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Position · Diagnose

Core competence audit

Finds the small number of things a business is genuinely, transferably good at — as opposed to the long list of things it merely does.

The printable canvas and the handoff into Claude Code are part of a paid plan. See what a plan includes. It needs the Claude desktop app on this machine, and your team and the prompt library already installed in that project — we cannot see your disk, so open it there.

Stage
01 Diagnose
Works at
All levels
Maturity
Scaling → Large organisation
Time
Half a day, including conversations outside the leadership team

What it is

Prahalad and Hamel's idea that a firm is better understood as a portfolio of competences than a portfolio of businesses. A core competence is a bundle of skills and technologies, not a single capability, and its test is whether it opens doors across several markets rather than making one product slightly better.

Access to markets
A genuine core competence provides potential entry to a range of markets, not just the one you are in. If it only serves the current product it is a capability.
Contribution to customer value
It must make a significant contribution to benefits the customer perceives. Internal excellence nobody notices is efficiency, not competence.
Difficulty of imitation
It should be hard for competitors to replicate — usually because it is a bundle of things learned over time rather than a single asset that can be bought.
Bundled, not singular
Competences are combinations: a skill plus a technology plus a way of working. That is why they are hard to copy and hard to articulate.
Held collectively
It lives in the organisation's routines and relationships, not in one team or one person. If it can resign, it is not core.
The mistake people makeAlmost every list produced in a first pass is a list of functions — "we're good at manufacturing", "we're good at service". Those are activities. Push until you reach the specific bundle that explains why you win, which is usually narrower and stranger than the function name.
What it’s forYou need to know what this business is genuinely better at than the alternatives.
What it’s not forYou are pre-revenue or pre-product. There is nothing yet to be competent at.

How you run it

  1. Start from wins, not capabilitiesLook at the last dozen things that went well. What did they have in common? Competences show up in outcomes before anyone names them.
  2. Apply the three testsA core competence gives access to several markets, contributes materially to what customers value, and is hard for competitors to imitate. Two out of three is a capability, not a competence.
  3. Ask delivery, not leadershipThe leadership team's view of what the business is good at is frequently a description of what it wishes it were good at. Ask the people doing the work.
  4. Check it is a competence, not a personIf it walks out with one individual it is not organisational. Say so plainly — that is a risk finding as much as a strength one.
  5. Test for decayCompetences erode quietly as people leave and investment moves. Ask when it was last genuinely exercised.

The prompt

Two ways to run it

Run this tool in your own Claude

The short prompt starts your partner against the library on your disk. The long one carries everything with it and needs nothing installed.

🔒 Prompt locked

Everything above is free — what this tool is, what it is for, what it is not for, and how to run it as a workshop. Three tool prompts a month are free with an account; beyond three, and for the printable canvas, it is the paid part.

See plans — from £19 a month

Your playbook

It lands in the earliest stage this tool suits. Move it on the Playbook page.

You’ll need

  • What you win on when you win
  • What the business is asked to do repeatedly
  • People from delivery, not only leadership

You’ll end up with

  • Three or four candidate competences, each tested
  • What each one enables that competitors cannot easily match
  • Where a competence is decaying and nobody noticed

Runs well with

AI risk classification and governanceAnalysis planBusiness Model CanvasComparable company benchmark