The Stack Assessment

The other files in the toolkit each measure one thing in depth. This one works out which of them you should be using, and in what order. Fifteen minutes, twenty-five statements, and the output is a sequence rather than a score.

Excel (.xlsx), six sheets, and an 8-page PDF. No email, no signup, no drip sequence.

The number to read twice

The workbook finds the lowest layer that is not holding, then counts how many layers above it are nonetheless being maintained. That count is the point of the whole exercise.

Every one of those layers is real effort, genuinely spent by capable people, producing less than it should — and it will keep doing that however well it is run, because the problem is underneath it. Most businesses have at least one. It is very often the thing they are proudest of.

The pattern is easy to recognise once named. A business runs a genuinely decent weekly meeting and has started pushing decisions down. Both are real efforts, both run properly. And nobody can reliably say what is in flight this week, because work lives in three places and none of them is current. The meeting is good and produces less than it should. The delegation is sincere and keeps reversing. Neither failure looks like a visibility problem from the inside — they look like the meeting needing a better agenda and the person not being ready.

Five layers, and why the order is not negotiable

This is not a maturity model borrowed from somewhere. It is a dependency chain, and each link fails in a specific way when the one below it is missing.

Swipe the table to see how each layer fails →

Layer one is the only one about a person rather than a system, and it is there because the ceiling idea is fractal: a team’s cadence cannot exceed the reliability of the person running it, in exactly the way a stacked habit cannot exceed the reliability of its anchor. That is also the layer people skip when scoring, because it feels like a judgement about somebody. It is not — it is a question about whether the right person is holding the thing, and getting that wrong quietly is far more expensive than asking it out loud once.

One trick worth using

Have two people fill it in separately — the founder, and whoever would actually run the thing. Do not discuss it first. Then compare.

Any layer where you differ by more than two points is more informative than either score, because it means one of you is looking at the intent and the other at the practice. That gap is the finding, and it is the most productive forty minutes available to a leadership team that thinks it agrees about how the business runs.

The other tell is smaller. There is usually one statement where you find yourself constructing a case for “Partly”. That construction is the answer — nobody builds an argument for a statement that is comfortably true.

What is in the workbook

Start Here

The five layers, why the order is a dependency chain rather than a maturity model, and how to answer honestly.

Assessment

Twenty-five statements, five per layer, answered Yes, Partly or No. Fifteen minutes.

Diagnosis

Each layer scored out of ten and marked SOLID, HOLDING or NOT YET — then the answer: your next layer, the file to use for it, and how many layers you are maintaining on top of the gap.

Your Sequence

All five in order with what to do about each one right now. One says START HERE. The others say wait, and mean it.

Thresholds

What counts as holding. Two numbers, and only one is worth moving.

Snapshot

The one you send back. Your sequence, the gap, and all five scores fill themselves in.

It ships filled in for an invented business so Diagnosis has something to work with — a decent cadence and real delegation effort, both sitting on work nobody can find. Clear the answer column and do it for yourself, in one sitting rather than over a week.

There is no prize for being on layer five

The sequence is not a ranking and nobody is grading you. Being honestly on layer two with layer one solid underneath beats being nominally on four with nothing holding — which is, for what it is worth, the actual state of most businesses that describe themselves as mature.

And the instruction for the layers above your gap is not to stop them. Stopping a functioning cadence to go and fix visibility loses the rhythm and buys nothing. Keep them ticking over and stop investing in them — no new ceremony, no improvement projects — until the layer underneath holds. Then they improve on their own, without you touching them, which is the clearest evidence available that the diagnosis was right.

This is the working front end of Discipline Stacking — capability built by layering a small number of practices that hold each other up, rather than adopting a framework wholesale and hoping the culture arrives with it. The individual half is Habit Stacking, which is layer one.