The Four Universal Tests
ZOKRI’s diagnostics for whether a strategy genuinely compounds: the survivors of stress-testing conventional strategy rules against 500+ businesses. Run all four.
1. The Customer Choice Test. Why do customers repeatedly choose you over alternatives? The answer must be genuine value, not convenience, habit, or your own opinion of your strengths. The standard is Martin's: the customer is the only judge, and five-star reviews are better evidence than strategy documents.
2. The Compounding Test. Does delivering this value create self-reinforcing advantage: does success feed more success, mechanically? The discipline is drawing: if you cannot draw the loop, junction by junction, it is not a loop, it is a hope. The drawn loop then becomes instrumentable in a metric tree.
3. The Defendability Test. What prevents this value being competed away? Answered in Can't-Won't terms, with the compound addendum: the strongest defence is a lead that grows while it is being copied.
4. The Resource Allocation Test. Are you actually investing in the activities that strengthen the loop, or harvesting it? Loops die politely, by being milked: the reputation spent rather than fed, the network taxed rather than grown. The scorecard and the OKR portfolio should show the loop being fed, and this test fails more incumbents than the other three combined.
The toolkit, assembled
The four sit alongside the strategy library's tests as a sequence: the Opposite Test asks whether it is a choice at all; the Can't-Won't Test asks whether it will stay yours; What Would Have to Be True asks which conditions carry it. These four ask the further question: does it accelerate? A strategy can pass every classical test and still be static, a well-chosen position that pays the same every year while a compounding rival pulls away.
How this connects to OKRs
Run the tests before planning and they generate the quarter. A failed Customer Choice Test points at discovery work; a failed Compounding Test points at compound moment hunting; a failed Resource Allocation Test usually indicts the current OKR portfolio directly, effort scattered across transactions while the loop starves. The tests are free to run and uncomfortable to pass, which is the correct price for finding out.
ZOKRI compound advantage research, 500+ businesses (2024–25). Original ZOKRI research; strategy-library connections credited to their sources.
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