War-game an equity refresh ladder by proving each grant class has a named owner, a measured refresh window, and a reverse path before the calendar starts governing every equity claim.
Equity refresh ladders fail when "refreshed" means a checkbox without a decision artifact, when teams dual-count a draft grant as both approved and live, and when high-risk grant paths still pin to one thin roster because the map is incomplete. The review needs one written inventory of grant classes, one owner who can deny a risky shortcut, and a documented consequence when a failed grant ages past the deadline.
Inventory the ladder path
List every grant class with its refresh window, exception rule, override behavior, owners, and notification channels. Mark paths that cannot reverse without a manual grant edit. Attach the last three equity incidents with raw timelines and any waivers. Include the source of truth for open grant counts during the observation window.
Define the phases for nominate, approve, grant, abort, and communicate. Each phase needs an owner and an exit condition. Write the point after which a stuck refresh would require a different procedure, then review whether that action is still permitted. Capture maximum acceptable dilution and cash-cost friction in measurable units, including which cohorts are excluded from the ladder and why.
Include the calendar of known events for the next two quarters: board windows, fundraising peaks, and vesting cliffs that shrink the usable change window. An equity budget that ignores those dates will look calm until the week they land.
Failure drills
- A minority high-volume team keeps a side-channel while the aggregate equity dashboard stays green.
- A restore has already left a partner surface without a trusted grant state.
- The primary equity dashboard lags beyond the planned observation window.
- An operator skips an approve gate because a board date is close.
- Automated and human grants collide under the new exception rule.
- Abort authority is unclear at week end and the page lands on the wrong grant.
For each drill, identify detection time, dilution impact, containment, and the authority to force a grant rollback. Require commands and dashboard links in the runbook. A statement that monitoring will catch it does not establish which alert fires or who receives it.
Prove equity changes are timed and owned
Run the package in Pingpong with people, finance, legal, and board seats. Ask legal which disclosure decision becomes unsafe first if grants still stick after the claimed window. Ask finance whether dilution can absorb a forced override. Ask people to show the exact ladder version or grant export used as the exit condition.
Related reviews include the people ops lead seat, a headcount freeze rule review, a comp band rewrite stress test, and an equity refresh stress test. Browse the war-game decisions hub for adjacent controls.
Authorize the published equity response only after a timed drill restores usable grant hygiene inside the documented budget without an undocumented manual step.