Constraint Density Audit

Your company doesn't slow down. It jams.

A two-week diagnostic that finds the rules costing you the most decision speed - and the three changes that buy it back. Fixed scope, fixed price, and you see the sample report before you pay anything.

Book the Free Call See the Sample Report

Sound familiar?

Why this happens: rules only accumulate. The US Code of Federal Regulations grew from 19,335 pages to 134,261 in 56 years - about 3.5% compound, every single year (Dawson and Seater's count). Companies behave the same way: every incident adds a rule, and no rule ever has to earn its keep again.

  • Decisions that took a week now take a month - and nobody ever decided to slow down.
  • Every initiative starts with sign-offs from legal, security, brand, and two platform teams.
  • Your best people quietly route around the official process. And privately, you're glad they do.
  • You add process every year. You have never removed any.
Sound familiar?

It's not how many rules. It's how many things each rule touches.

We ran a controlled experiment: seventy runs of an AI agent under growing rule sets. An AI agent is not a company - it is the cleanest system in which this arithmetic shows itself. Whether the same collapse is building inside your organization is exactly what this audit measures. On your data, not ours.

  • Forty rules that did not overlap: followed almost perfectly.
  • Make the rules overlap - each rule touching the same work as the others - and perfect runs collapsed from four in five to one in five.
  • The rule that failed first was not the hardest one. It was the most connected one, and it failed only under load.
  • Most companies count policies. Nobody measures coupling. That is the dial this audit reads.
It's not how many rules. It's how many things each rule touches.
2 weeks Fixed scope, fixed price
5 Numbers in your report
3 Changes, ranked, yours to overrule
4,500 EUR Half on start, half after the readout

What we do: five numbers, three moves

Two weeks, fixed scope. Your side of the cost, itemized: three file exports, five 45-minute interviews, one 90-minute readout. No system access. NDA first; exports can be pseudonymized before they leave your building, and everything is deleted after the engagement. Where each number comes from: the Rule Load Index, Coupling Map and speedometer fall out of your exports; the paper-vs-practice gap comes from the interviews cross-checked against the tickets; the three changes are our judgment - ranked, so you can overrule it. And if your ticket history turns out too thin to carry the analysis, we tell you on the free call, before you pay anything.

1

Week 1 - measure. You send three exports: your ticket system (Jira or whatever you run), your process docs wherever they actually live - Confluence graveyard, ISO folder, workflow configs - and the org chart. Then five interviews, chosen together at kickoff: the people who make the decisions and the people who wait for them.

2

Rule Load Index - how many binding rules the average decision must clear before it is allowed to happen. A decision is anything that waits for a yes: a release, a hire, a price change, a customer exception. Your baseline.

3

Coupling Map - the ten rules that touch the most teams, systems, and other rules. These - not your newest policies - are where speed goes to die.

4

Paper-vs-practice gap - the rules your organization already ignores in practice. Every quiet workaround is a warning light.

5

Decision speedometer - how long decisions actually take: the median and the spread. Not your dev cycle-time dashboard - decision latency: approvals, exceptions, hires, releases. The spread usually starts climbing before the average does; that is the earliest warning you will get.

6

Three changes - three specific rules to delete, split, or narrow. For each: why this one, what should get faster, the risk, and how you will see the effect in your own numbers within 60 days. Ranked. Your call which to act on.

7

The readout - 90 minutes with your leadership team, not a presentation. Minutes 0-30: your five numbers, and how close they say you are to jamming. Minutes 30-70: the Coupling Map, rule by rule - we argue about the three changes until your team owns them, or replaces them with better ones. Minutes 70-90: the tracking metric, so in 60 days you see in your own data whether decision time recovered. You leave with a decision made, not a deck to file.

Before you pay, check us: we ran it on the EU's own rulebook

You do not have to trust us. Before the call you get the sample report: this exact method run on 12 EU digital acts, half a million words of law, every number computed from the official texts on EUR-Lex. You can verify every figure yourself.

  • GDPR is cited by 9 of the 11 other acts - 212 references. The load-bearing wall of the whole rulebook.
  • The coupling of each new act has grown 6x in a decade: acts adopted 2002-2019 average 8 references to the others; acts from 2022-2024 average 53.
  • ePrivacy (2002) is wired into 9 newer acts. The attempt to replace it died after 102 months. Deleting a coupled rule is the hardest move there is.
  • The full corpus: 512,370 words - 42.7 hours of reading at 200 words a minute. For a specimen 150-person software company, 7 of the 12 acts bind outright, 3 more conditionally.
Before you pay, check us: we ran it on the EU's own rulebook

Price, guarantee, first move

No day rate, no extensions, no phase two hiding behind phase one. A full operating-model review from a big firm costs many times this and takes a quarter; this is the surgical version.

The Audit - 4,500 EUR fixed

About 19,000 PLN. Half on start, half after the readout. One question - which rules cost you the most speed - answered in two weeks: five numbers, three moves.

The Guarantee - you judge, not us

If the readout does not produce at least three changes your own team agrees are worth making, the second half of the fee is waived.

The Free Call - 30 minutes

Bring one recent decision that took too long. We tell you which rules we would look at first and what we would measure - whether or not you hire us. The sample report lands in your inbox before the call. If it is not a fit, you will know inside 30 minutes.

Three objections, answered

What this is not: a reorg, a transformation program, or a headcount exercise. Nobody gets blamed - every rule in your company was rational the day it was written. We audit the compound effect, not the authors. Legal and compliance keep their veto: we rank, you decide.

  • "We already know where our bottlenecks are." You know the symptoms. The Coupling Map usually surprises: the most expensive rule is rarely the most complained-about one. It is the quiet one that touches everything - invisible precisely because it fails only when everything else is busy.
  • "Compliance will block this." Compliance blocks deletion crusades. This is not one. It is a ranked list of which rules carry the most coupling, with a risk note on each. In practice compliance becomes the ally: they would rather formalize five real exceptions than keep pretending the workarounds don't exist.
  • "Why now?" Because rule load only moves in one direction, and the spread in your decision times is already telling you where you are headed. Reading the dial costs two weeks. Discovering it during a crisis costs the quarter.
Three objections, answered

Who's asking

Maciej Jankowski

Maciej Jankowski

Runs the audit

More than fifteen years in software: CRM systems consultant, then full-stack engineer, most recently AI transformation projects at Future Processing. Along the way I co-founded a startup and personally pitched the round that raised 3 million PLN. This audit is new: you would be among its first three clients, and the price reflects that. The experiment behind it is real and reproducible; whether it holds at your scale is what the audit tests, on your numbers. I would rather be checkable than believed.

Bring one decision that took too long

A free 30-minute call. We tell you which rules we would look at first and what we would measure - whether or not you hire us. You get the sample report before the call, so you know exactly what you are buying and can check every figure. Prefer email? maciejxjankowski@proton.me - or find me at linkedin.com/in/maciej.

Book the Free 30-Minute Call