01
Decision rights that exist on paper but not in practice.
A post-close mandate lands on an owner who, in the documented structure, holds the authority, and in the real one, never has. The plan has no one who can actually carry it.
Door · Private equity / pre-deal
Pre-deal. Read the target's governing documents before the value-creation plan meets them.
Your target's documented organisation and the one that actually runs have come apart. WorkLattice reads its governing documents as a connected system and shows you exactly where - and whether that gap survives the value-creation plan and the pace a new owner sets.
Diligence tells you what the target owns and what it owes. It rarely tells you whether the organisation can execute the plan you are about to impose on it.
Every target runs two organisations: the one its governing documents describe, and the one that actually decides, authorises, and escalates day to day. Under a new owner, at a new pace, the gap between them is where the value-creation plan slows, stalls, or quietly breaks. WorkLattice reads that gap before completion, from the document set you already have in the data room.
The load-bearing point
A thin data room is a finding, not a dead end.
A thinly documented target isn't un-analysable. It shows maximum separation between the documented organisation and the one that runs, and the thinness is itself the finding. Diligence rarely has time to interview; the governing documents are what you have, and they're enough to read the structure.
What it surfaces
Three gaps that decide whether the plan lands.
02
Shared terms that two functions read differently.
Approved, complete, escalated. When the same word means different things across the target, reported progress and actual progress drift apart, and the first 100 days run on the wrong number.
03
Records and escalation that dead-end before a decision.
Controls and reporting lines that look complete document by document, but stop short of the decision they are meant to reach. The gap is invisible to a control-by-control review and load-bearing under a new pace.
The same engine, read for the deal
One diagnostic, scoped to the diligence clock.
WorkLattice is a graph-based decision architecture diagnostic. It reads a governing document set as one connected system and shows where authority, obligation, escalation, and record break down: first where the documents contradict themselves, then where the documented organisation has parted company from the one that runs. For a sponsor pre-deal, that is a structural read of the target on the diligence clock, fixed scope and fixed fee, defensible in an investment committee.
For a worked example of the same method run blind on a stacked-framework document set, see the structural governance assessment.
Have a target where the data room reads cleaner than the business runs?
A thirty-minute conversation establishes whether a pre-deal structural read fits the situation, what it can surface on your timeline, and how it would be scoped.