CHAVIS RAYNOR, PhD

Creator of FPI — FAILURE PATTERN INTELLIGENCE

For CEOs, CFOs, and Boards of Directors Facing Irreversible Capital Decisions

The failure patterns most likely to destroy your capital are active right now. Most won’t be visible until after the capital is gone.

FPI exists to answer one question: what failure patterns are already active in this decision, and what would they destroy if left unchecked? It treats failure as structural rather than personal, and it aims to surface those patterns before the capital is gone, not after the outcome is visible—the point in a decision’s life where a documented pattern can still be interrupted rather than only explained.

Two Ways to Apply the Framework

Same evidence base, same discipline—applied in two directions. One looks backward at a decision whose outcome is already known. One looks forward at a decision whose outcome isn’t known yet.

FPI Hindsight

Understand why a completed decision produced the outcome it did.

You provide materials from a past capital decision that underperformed or failed. I show you exactly which documented patterns were active—giving you a precise, source-traceable vocabulary for what happened, and a documented basis for comparison the next time a similar decision is on the table.

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FPI™ Hindsight

FPI Insight

Identify documented failure mechanisms already present in a live decision.

You have a live, active capital decision. We start with a conversation about what you're facing and what's at stake. If it's a fit, you receive a proposal with three options—scaled to your situation, never a single take-it-or-leave-it price.

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FPI™ Insight
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“What impressed me most was his analytical rigor and synthesis capabilities—he took input from diverse functional perspectives and distilled complex organizational data into a clear, actionable strategic framework… I would not hesitate to recommend Chavis to organizations seeking strategic guidance on organizational assessment or helping leadership teams understand their current state and pathways for transformation.”
Brad Schaufert, MBA
Director of Business Strategy and Program Management
Textron Specialized Vehicles

The Failure-First Tradition

Most capital allocation frameworks are built from studying what worked—a survivorship-biased record that teaches you what succeeded in someone else’s context and says little about the structural mechanisms that destroy value. FPI inverts that. It is built on 700+ documented failure patterns, cross-validated against independent authoritative sources. That documented failure is more transferable and more actionable at the moment of a capital decision than documented success is FPI’s founding premise—and, like every other claim FPI makes, it is held to the same evidentiary standard: tracked, not assumed.

This is the Failure-First Tradition—the discipline Textron founder Royal Little began and FPI extends systematically. Read the full position paper →

Causal Failure Analysis & Diagnostics is the underlying science: an open research agenda asking what documented organizational failure can and cannot support as evidence. See the research →

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