Six questions. One honest reading of the layer your business is actually running from.
Most strategy fails because it's applied to the wrong picture of the business. This audit is designed to surface that picture — the implicit theory you've been operating from, and where it has drifted from what the company actually is.
Not what it does. Not what it sells. Not how it is positioned. What it is — at the foundational level. What category of thing exists when you point at this company. One or two sentences that would still be true if you removed everything about product, market, and revenue.
Describe both sides honestly. Don't reconcile them. Don't explain why the gap is fine. Just name what you thought it was going to be, and name what it has actually become.
Not what you sell them. Not what is on the invoice. What do they experience themselves as getting? If they described this purchase to a friend — not your product, but what they got from it — what would they say?
Give a specific example of a real decision you made — something you actually did — that you couldn't fully explain using the public story about what your company is. A hire, a pivot, a product, a client you took or passed on.
Not an operational mistake. Something structural — a direction you're moving, a positioning you're holding, a hire you made, a story you're still telling — that doesn't fit what the business has actually become. The thing you've been carrying without naming it.
Remove every story you've told about the company. Remove the pitch, the brand, the founding narrative. Describe only what you see happening — the work, the relationships, the exchanges, the decisions. What does an outside observer conclude?
Optional — leave blank if nothing surfacesThe full ontological audit is different. It surfaces what you don't know you don't know — the places where the company's actual behavior contradicts your theory of it, in ways you can't see because you're inside the system. That takes three or four conversations and an outside eye. If reading your audit above has surfaced something you've been carrying without language for, the right next step is a short conversation.