift.
Cultural divergence + IT-simplicity fallacy + talent-flight retention. Roadmap: deeper PMI overlays land once acquirer-side engineering capacity is in place.
Severity-weighted count of detected cognitive biases, normalized to document complexity.
Inter-judge variance from the three-judge noise panel. Low variance = stable reasoning.
Share of quantitative claims that verify against grounded search, plus source reliability.
Was a prior submitted, outcomes tracked, dissent present, right committee size?
Inverse of the seven-framework regulatory exposure score from the Verification node.
Pattern match against 143 historical cases. Prior failure signatures drag the score down.
Board-ready. Strong reasoning across the stack.
Mostly solid. Address the flagged biases before the vote.
Mixed. Several reasoning gaps need explicit treatment.
Weak. Rework required before the committee reviews.
Critical. Reset the memo before re-circulating.
Groupthink + authority + off-balance-sheet masking.
Explicit risks, dissent tracked, reference class cited.
Narrative fallacy, founder halo, undefined unit economics.
Classifies the decision domain into high / medium / low / zero validity. High-validity domains have stable rules and rapid feedback (chess, weather forecasting one week out). Low-validity domains are noisy with delayed feedback (M&A, market entry, long-horizon strategy). Most strategic memos sit in the low / zero band.
Pure-function similarity scoring against the 143-case reference-class corpus. Returns top-5 historical analogs + matched-class baseline failure rate + four-band predicted outcome (succeeds / mixed / struggles / fails / too-small-to-judge). Structurally novel decisions return "too small to judge" rather than a fabricated forecast: the cold-start posture is honest.
Audits the second condition for trustworthy intuition. Has the decision-maker had enough closed-loop feedback in this specific domain for their experience to be calibrated? Verdict bands: adequate (≥10 closed outcomes in domain past 18 months) / sparse (3-9) / cold-start (<3) / unknown.
Three judges converge on the same score. The reasoning holds up — the memo says what it means.
Same memo, same prompt, three different reads. Something is ambiguous — rewrite before the board sees it.
Every bias name links back to a published academic source. A skeptical reviewer can chase any flag back to its original definition without leaving the document.
Ensemble sampling across three Kahneman-side nodes plus inter-judge variance scoring inside the Noise Judge node come directly from this framework.
Recognition-Primed Decision theory grounds the RPD Recognition node: pattern matching against a labeled historical library.
The foundational taxonomy for framing, loss aversion, anchoring, and availability biases detected by the Bias Detective.
Calibration methodology for the outcome flywheel and the Forgotten Questions node: what are you not asking?
Probabilistic decision framing behind the blind-prior capture and per-analysis confidence model.
Source for the 11 strategy-specific biases (entry-price anchor, thesis confirmation, winner’s curse, management halo).
18 rise-and-fall determinants (debt cycle, currency cycle, reserve-currency status, governance, infrastructure) feed the Structural Assumptions audit, the macro-layer pass that sits beside cognitive-bias detection, asking what the plan is betting on about the world.
Full data-handling and sub-processor list: /privacy.
Upload takes 60 seconds. The twelve-node pipeline you just read about runs on your document and returns a DQI, flagged biases, toxic combinations, and the questions the memo didn't ask.