Most decisions don't fail in the boardroom.
They fail in the practice.

Two questions, not one

Every major purchase asks two distinct questions that almost no one separates. Does this solution create value? And: will this organization actually capture the value it creates? Most evaluations conflate them. PSI measures the second.

Pain is real, and rarely honest

Buyers under-report change cost because under-reporting is what gets the deal across the finish line. Sellers under-price it because over-pricing it loses the deal. The truth — technical complexity, organizational disruption, risk exposure, the burden of getting the team to actually use the thing — sits somewhere both parties have a small reason to hide. PSI surfaces it as four sub-scores, separately, on the record.

Adoption decides the outcome

The single best predictor of whether value will be realized is not the feature set, the price, or even the strength of the strategic case. It is whether someone — a champion with authority, a team with capacity — will actually adopt the change. Time-to-value, training load, support burden, champion strength: these are the Experience term. They move the score by ±50%.

Time has weight

A deal that hasn't measurably advanced in three months is a different deal than the one you scored on day one. Staleness is signal, not noise. PSI multiplies the point score by a time-decay factor so a dormant deal carries less commit weight. If you wouldn't commit it cold today, you shouldn't commit it cold in your forecast.

Confidence is data

A score from a deal where the inputs are documented and a score from a deal where the inputs are guesses are not the same score, even if the numbers match. PSI carries confidence through to a Monte Carlo band — p10 to p90 — so the reader sees both the central estimate and how soft it is. A wide band on a Strong score is a flag, not a victory.

For sellers

Pipeline discipline

Score every deal at every stage transition. Tighten the weakest input before commit. Let the dominant lever (Reduce Pain / Raise Gain / Improve Experience) be your coaching cue. Block low-PSI deals from entering commit-forecast — or commit them with eyes open.

For buyers

A reality check before signing

Before authorizing a major purchase, walk through the questions a vendor wouldn't ask. Are we really ready to absorb this? Is the champion strong enough? Has someone made the change-cost honest? PSI gives you a structured way to find out — and a number to remember when implementation gets harder than expected.

For organizations

A calibration corpus that gets smarter

Every score and every outcome enters a corpus that retunes the rubric over time. Past scores get retroactively replayed under each new rubric version, so you can see how your calibration would shift. The instrument that scored the deal becomes the instrument that learns from it.