The ARETE Strain Domains™
Most growing businesses carry strain they can feel before they can name it.
Decisions that used to be straightforward become slower or more contested. Good people start working around each other rather than with each other. Margin holds on paper but not in practice. The business is moving, but something in how it moves has changed.
This is organisational strain and in a growing business, it is almost always structural rather than personal. The business has outgrown the systems, decision-making habits, and operating rhythms that got it here. The people haven’t failed. The model has been stretched.
The ARETE Strain Domains™ is a five-domain diagnostic framework that makes that strain visible, measurable, and addressable. Each domain looks at a different dimension of how strain builds and where it concentrates. Together they give a complete picture of where a business is under pressure and what is driving it.
The Five Domains
Decision Load™
Where decision pressure builds, concentrates, and slows the business down. Decision Load™ treats this as a structural problem first, not a question of individual capability or appetite. When too many decisions route through too few people, or when the wrong decisions are being made at the wrong level, the whole system slows. Decision Load™ is the first of the five domains and is now available as a standalone diagnostic.
Growth Strain™
How unresolved trade-offs distort execution as a business scales. Growth brings choices that are rarely made explicitly, about which markets, which clients, which operating model. When those choices get settled by default rather than by design, the consequences accumulate quietly until they become visible in margin, pace, or culture. Growth Strain™ examines where those defaults are sitting and what they are costing.
Operational Friction™
The hidden drag that complexity creates across processes, structures, and handoffs. As businesses grow, the cost of coordination rises, more steps, more sign-offs, more rework. Operational Friction™ measures what that drag is doing to pace, margin, and the effort it takes to deliver.
Signal Integrity™
How accurately the business sees itself, and where information gets distorted as it moves through the organisation. A business operating under strain often makes decisions on a version of reality that is incomplete, delayed, or shaped by what people feel able to say. Signal Integrity™ assesses how clean the information is that reaches the people who need to act on it.
Trust and Energy™
How strain affects the confidence, standards, and resilience of the people carrying it. Sustained strain changes how people work, the risks they take, the standards they hold, the discretionary effort they bring. Trust and Energy™ looks at whether the business can sustain its performance, or whether the people doing the work are being quietly depleted.
Who this is for
Founders and MDs of owner-led businesses who sense something has shifted but haven’t yet been able to name it clearly enough to address it.
Leadership teams navigating growth, acquisition, or a step-change in complexity where the operating model that worked before is starting to show its limits.
Investors, acquirers, and integration teams who want a clearer picture of the strain inside a business than financial due diligence alone provides.
How it works
The diagnostic is conducted by Richard Done and delivered as a written report covering whichever domains are most relevant to the business. Six organisations have completed the full diagnostic. It is not a survey or a self-assessment tool, it is a structured conversation with an experienced outside eye, followed by a clear read of what it found.
If you are wondering whether the ARETE Strain Domains™ diagnostic is relevant to where your business is now, the right first step is a short conversation.