The full methodology behind Kihon Labs' hidden-cost diagnostic.
Every Kihon Labs engagement rests on a single, tested body of work: the socio-economic approach to management, developed through more than five decades of intervention-research. This page opens the model up. Where it comes from, how it reads dysfunction, and how it turns a vague sense of drag into a euro figure and a sequenced plan.
Not a framework invented for a landing page.
Kihon Labs' diagnostic is an adaptation of the socio-economic approach developed by Henri Savall, Véronique Zardet, and the ISEOR research team, associated with Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3.
Its central claim is simple and uncomfortable: organisations carry large, recurring costs that conventional accounting never records, because those costs are produced by dysfunction rather than by any line item. The method exists to surface those costs, name them, and quantify them.
It is not a theory that stayed in the seminar room. It has been built and refined through intervention-research inside real organisations, in industry, services, healthcare, and the public sector, for more than five decades.
Kihon Labs' contribution is narrow and specific: to carry that same method into commercial and revenue systems, where the same invisible costs accumulate, undiagnosed, at every growth stage.
Six families. Five signals. Six costs.
The method reads a commercial system along three axes at once: where the dysfunction sits, how it surfaces in day to day operation, and what form the cost takes. No dysfunction is ever a single, contained problem.
ISEOR's classical model distinguishes six dysfunction families, five hidden-cost indicators, and six components of financial consequences: excess salary, overtime, overconsumption, non-production, non-creation of potential, and risks.
How a diagnostic becomes a fix.
Kihon Labs organises its SEAM-informed engagements into four client-facing stages, from initial evidence collection to measured result.
Evidence collection and hidden-cost assessment
Structured, role-based interviews across the organisation, combined with a review of process, incentive, and organisational documents. What surfaces is converted into a euro figure across the dysfunction families and cost components, so the picture is evidenced rather than asserted.
Mirror effect and co-designed intervention project
The findings are reflected back to the people who work inside the system, the mirror effect, so the diagnosis is recognised rather than imposed. A project group is then formed with them to design the interventions, because the people who live the dysfunction are the ones who make the fix hold.
Implementation
The agreed interventions are put into practice inside the real operating system, sequenced by cost of inaction. Changes are made where the cost was located, not spread thinly across everything at once.
Evaluation
Results are measured against the baseline established at diagnosis, so the effect of the intervention is quantified rather than assumed. Cost that has genuinely been removed is confirmed, and what remains is fed back into the next cycle.
The scholarship this method sits inside.
Kihon Labs' diagnostic is built on the Socio-Economic Approach to Management (SEAM), developed by Henri Savall, Véronique Zardet, and the ISEOR research team across more than five decades of intervention-research.
It reads commercial dysfunction through the same logic that growth-stage theory has described for decades: Greiner's phases of organisational growth and crisis (1972), Churchill and Lewis's five stages of small-business growth (1983), and Flamholtz and Randle's work on the pains and infrastructure of scaling organisations (2007).
Where those models name the transitions, SEAM prices them. Cem Gorer is preparing to begin the Executive DBA at EADA Business School, delivered in partnership with Le CNAM-Paris. The commercial adaptation is intended to be tested and refined through that doctoral work.
Kihon Labs' field methodology also draws on ISEOR's broader intervention-research toolkit (HORIVERT procedure, qualimetric analysis, periodically negotiable objectives), applied selectively depending on engagement scope.
The diagnostic ends with a map, not a memo.
When the diagnostic is complete, you do not receive a deck of observations. You receive a map of where money is leaking, expressed in euros across the dysfunction families and cost components, and a priority-ranked list of interventions sequenced by cost of inaction. From there, two paths.
Your team runs it
You take the roadmap and execute internally. The diagnostic stands entirely on its own.
- Euro-denominated hidden-cost map
- Priority-ranked intervention roadmap
- Executive briefing with next steps
- A defensible number your leadership can own
What it does not include: the interpretation calls that come up mid-execution, the sequencing decisions when two priorities collide, and the correction when the first attempt does not move the number.
Best when: you have the internal capacity to execute and need the diagnosis to point it in the right direction.
See Diagnosis in detailKihon Labs runs it
We execute the roadmap directly, fractional-CRO style, and stay until the fix holds.
- Everything in the diagnostic
- Direct execution of the intervention roadmap
- Fractional-CRO-style accountability for the outcome
- Milestone check-ins until the system holds
What it adds: interpretation when evidence conflicts, sequencing when priorities collide, and correction when the first intervention does not move the number.
The diagnostic pays for itself: when you continue into Operation, the diagnostic fee is included in the Operation price.
Explore Operation in detailStraightforward answers about the method.
Is this the same method ISEOR published, or a variant?
Does the method apply to non-sales functions?
How is this different from a maturity model or a benchmark?
Who actually applies the four-stage process?
Where this leads next.
See it applied
What the diagnostic measures in a commercial system, and what you receive at the end of it.
Meet the practitioner
Why a working operator prepared for doctoral research, and what intervention research actually means in the field.
Try a small version of it
Ten questions, two minutes. The same six families, read at a glance rather than in depth.
Your commercial system is already producing hidden costs. Let's put a number on it.
One call, 30 minutes. We'll review what's working, what's stalling, and where the real cost is sitting. You'll leave with a concrete next step, whether that's Kihon Labs or not.
Book a diagnostic call