Intelligence is only finished when it tells you what to do.
Most strategy work ends with a recommendations slide. Ours ends with a register: every finding traced to the page that caused it, sorted by who can fix it, with an owner and a date against each row. This page explains how that register is built, how the actions are ordered, and what happens after you act.
The one screen
The first thing you see in any Rathvane deliverable is one screen, built to be read in two minutes.
The verdict. One sentence on where you stand. Not a summary of the document; a judgment.
What it costs you. The deals, the trust, or the time the current state is costing, in the plainest terms the evidence supports.
The one move. The single action that matters most this week. Usually the one you can take without anyone's permission.
Three fixes. The next three actions behind the one move, each with an owner and a date.
Where the proof sits. A count of the captures behind the screen, and a link into the Evidence Locker.
Everything else in the deliverable sits behind that screen. You can read all of it, or you can hand the screen to the person who owns the first fix.
How an action gets onto the list
An action is never written first. A finding is. A finding is a claim with a capture behind it: the answer an engine gave, the page a buyer saw, the number a filing contains, dated and hashed. The action is what the finding implies, and it only makes the list if three things are true.
- The finding is traced to the surface that caused it: a page, a listing, a review site, a filing, a competitor's claim.
- The surface is sorted into one of three bins: one you own and can edit, one you can ask to change, or one you cannot touch and can only outweigh by publishing something better.
- The action is specific enough to have an owner and a date. "Improve messaging" is not an action. "Publish the pricing page; marketing; seven days" is.
Where the evidence is thin, the action is marked as reasoning rather than fact, and it says what capture would confirm it.
How the actions are ordered
The register is sorted, not listed. Four questions decide the order.
- Who controls it. Pages you own come first, because you can act today. Pages you can ask to change come next. Pages you can only outweigh come last, because they take months.
- How much it costs you. Measured by the evidence: how many buyers meet the surface, how early, and what it tells them.
- How fast it moves. A price published today changes what the machines say within days. A reputation surface moves over quarters. Fast and cheap outranks slow and expensive, when the cost to you is comparable.
- What else it unlocks. Some fixes make three other fixes possible. Those rise.
The one move is the top of that sort. The three fixes are rows two to four. The register holds the rest, usually ten to thirty rows, each one checkable.
What happens after you act
A capture is a photograph with a date on it. When you make a fix, we take the photograph again, at thirty, sixty, and ninety days, and lay it beside the first one. The register shows which rows moved, which did not, and what the next sort looks like. Nobody can produce that comparison retrospectively. It requires having taken the first photograph.
Where the register lives
In the deliverable, as the Action Register document. In Ask Rathvane, which answers "where do I start" from it and tells you who owns each row. And in every re-capture, where it becomes the record of what you did and what it changed.