Financial DD complete. Organizational readiness unknown.
A Nordic mid-market PE firm was evaluating the acquisition of a regional services company with approximately 400 employees. Financial and commercial due diligence had been completed. Both returned green.
The investment thesis, however, depended on significant operational improvement post-acquisition. The deal team had no structured view of organizational readiness, leadership alignment, or where execution risk actually lived — only the impressions formed in management presentations.
One question, deployed across management and operations.
Cicuno was deployed across the target's management team and key operational staff in the final weeks before bid submission. Using a single, context-specific open question, respondents identified what they saw as the most critical issues facing the organization — unprompted and anonymously.
Each issue was then self-scored for sentiment, personal influence, perceived consensus with leadership, and proposed actions. The process took under two weeks, end to end.
A consensus gap at the center of the thesis.
The analysis surfaced a significant consensus gap between senior leadership and operational management around a planned system implementation central to the investment thesis. Leadership rated execution readiness as high. Operational managers — anonymously and consistently — flagged resource constraints, unclear ownership, and low confidence in the timeline.
A secondary cluster of responses pointed to unresolved cultural friction from a prior reorganization that had not surfaced in any management interview.
A formal organizational risk section in the IC memo.
The findings were incorporated into the investment committee presentation as a formal organizational risk section — the first time the firm had included structured people-risk data at this level of rigor.
The bid proceeded, with revised assumptions on integration timeline and a specific 100-day workstream added to address the identified friction points. Post-acquisition, the Cicuno baseline served as the starting point for the integration diagnostic — turning a one-off DD exercise into a monitoring signal for the hold period.
“It changed how we thought about the first hundred days.”
What the deal team received.
- Consensus mapWhere leadership and operations agree — and where they don't
- Influence / sentiment quadrantResignation vs. active resistance vs. latent energy
- Action clustersUnprompted proposals, ranked by internal support
- Risk memo sectionDelivered in IC format, ready to drop in