Signal-Response Distance: A diagnostic construct for AI-era organisational responsiveness.

Most strategic architecture practice operates at the level of artefacts: capability maps, value streams, roadmaps. The artefacts can be accurate without the transformation being possible, because the binding constraint on strategic response lives below the artefact layer, in the typed delays of the organisation's response capability.

Signal-Response Distance (SRD) is a diagnostic construct for measuring those delays. It decomposes the response into six capability stocks (Sensing, Acquisition, Assimilation, Seizing, Reconfiguring, Reflexive) and measures the delay each stock contributes to the total response.

The construct classifies each measured signal by response distance and complexity into one of four quadrants, each with a distinct intervention prescription. The methodology includes a strengthened anti-confirmation gate, including post-engagement consequentiality follow-up at six and twelve months, designed to surface diagnostic claims that don't survive contact with operational reality.

v0.4 is an architecture-driven reformulation. It hangs the construct on an explicit Business-Architecture object model: value stream → stage → capability as the hub, with a dynamic layer of business event → signal → detection mechanism → routing. SRD is pegged to a business event and therefore composes: an event's distance rolls up to a capability, a value stream, and the enterprise. The scoring ranks capabilities by cross-value-stream leverage, not AI use cases; a third output lens, the Routing Map, shows how a detected signal is routed to a response. v0.4 also promotes system dynamics (Forrester, Senge, Sterman) to the primary theoretical lineage: SRD is a tractable, consulting-scale reading of a four-point delay structure. The evidence base is unchanged; the empirical programme is consolidated onto the v1.0 path.

v0.4 changes the model's architecture, not its evidence base: a capability-anchored object model, event-anchoring, capability-leverage scoring, and system dynamics as the primary lineage.

Each version is dated. Each version names what changed.

1. v0.4 Current · June 2026

   Architecture-driven reformulation. Capability-anchored object model (value stream → stage → capability-as-hub; business event / signal / detection mechanism / routing), event-anchoring and composability, capability-leverage scoring, the Routing Map output lens, and system dynamics (Forrester / Senge / Sterman) promoted to primary lineage. Absorbs the v0.3.1 frontier-position amendment. The empirical programme moves to the v1.0 path.

2. v0.3 Superseded · May 2026

   Review-driven reformulation absorbing 1 critical, 11 major, and 18 minor findings from two independent peer reviews. Strengthened anti-confirmation gate with Output 3b consequentiality follow-up. Quadrant renaming: Augmented Frontier, Instrumentation Gap, Slow-Complex Zone. (Plus the v0.3.1 amendment: frontier-position uncertainty and the anti-overreliance triad, now absorbed into v0.4.)

3. v0.2 Superseded · February 2026

   Empirically-driven reformulation absorbing eight findings from the second engagement application. Internal-control natural-experiment method introduced.

4. v0.1.1 Superseded · November 2025

   First engagement-driven amendment. Three load-bearing additions: intra-organisational t₀ class, inter-domain coupling, measurement-completeness precondition.

5. v0.1 Superseded · October 2025

   Initial framework draft.

Two doors.