Ten questions that show where a major investment is carrying its risk, from irreversibility to exit optionality, so the decision can be prepared rather than simply argued.
This is a decision-preparation tool, not financial advice. Score the specific commitment on the table: the questions and arithmetic are fixed, and nothing you enter leaves your browser.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
The score has told you where the risk concentrates; independent challenge belongs exactly there. A confidential client brief points selected senior operators from the Global Board at those areas before the commitment is made.
Pressure-test this decisionAnswer for the investment as proposed today, at its current size and terms.
On these answers the commitment is survivable if wrong: it can be staged or unwound, it will not distort the balance sheet, and the case does not hinge on a single assumption. Structurally lower risk has its own trap, though: commitments that look safe attract less scrutiny per euro than they deserve.
The risk is real and localised: typically a dependence on one or two assumptions, meaningful size, or execution demands above what the organisation has recently proven. Investments in this band succeed regularly, but they succeed for prepared committees and surprise unprepared ones.
This commitment concentrates several unforgiving features at once: hard to reverse, large relative to the organisation, dependent on assumptions or timing, with limited exit between decision and outcome. Commitments of this shape are sometimes right, but they are never routine, and they should not be approved through a routine process.
No scorecard can tell you whether an investment will pay off; anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. What a fixed score can do is show where the risk is concentrated, so the committee spends its challenge where the commitment is most exposed rather than where the discussion is most comfortable. This tool prepares the decision rather than making it, and it is not financial or investment advice.
Exit optionality and concentration get the least airtime in approval meetings, for an understandable reason: examining them feels like planning for failure in front of the sponsor. Yet they are the factors that determine whether a wrong decision is a bruise or a crisis. A committee that cannot discuss the exit is not approving an investment; it is joining one.
Ten answers at 0, 5 or 10 points, normalised to 100, where higher means more embedded risk. Three bands map the result to a level of challenge rather than a verdict: the score cannot see the upside, by design, because upside is what every case already argues for itself.
No. It is a structured way to see where a commitment carries risk so the decision can be properly prepared and challenged. It does not assess expected returns, recommend investments or substitute for professional advisers where those are needed.
A high score stops the investment from being approved casually, which is different. Organisations rightly make high-risk commitments; the failures come from making them through processes designed for routine ones. The score calibrates the scrutiny, not the answer.
It is a finding. Have the sponsor and a non-sponsor score it separately and examine the differences: each gap marks a place where the case as written and the case as believed diverge, which is exactly where an approval committee should be asking its questions.