F - Fallout or forbidden loss hidden

The headline goal omits the costs and red lines that could make achieving it a victory not worth having.

Your startup's launch date is six weeks out and the team mantra has become "whatever it takes." You hit every milestone, but you are quietly accumulating burnout, untested code, and promises to customers that engineering has not seen. The headline goal, ship on time, says nothing about the wreckage that could make shipping a victory not worth having.

This diagnostic checks whether your goal's stated upside is hiding costs, risks, or red lines that should have been part of the goal itself. The cues: upside language with no anti-goal, floor, or sacrifice budget; pressure to push costs onto health, relationships, or less powerful people; team members who can name ways to win the metric while violating the mission. Run it by asking: what would make hitting this target not worth it, and which losses must be capped or forbidden in advance? Write those limits into the goal, not into a mental footnote. When it works, the plan gains explicit ceilings, like a maintenance-debt cap or a burnout line, before the sprint starts. Don't swing to listing every conceivable harm until action becomes impossible; protect severe, plausible losses and budget the ordinary tradeoffs.