The Four Causes of Death  /  Capability Gap Calculator

You already paid for it.
You just never got all of it.

This calculator estimates the gap between the capability your organisation pays for and the capability it actually receives.

Every number is yours. Enter your own figures and set the assumptions to what you genuinely believe is true about your organisation.

There are no right answers. The point is to see what your own assumptions reveal.

How to use this

1Enter your numbers.2Adjust the assumptions.3See where capability may be disappearing.
Your organisation
Salary plus on-costs. Whatever a person actually costs you to have.
20%
Higher for knowledge and professional roles. Lower where the work is genuinely prescribed. This sets the size of the pool the first two causes draw from.
25%
40%
← All UnseenAll Unrewarded →
The rest is people who can see it and hold it back anyway. This split is the most useful question on the page, because the two have completely different fixes.
1. UnseenNever offered$550k

You do not pay people only to execute. Part of every salary buys judgement: what they notice, what they know that you do not, the call they make when nobody is watching. This is the portion of it that never gets offered, because the person cannot see that what they have is worth bringing.This is capability that exists inside the organisation but never becomes available to it.

2. UnrewardedWithheld on purpose$825k

The same pool, lost a different way. These people can see exactly what they have. They have simply learned, across thousands of small moments, that putting it forward does not pay as well as being easy to work with.This is capability the organisation has, has been told about at least once, and has quietly trained itself out of receiving.

3. UnclearIn the room, not in the decision$1.4M

Your people are in the meeting. You are paying for their time and their expertise. The question is how much of that capability actually influences the decision.This is capability that reaches the room and arrives in a shape nobody can act on.

4
50%
Count the last meeting you ran. How many people actually changed the outcome?
4. UnusedDelivered, then lost$660k

One of the most expensive forms of capability loss. Someone brought real capability into the organisation, it was not fully used, recognised or retained, and eventually they left.This is capability the organisation received and then let walk out of the building.

8
Only the people you genuinely wish had stayed. Not total turnover.
75%
Recruitment, vacancy, onboarding, and the months before the replacement is any good.
Your estimated annual capability gap
$0
Capability you are paying for but may not be receiving each year  ·  $13,929 per employee

Optional

Want this number in your inbox?

One email with the result you just built — the total, the four causes, and your assumptions. No list, no sequence, no follow-up. Skip it and nothing changes.

Your details go to Amanda only — no lists, no spam.

These are four different ways capability disappears. It can go unrecognised by the person who has it, be deliberately withheld, fail to influence the decision it reached, or leave the organisation altogether.

Read this before you quote the number

These are your assumptions, not my claims. Every figure above is a setting you chose. I have not put a single piece of research into the maths, deliberately, because a number you built yourself is one you cannot dismiss and I cannot be accused of inventing.

The defaults are starting points, not industry benchmarks. If you think a number is wrong, change it. If the total still looks uncomfortable after you have set every slider to the most generous position you can honestly justify, that is the finding.

This tool does not measure individual employee capability. It estimates the potential organisational cost of capability that is present but not fully expressed, used or retained.

This is a scale-of-the-problem tool. It shows you the potential order of magnitude, and which of the four causes your own estimates point at. It does not tell you why that cause is running in your organisation. The next question is not “how do we get people to perform better?” It is “what is stopping the capability we already have from being used?”

Found a bigger gap than you expected?

Amanda Anderson works with organisations to find what is stopping the capability they have already paid for from becoming contribution, judgement and impact.

Email me my result →