Phase 1 — Active Workload Audit

Inventory every active initiative, owner, hypothesis, and measurement contract.

Enumerate every in-flight initiative

Teams routinely discover 30–50% more active work than leadership believes.

Attach a hypothesis to each

Initiatives without hypotheses are exploratory, not execution.

Phase 2 — Falsifiability Scoring

Every initiative declares its disconfirming outcome upfront.

Define the disconfirming outcome

State the result that would cause termination.

Bound the falsification window

Open-ended timelines preserve unfalsifiable work indefinitely.

Phase 3 — Capacity Discipline

Active initiatives capped at a fixed multiple of headcount.

Rank by expected contribution per unit of capacity

Not effort, urgency, or stakeholder preference.

Decommission the bottom tercile

Without it, the workload monotonically grows.

Phase 4 — Cadence Lock

Mid-cycle additions require explicit decommissioning of equal-weight work.

Enforce the swap rule

New work in requires equivalent work out.

Review on the locked interval

Continuous re-prioritization is the failure mode the Protocol prevents.