The Action Test is a diagnostic in the Prerequisite System that measures the true cost of completing work inside an organization. An analyst gives a worker a bounded and relevant task and observes every step taken to carry it from request to delivery, including clarifications, handoffs, time spent, and revisions. Repeated across roles, the test exposes hidden costs in time, labor, and outcome value. By mapping these flows, leaders can see where progress slows, where work fragments, and where value is lost, revealing opportunities to align execution and accelerate results.
The Information Test is a diagnostic in the Prerequisite System that measures the true cost of finding answers inside an organization. An analyst asks a worker a concrete and relevant question and observes every step taken to source the answer, including systems opened, colleagues consulted, time spent, and artifacts used. Repeated across roles, the test exposes hidden costs in time, labor, and outcome value. By mapping these flows, leaders can see bottlenecks, delays, and points of failure, revealing opportunities to align knowledge capture and accelerate decision making.
I’ve just published my latest paper on the Prerequisite System, a cornerstone of the Ragsdale Framework for Autonomous Organizations. In this post, I go deeper into what it means: the structural foundation every enterprise needs before it can evolve toward autonomy. By unifying fragmented flows, capturing decisions, and preserving context, the Prerequisite System makes organizational progress measurable. Without it, autonomy remains abstract. With it, aspiration turns into a clear trajectory toward alignment, acceleration, and eventual autonomization.
The IDE model once stands for Insights, Decisions, and Executions, but “execution” has increasingly proved too narrow to describe the flows that follow decisions. I am now retiring it in favor of “operation”, which captures ongoing, systemic, and scalable processes that sustain momentum and enterprise flow. This evolution expands IDE into IDO: Insights, Decisions, Operations. While older writings will retain the original term, future iterations of my research and papers will adopt this updated language.
Autonomization is the ultimate horizon of organizational evolution where every operation reaches maximum optimization. Automation has advanced execution, but most organizations remain far from this ideal. With recent advances in AI, artificial actors now contribute to insight and decision as well, pushing enterprises closer to true autonomy. Autonomization may never be practical in every sense and for every operation, but it should remain the guiding principle that directs progress and steers organizations toward greater resilience, adaptability, and optimization.