How a Structural Diagnostic Connects to What Organizations Already Face
(The below data is uniquely synthesized by us from 13 major surveys (2024–2026) covering 20,000+ respondents across NFIB, Federal Reserve, Gartner, Deloitte, PwC, JP Morgan, Capstone Partners, Citizens Bank, RSM, Techaisle, and the National Center for the Middle Market.)
| Rank | Business Problem | Large | Mid-Market | Small |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rising costs and margin pressure | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | Talent acquisition and retention | 5 | 2 | 2 |
| 3 | Revenue growth and customer acquisition | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| 4 | Economic and policy uncertainty | 4 | 4 | 6 |
| 5 | Operational inefficiency and process breakdown | 2 | 5 | 8 |
| 6 | Technology adoption and AI integration | 6 | 6 | 9 |
| 7 | Cybersecurity and data risk | 7 | 7 | 10 |
| 8 | Supply chain disruption | 8 | 8 | 5 |
| 9 | Scaling without losing operational control | 10 | 9 | 4 |
| 10 | Regulatory and compliance burden | 9 | 10 | 7 |
1. Rising Costs and Margin Pressure
75% of small firms cite rising costs as their top financial challenge. 92.5% of mid-market CEOs rank inflation as moderate-to-significant for the third straight year. Large-enterprise COOs report that cost pressure consumes resources meant for long-term strategy.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Most organizations respond to cost pressure by cutting across the board or renegotiating vendor contracts — visible actions that address symptoms. But costs often stay elevated because the process used to control spending doesn’t match the actual constraint structure.
Example: A mid-market services firm kept running quarterly cost-reduction exercises. Each cycle produced savings that evaporated within 90 days. A structural diagnostic revealed that three department heads each had independent purchasing authority with no shared visibility. The same categories were being approved through three separate channels. The fix wasn’t a better budget — it was a single constraint point that consolidated approval for overlapping spend categories. Costs dropped and stayed down because the structural mismatch was removed.
2. Talent Acquisition and Retention
Labor quality has been NFIB’s #1 single most important problem for most of 2025. 84% of mid-market leaders call recruitment and retention a top priority. 87% expect workforce challenges to directly impact growth over the next 3–5 years.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Talent problems get treated with compensation increases, culture initiatives, and recruiting campaigns. These address the visible symptom — people leaving or not applying. But in many organizations, the reason capable people leave (or underperform) is structural: unclear authority, conflicting direction from multiple leaders, or roles designed around organizational charts rather than actual workflows.
Example: A nonprofit kept losing its strongest program managers within 18 months. Exit interviews pointed to “burnout.” A diagnostic session revealed that program managers reported to a director for strategy but needed approval from a separate operations lead for resources, and a third person controlled the timeline. Every project required navigating three authority structures that frequently contradicted each other. The fix wasn’t higher pay or wellness programs — it was consolidating resource and timeline authority under one role. Retention stabilized because the structural friction that created the burnout was removed.
3. Revenue Growth and Customer Acquisition
57% of small businesses cite reaching customers and growing sales as their top operational challenge. Growth is the #1 enterprise priority for CIOs in 2025, displacing operational efficiency for the first time in two years.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Revenue problems are typically addressed with new marketing strategies, sales training, or pricing adjustments. These assume the organization can execute on a growth plan once it exists. But revenue often stalls because the internal process for pursuing new business doesn’t match what the market requires — speed, adaptability, or coordinated cross-functional response.
Example: A professional services firm had a strong pipeline but kept losing deals in the proposal stage. Leadership assumed the proposals needed better content. A diagnostic revealed that proposal development required sign-off from five people across three departments, with no defined sequence or deadline for each. Average turnaround was 23 days; competitive firms were responding in 8. The problem wasn’t proposal quality — it was a structural bottleneck in the approval chain. Reducing the sign-off chain to two people with a 5-day turnaround increased win rate by 30%.
4. Economic and Policy Uncertainty
The NFIB Uncertainty Index hit its fourth-highest reading in 51 years during 2025. Mid-market optimism about the national economy dropped from 65% to 32% in six months. Half of large-enterprise CEOs plan to reduce risk appetite through 2026.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Uncertainty causes organizations to freeze — delaying decisions, deferring investment, cycling through the same debate without resolution. The usual response is to wait for clarity. But the structural question is whether the organization’s decision process can resolve high-uncertainty questions at all, or whether it’s designed only for situations where the answer is clear.
Example: A manufacturing company spent seven months debating whether to shift a portion of production to a domestic supplier in response to tariff uncertainty. Every leadership meeting revisited the same data. A diagnostic revealed the team was treating this as a problem that required a definitive right answer (certainty), when it was actually a probability problem — a bet that needed to be evaluated on risk tolerance, not proof. The structural mismatch between problem type and decision method was the reason it kept cycling. Once reframed as a risk decision with a defined owner and a 90-day review trigger, the team resolved it in two weeks.
5. Operational Inefficiency and Process Breakdown
62% of strategy leaders say their operating model can’t support current objectives. 82% of COOs struggle to balance short-term firefighting with long-term strategy. 51% of small firms report uneven cash flow — often a downstream effect of process breakdown.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: This is the most structurally direct problem on the list. Operational inefficiency is rarely about lazy people or bad tools. It’s about processes that evolved organically and no longer match what the organization needs them to do. The diagnostic is designed precisely for this: identifying where the process structure diverges from what the solution requires.
Example: A public institution had a capital improvement process that averaged 14 months from request to approval. Staff assumed the problem was bureaucratic — too many committees. A diagnostic showed that only two of the seven review steps added substantive value; the other five existed because of a policy written for a different era that no one had revisited. The constraint was invisible — embedded in a process nobody questioned because it had always been there. Removing the five redundant steps reduced the cycle to four months without changing oversight quality.
6. Technology Adoption and AI Integration
91% of mid-market companies now use generative AI, but 92% encountered challenges during rollout. 30% of enterprise GenAI initiatives are abandoned after proof-of-concept. Integration with existing systems is the #1 implementation challenge.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Technology adoption failures are almost always framed as technical problems — wrong vendor, bad data, insufficient training. But a significant share of failed implementations stall because the organization’s decision structure around technology doesn’t match the kind of decision being made. Choosing a platform is a different kind of problem than integrating it across departments. When the same process is used for both, one or both will fail.
Example: A mid-market company invested in an AI-powered forecasting tool that produced accurate predictions — which nobody used. Leadership blamed user resistance. A diagnostic revealed that the forecasting output went to a planning team that had no authority to change procurement based on the forecast. The insight had no structural path to action. The fix was connecting the forecast output to the person who actually controlled purchasing decisions. Adoption followed because the structural disconnect between insight and authority was resolved.
7. Cybersecurity and Data Risk
Cybersecurity has been the #1 CIO priority for four consecutive years. 91% of organizations reported at least one cyber breach in the prior year. Mid-market firms cite data quality and privacy as their top AI implementation barriers.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Cybersecurity is a technical domain, but the organizational response to cyber risk is structural. Who decides risk tolerance? Who has authority to enforce policy changes? When a breach occurs, is the response process designed for speed or for consensus? Many organizations discover during a crisis that their incident response structure doesn’t match what the situation requires.
Example: A mid-market firm had a cybersecurity policy, an incident response plan, and a dedicated IT security lead. When a ransomware attempt hit, the response took 72 hours — because the security lead could identify the threat but needed the COO to authorize a network shutdown, the CFO to approve emergency spending, and the CEO to communicate with clients. None of these authorities had a pre-defined sequence or trigger. A diagnostic could have identified in advance that the response structure required serial authorization for a problem that demanded parallel, immediate action.
8. Supply Chain Disruption
64% of small businesses reported supply chain disruptions in September 2025 — up 10 points in one month. 24% of mid-market CEOs identify supply chain risk as a top tariff-related hurdle. Supply chain disruptions had the greatest non-pandemic impact on large organizations.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Supply chain resilience is typically treated as a procurement or logistics problem. But the organization’s ability to respond to disruption depends on how decisions about sourcing, inventory, and supplier relationships are structured — and whether those decisions can be made fast enough when conditions change.
Example: A distributor experienced repeated stockouts on key products despite having dual-sourced every critical SKU. The supply chain team had done its job. A diagnostic revealed that switching between suppliers required approval from a procurement director who also controlled pricing — and that person was structurally incentivized to minimize cost, not protect availability. The conflict between cost optimization and supply continuity was embedded in the authority structure. Separating the availability trigger from the cost-approval authority eliminated the stockout pattern.
9. Scaling Without Losing Operational Control
Growth creates process breakdown. Workflows that functioned at one scale produce inconsistent results at the next. Mid-market companies consistently identify this as a defining challenge of their size tier.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Scaling problems are structural by definition. A process that works for a 30-person company breaks at 150 not because people got worse, but because the structure can’t carry the load. The diagnostic identifies which constraints are real (and must be preserved) versus which are artifacts of an earlier stage (and are now creating drag).
Example: A growing technology firm hit a wall at 120 employees. Projects that used to take 6 weeks now took 14. The CEO assumed they needed better project management tools. A diagnostic revealed that the CEO was still the final approver on every client-facing deliverable — a constraint that made sense at 30 people and was now the single bottleneck for the entire operation. The constraint was real (quality mattered), but the method of enforcing it didn’t match the organization’s current scale. Delegating approval authority with a defined quality checklist preserved the constraint while removing the bottleneck. Project timelines returned to 7 weeks.
10. Regulatory and Compliance Burden
9% of small businesses cite regulations as their top problem. Insurance costs hit their highest level since 2018. Large enterprises face an increasingly complex landscape across SEC, DORA, state privacy laws, and ESG reporting.
Where a Diagnostic Helps: Compliance is treated as a legal or administrative function. But the process of staying compliant — who monitors, who updates, who has authority to change operations in response to new requirements — is structural. Organizations that struggle with compliance burden often have a structural mismatch between the speed at which regulations change and the speed at which their internal process can respond.
Example: A financial services firm was consistently late on regulatory filings — not because they lacked legal counsel, but because each filing required data from four departments that had no coordinated submission process. Every quarter was a scramble. A diagnostic mapped the actual data flow and revealed that three of the four departments were producing the same underlying data in different formats. Consolidating the data source and assigning one owner for regulatory data assembly eliminated the quarterly crisis and reduced preparation time by 60%.
Summary
Every organization on every survey is dealing with some combination of these 10 problems. Most have already tried to fix them — with strategy refreshes, new hires, technology investments, consultants, or reorganizations.
When the fix worked, the problem resolved. When it didn’t, the problem is still cycling.
A Decision Structure Diagnostic doesn’t compete with solutions for inflation, AI adoption, or cybersecurity. It answers a different question: Why hasn’t your attempted fix for this problem resolved it?
The answer, in the vast majority of cases, is structural. The method being used to solve the problem doesn’t match what the solution actually requires. The diagnostic finds where that mismatch is, identifies the specific correction, and delivers it in plain language with a defined owner and a 30-day check.