The system works. The outcome never formed.
Behaviour drifts in the months after a transformation lands, while every dashboard stays green. Outcome Observability is a discipline for seeing that, and deciding on it, before it reaches the P&L.
Two people, three signal types, five documents, one meeting
Stewardship pair
Two named executives. One owns what the outcome means, one owns whether it is real.
Three signal types
Pulse, integrity and shadow. Read alone, each one lies about the health of the outcome.
Five artefacts
Contract, signal sheet, drift log, decision record, value ledger. Nothing else.
One review
Designed to fit thirty minutes, and it must end in a recorded decision.
The five templates
Everything the discipline runs on. A custodian with these five documents has what they need. No signup, no email, no tool.
Outcome contract
What behavioural change, owned by whom, worth what.
Signal sheet
What is watched, at what threshold, triggering which decision.
Drift log
Observation, interpretation, and a mandatory counterfactual.
Decision record
Amplify, correct or accept, and how it will be judged.
Value ledger
What was protected, what it cost, what was accepted.
What this is not
- Not a dashboard. No RAG statuses, no percentage bars, no milestone trackers. Those belong to delivery governance.
- Not a tool. There is no software to buy. Five documents and a named custodian are the implementation.
- Not benefits realisation. Benefits arrive late by design. This watches the behaviour that produces them, while it is still cheap to correct.
- Not project governance extended. The project has closed. That is the point.
Auerbach · expected 2027
The full reasoning
The site gives you the vocabulary and the templates. The book gives you the reasoning: how to read a signal that contradicts a status report, a ninety-day worked case from framing to verdict, and the seven ways the discipline gets hollowed out in practice.