The Lantern Diagnostics

Three short diagnostics to surface what your business already knows.

Designed to bring forward the often overlooked risks and opportunities that emerge in the day-to-day view of running a business.

Each takes roughly fifteen minutes. Pick whichever question matters most to you right now — or work through more than one for a fuller picture. There's no scoring, no benchmark, no funnel. Just structured questions that ask the things most frameworks miss.

The three diagnostics
01

Operational Risk Velocity

Time Roughly fifteen minutes
Best for Operators looking to understand the risks their business faces. An excellent starting point for those beginning to think about operational excellence.

The question it asks Which of the risks in your business are moving fast, which are moving slowly, and which kind is on your radar?

Operational risk shows up in two speeds. Fast risks announce themselves — a key employee resigns, a vendor goes down, a breach happens. Slow risks accumulate quietly — margin compresses by half a point a quarter, vendor lock-in deepens, technical debt grows.

Human attention is calibrated to fast change, which leads most organizations to track fast risks closely and slow risks loosely, often without realizing it. This diagnostic walks through five domains, asking what's moving fast and what's moving slowly in each — surfacing the pattern of where you're attending well and where you're not.

People & knowledgeVendorsTechnologyRegulatoryFinancial
Download the diagnostic PDF · fillable · 15 minutes
02

Sensing & Feedback Loops

Time Roughly fifteen minutes
Best for Operators who suspect their business has information it isn't using, or who want to think about how their organization actually learns.

The question it asks How does your business notice when something has changed — and what happens with what it notices?

Business problems are rarely invisible. The challenge most businesses face is moving from recognizing the problem to getting the right people to act on it. A bookkeeper sees margin compressing. A long-tenured employee notices a vendor's quality slipping. A salesperson hears the same objection three times in a quarter. The signal exists — but is it reaching decision-makers?

This diagnostic looks at the feedback loops your business depends on across five domains. It helps you examine how signals are being generated and what happens once they're received. Most businesses learn well in some areas and poorly in others; the asymmetry is usually the most useful thing the diagnostic surfaces.

Customers & marketFinancials & operationsEmployeesVendorsOperating environment
Download the diagnostic PDF · fillable · 15 minutes
03

Antifragile

Time Roughly fifteen minutes
Best for Operators interested in a structural look at where their business sits relative to uncertainty.

The question it asks Where does your business get stronger from stress, where does it just survive stress, and where does stress actually do damage?

Most business advice stops at resilience — the ability to absorb a shock and return to baseline. Resilience is real and valuable, but it's also not the highest bar. Some businesses, by design or by accident, use stress as a catalyst for improvement. Nassim Taleb, who coined the term, calls this "antifragility."

Two businesses lose a major client. One struggles to regain its footing; the other ends the year stronger than before. Same shock, different trajectory. This diagnostic walks through five domains and helps you place each on the spectrum from fragile to antifragile — surfacing where exposure has quietly accumulated, and where you may already have built more strength than you realize.

RevenueKey dependenciesOperationsFinancial positionPeople
Download the diagnostic PDF · fillable · 15 minutes
If something surfaces

Forty‑five minutes. Coffee, cocktails, lunch, or virtual.

If working through one of these surfaces something you'd like to think through with someone, grab time on my calendar.

I'm Zach Nelson. My firm, Lantern Strategic, is a consulting practice focused on operational capacity, risk mitigation, and technology. Most of my work is with owners and operators navigating the complexity that comes with scale, change, disruption, or all three.

The diagnostics on this page reflect how I think about that work — looking carefully at the structure of a business, paying attention to what most frames miss, and removing what's getting in the way before adding anything new.

Zach Nelson