Map actions and consequences before you write a word.
Every business analysis and venture page starts here. Who reads it. What they intend to do. What cascades — up to the 5th order effect.
The consequence chain tells you what the page must prove, what tension it must create, and which action it must make impossible to avoid. Content follows. The chain leads.
Who? When? Tension?
Name the role, the moment they arrive, and the unresolved tension that brought them. Five profiles maximum. A specific person at a specific moment — never "people who might."
What do they intend to do?
Five actions per profile — one verb each. The page exists to cause action one. Name action five: the most likely wrong move. Both are load-bearing.
What cascades from that?
1° direct → 2° downstream → 3° system → 4° cultural → 5° structural. Trace both chains. The positive chain is the promise. The negative chain earns trust.
The agents section below is one instantiation. Your venture or journey page uses the same structure with different readers and different consequences.
Each first action opens by default. That is the pit.
Gravity pulls each reader toward action one. The negative chain on action two makes that gravity visible — and credible. Tap any action to trace its consequence chain.
Owner / Principal
Considering first real agent delegationTension — Scale without losing oversight.
Agent executes declared task. Receipt emitted to IntentTrace.
Owner reviews receipt. Trusts the trail. Raises spend threshold.
More delegation. Attention shifts from doing to reviewing receipts.
Team learns: agents can be trusted because receipts exist, not because humans watch.
Organisation operates at agent scale. Human effort concentrates on strategy, not execution.
Developer / Integrator
Evaluating agent APIs before building an integrationTension — Fast integration without inheriting liability.
Developer confirms which capabilities are live vs. planned.
Integration scoped to live capabilities only. No phantom calls.
CI validates against the schema. Breaking changes caught before deploy.
Team treats agent.json as a contract, not documentation.
Integration fleet stays current as capabilities graduate from planned to live.
Operations Director
Identifying which workflow to automate firstTension — Reclaim FTE without creating new failure modes.
Agent runs the workflow. Receipts on every step.
FTE freed from the workflow. Redeployed to higher-value tasks.
Second workflow identified. Confidence justifies expanded scope.
Operations team shifts from execution to review and improvement.
Business runs more workflows with fewer people. Margin improves.
Run the exercise. Then write.
The consequence chain answers the Direct Action Contract — seven diagnostic questions that determine whether a page passes or fails before a word is written.
Name your five reader profiles. Role + moment + tension. A specific person at a specific moment — never "people who might."
For each profile, list five actions. One verb each. Rank them: action one is what the page exists to cause. Action five is the most likely wrong move.
Trace the five-order consequence chain for action one (positive) and action five (negative). Both chains inform every section, stat, and prompt.
Apply the seven-question Direct Action Contract. If all seven questions are answered by the consequence chains, the page is ready to write.
Close with a CopyablePrompt — persona-tagged, 150–300 words, plain text. The prompt IS the action. Not a summary — the next move the reader makes with their own AI.
Put this to work
Map your reader profiles before you write your page.
For the page designer / builderCopy this prompt. Paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant. The page context is already loaded — send it and get analysis tailored to your role.
I am designing a page for a business analysis or venture. Before I write any content, I want to run the Actions and Consequences framework so the page causes the right action. My page context: - Page purpose: [describe what the page covers] - Primary reader: [role + the moment they arrive + the tension that brought them] - The action I most want them to take: [one verb — the single action this page exists to cause] - The wrong action I most want to prevent: [the most likely misfire if the page fails] For the primary action above, trace the consequence chain to the 5th order: 1st order (direct): what immediately results 2nd order (downstream): what that first result causes 3rd order (system): what that downstream effect triggers in the broader system 4th order (cultural): how repeated instances change beliefs and norms 5th order (structural): what the system looks like after this action has compounded over time Then trace the same chain for the wrong action. Finally, answer this: what is the single most important thing the page must prove to make the right action easier than the wrong one? And what should the CopyablePrompt at the close of the page ask the reader to do first?