I - Interests or legitimacy unresolved

The goal says 'we' but hides who gains, who pays, and who never got a vote.

Your family calls the mandatory Sunday dinner "our tradition." But your teenager sits silent through it, your sister drives 90 minutes each way, and the person who most loves the ritual is the one who decided it. "We all want this" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and nobody ever asked who actually gains, who quietly pays, and who never got a vote.

That gap is what this diagnostic detects: a goal that treats multiple people as one, hides who bears the costs, or lacks real consent. The cue is a group noun, we, the family, the team, standing in for separate people, or disagreement about the goal being mislabeled as resistance to execution. To run it, ask the repair question: who gains, who pays, who decides, who may say no, and whose minimum must not be averaged away? Write actual names next to each. When it works, hidden losers become visible and the goal either earns genuine buy-in or gets renegotiated. What changes is legitimacy, not just clarity. Don't use it to demand unanimity on everything; different people can legitimately hold different roles, so make the rule for who decides explicit rather than pretending everyone must agree.