Every Richards Six assessment applies six structured analytical lenses to a single strategic document. The lenses do not operate in isolation. Every finding cross-references across all six sections, producing an interconnected evidence map rather than a list of opinions.
Every strategy rests on assumptions. Most of them are never stated. The Key Assumptions Register extracts the implicit and explicit assumptions your strategy depends on and states each one as a testable claim. If an assumption cannot be tested, it is flagged as unfalsifiable – and therefore a risk in itself.
Each assumption is tagged with a confidence level and cited back to the specific language in your document. The assessment then tests for fragility: what happens to the strategy if this assumption turns out to be wrong? Load-bearing assumptions – the ones where failure would collapse the entire thesis – are flagged for particular scrutiny.
A typical report identifies 6 – 12 assumptions. The register is not a list of criticisms. It is a structural map of what your strategy needs to be true in order to succeed.
This section identifies the external and internal threats that could damage or destroy your strategy. Each threat names the specific actor involved – competitors, regulators, market forces, internal execution failures – and is rated by both likelihood and impact.
High-risk vectors are supported by verification tables with sourced evidence, not speculation. Categories covered include competitive response, regulatory action, market shifts, technology disruption, supply chain vulnerability, talent dependency, customer behaviour changes, economic conditions, and internal execution risk.
A typical report surfaces 6 – 10 attack vectors. The goal is not to produce an exhaustive catalogue of everything that could go wrong, but to identify the threats with both the highest probability and the highest consequence – the ones that warrant immediate attention.
Based on the ACH method developed by Richards J. Heuer Jr. at the CIA, this section tests the central strategic question against multiple hypotheses. H1 is always the strategy succeeding as planned. The remaining hypotheses represent alternative outcomes – including at least one failure mode the subject has not considered.
An evidence matrix scores each piece of available evidence against each hypothesis, marking whether it is consistent, inconsistent, or neutral. The matrix is read by columns: the hypothesis with the fewest contradictions is the one best supported by the evidence. This approach forces the analysis to focus on disconfirming evidence rather than confirming what the subject already believes.
The section concludes by identifying the single most diagnostic evidence item – the one piece of information that most sharply distinguishes between competing hypotheses. This tells you where to direct your verification effort.
The pre-mortem sets the scene at a future date. The strategy has failed. Working backward from that failure, it reconstructs the sequence of decisions that led to collapse.
Each decision node presents: the decision the subject faced, the option they chose and why it seemed reasonable at the time, the most plausible alternative they rejected, an option they did not consider at all, and the consequence that followed. The reconstruction shows how individually defensible decisions compound into cascading failure.
All alternatives presented in the pre-mortem are grounded in industry precedent or documented evidence. They are not speculative inventions. A typical report contains 4 – 6 decision nodes, each one linked to findings elsewhere in the assessment.
Decision triggers are concrete, measurable if/then tripwires. They are not strategic recommendations. They are monitoring and escalation instructions – specific conditions that, if met, should prompt immediate action.
Each trigger includes: a severity level (WARNING or CRITICAL), a specific measurable condition with a number, date, or observable event as its threshold, an escalation action, an owner responsible for acting, a monitoring method, and a review date. Every trigger is designed to be unambiguous. There is no room for interpretation about whether the threshold has been crossed.
This section transforms the assessment from a static report into an ongoing monitoring framework. A typical report contains 4 – 8 triggers, each one mapped directly to an attack vector or assumption identified earlier in the analysis.
This section identifies failures in the subject’s thinking process, not external threats. It names specific cognitive patterns – survivorship bias, anchoring, confirmation bias, expertise blind spots, cultural blind spots, stakeholder perspective gaps – and shows how each one manifests in the document.
Each blind spot is evidenced from specific language or omissions in the submitted material. The analysis shows what the bias causes the subject to miss and how it distorts their risk assessment. This is not a generic checklist of biases applied to every document. Each finding is grounded in the text.
A typical report identifies 4 – 6 blind spots. These findings frequently explain why a particular assumption went untested or why a specific attack vector was overlooked – creating direct cross-references to Sections 01 and 02.
Every factual assertion in a Richards Six assessment is tagged with a confidence tier. This is not a formality. It is the mechanism that separates analysis from opinion.
Every assessment concludes with one of four verdicts, based on the severity and distribution of findings across all six sections.
| Verdict | Criteria |
|---|---|
| PROCEED WITH MODIFICATIONS | Core thesis is sound. Identified risks are manageable without altering the core strategic direction. No CRITICAL-severity decision triggers are already tripped. |
| CONDITIONAL PROCEED | Thesis has merit but depends on 1 – 2 unresolved high-risk assumptions. Proceed only if specific conditions are met first. |
| HOLD | Significant unresolved risks. Proceeding without further information or structural changes carries substantial downside. |
| DO NOT PROCEED | Fundamental flaws in the thesis, or CRITICAL-severity risks that cannot be mitigated. Evidence strongly favours failure hypotheses. |
Findings in a Richards Six assessment are not siloed. Every section uses a systematic ID system (A-01 for assumptions, AV-01 for attack vectors, DN-01 for decision nodes, DT-01 for triggers, BS-01 for blind spots) that links findings across the report. A blind spot in Section 06 may reference an assumption in Section 01 that it explains. A decision trigger in Section 05 maps directly to an attack vector in Section 02. The result is an interconnected evidence map, not a stack of independent observations.
See what this looks like in practice.
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