Essay · 2026
The Displacement Rate Audit
A five-minute scoring tool for any product, position, architecture, business model, or career bet. Find out what still works after the environment changes.
Most plans are scored against the world they were made in.
That is the problem.
The useful question is not whether the product, thesis, architecture, position, or career bet works today. The useful question is how much of it still has a job when the surroundings change.
The Displacement Rate Audit is a free five-minute tool for asking that question before reality asks it for you.
Run it on one thing you are currently defending:
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a product line;
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an investment thesis;
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a technical architecture;
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a business model;
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a career bet;
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a major project your team is still defending.
Then name the most likely large change in the next eighteen months. The audit only works if the change is specific enough to argue with.
Not “AI gets better.”
Something concrete:
An open-source model matches your benchmark and runs on commodity hardware.
Your sector takes thirty percent multiple compression.
Your main distribution channel stops favouring your format.
The buyer no longer needs the workflow your product was built around.
Now score what survives.
The audit gives you a 0-5 displacement score. Zero means nothing survives; the work belonged to the old version of reality. Five means the change was already accounted for in the original design.
The score matters less than the forcing function:
If you cannot name the specific components, contracts, positions, relationships, or capabilities that still have a job after the change, your real score is lower than the one you wrote.
This is why the tool is useful across domains. It does not ask whether something is impressive. It asks whether it is durable under a named disturbance.
The output is deliberately small: one named change, one score, and one list of the parts that survive. That is enough to make the next decision harder to fake.
Use it before adding features. Use it before sizing a position. Use it before doubling down on a technical architecture. Use it when a strategy still sounds good but you can feel the surroundings moving.
Download.
The Displacement Rate Audit
121KB ∙ PDF file
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The Displacement Rate Audit is a companion to The Forest Floor Is the Product, the article that develops the substrate-vs-canopy lens across ecosystems, software, knowledge work, and capital allocation.
What is one thing you are building that would score lower than you want if the next big change arrived tomorrow?
If a single argument here changed what you were about to trust, the highest-leverage move is to subscribe on Substack. One piece a week, no filler.