Phase 1: Landscape Discovery & Baseline Audit

You are conducting the discovery phase of a structural overhaul. The substrate-context.md file at the project's working directory tells you WHAT you're auditing and WHY. Your job is to produce a landscape report that the next phase (taxonomy-modeling-design) can consume.

Preconditions

• Working directory exists and contains substrate-context.md.
• If substrate-context.md is missing, stop and ask the user to run the pentaphase-orchestrator Phase 0 first, OR have them dictate the substrate, driving force, primary failure point, operational roles, and time horizon so you can write substrate-context.md yourself.

Read substrate-context.md in full before starting any work stream.

Four work streams

The four streams produce four named outputs that you will combine into the final report. Run them in any order; produce each as its own section in the working directory before composing the report.

Stream 1 — Inventory Assets

Document every existing core output, component, and data point in the substrate.

For each asset, capture:

Output as a markdown table or sectioned list. Descend until you have leaves, not branches — "the docs folder" is a branch; the individual files inside are leaves.

If the substrate is too large to enumerate exhaustively in one pass, sample by category and declare the sampling method explicitly.

Stream 2 — Map Current Flow

Track how items travel from creation to final archive. For each distinct flow:

• Trigger — what initiates the flow (event, schedule, human action)
• Stages — ordered list of states the item passes through
• Actors — who or what advances each stage (human role, automation, hybrid)
• Handoffs — where state passes between actors (these are the friction-prone points)
• Termination — how the flow ends (archive, deletion, escalation, abandonment)
• Volume — items per unit time (or backlog depth if flow is irregular)

If multiple distinct flows exist, document each separately. Number them. Use prose, ASCII diagrams, or sequence lists — whichever is clearest.

Stream 3 — Identify Friction

Pinpoint structural bottlenecks, communication gaps, and systemic inefficiencies. For each:

• Friction point — specific, named, located in the flow
• Type — bottleneck / gap / inefficiency / drift / silo / coordination cost / quality leak
• Frequency — how often it bites (every event, weekly, monthly, sporadic)
• Impact — cost in time, money, quality, morale, opportunity
• Root cause hypothesis — your best read on the underlying mechanism

Resist generic complaints. "Slow process" is not a friction point. "Tickets sit in the 'awaiting-review' state for an average of 6 days because reviewers are not paged" is a friction point.

Stream 4 — Define Value Metrics

Establish clear success indicators for speed, accuracy, and utilization. At minimum, one metric per dimension. For each:

• Name
• Definition — what is measured, how, with what tool
• Current baseline — current value with measurement method and date
• Target — where we need to be after the overhaul
• Cadence — how often it's measured
• Threshold — value at which an alert/escalation fires (optional but recommended)

Metrics must be measurable. "Better UX" is not a metric. "Time from ticket creation to first response, p50, in minutes" is.

Composing phase-1-landscape-report.md

Combine the four streams into a single file at <working-dir>/phase-1-landscape-report.md. Structure:

# Phase 1 — Landscape Report

**Substrate:** <name from substrate-context.md>
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Preconditions:** Read substrate-context.md (path)
**Postconditions:** Ready for Phase 2 (taxonomy-modeling-design)

## 1. Executive summary

3–5 sentences on the substrate's current shape and biggest pain.

## 2. Assets inventory

[full table or sectioned list]

## 3. Current flow map

[per-flow sections]

## 4. Friction register

[per-friction-point list]

## 5. Value metrics

[per-metric definitions with baselines]

## 6. Open questions for Phase 2

[explicit list of gaps, ambiguities, or decisions deferred to taxonomy design]

Gate criteria (auditor will check)

The report passes Phase 1's gate iff:

1. Asset coverage ≥ 80% — no major asset class missing. If sampling was used, the sampling method is declared.
2. At least one flow mapped end-to-end — from trigger to termination, with stages, actors, and handoffs.
3. Friction register has ≥ 3 named points — each with a type, a frequency, an impact, and a root cause hypothesis.
4. Value metrics cover speed AND accuracy dimensions — each with a current baseline and a target. Utilization is encouraged but not required.
5. Open questions for Phase 2 section is present — even if empty (an explicit "no open questions" is acceptable; an absent section is not).

If you cannot meet a gate criterion, flag the gap explicitly in the "Open questions" section and surface it to the user before invoking the next phase.

Anti-patterns

• Don't invent assets you can't verify. If something might exist, mark it "suspected — needs confirmation" rather than asserting it.
• Don't smooth over confusion. If two roles claim ownership of the same asset, document the conflict — that IS the friction point.
• Don't skip flow mapping by saying "it's complicated". If it's complicated, that's a Phase 2 problem to solve. Map what's there.
• Don't propose solutions in this phase. Solutions belong in Phase 2 (taxonomy) or Phase 3 (environment). Phase 1 is descriptive only.

See also

• references/inventory-templates.md — sample inventory tables for common substrate types
• references/friction-patterns.md — common friction archetypes with examples
• references/value-metrics-frameworks.md — speed/accuracy/utilization metric libraries