A startup programme connects entrepreneurs to potential customers through structured events and facilitated introductions. Deals are announced. Relationships are celebrated. Three years later, few entrepreneurs have direct, ongoing commercial relationships with those customers. New cohorts route through the same intermediary.
The connector who never stops being needed is not creating connections. They are managing the absence of them.
S5 is one of the most politically sensitive stalls to name, because it implies that organisations whose stated purpose is connection are preventing it. That framing is unfair and usually inaccurate. Intermediaries exist because they solve real problems. Transaction costs are high. Information is asymmetric. Trust takes time to build. A well-run connector organisation reduces these frictions genuinely.
The stall appears not because the intermediary is bad at its job, but because it has become structurally necessary. When actors cannot transact without passing through the connector, the connector controls access. That control creates value — for the connector. It also creates dependency — for the actors. The dependency is rational on both sides: the buyer benefits from pre-screened introductions, the producer benefits from warm referrals. Neither has an incentive to invest in the direct relationship that would make the connector optional.
Removing intermediaries does not just enable direct coupling. It removes the positions that gain advantage from remaining in the loop.
Ecosystem Stewardship · Chapter 6Over time, the connector's position is load-bearing. The ecosystem's coordination capacity runs through their relationships, their events, their introductions. This is not capture — it is what successful intermediation produces when it is not designed with an exit condition.
S5 is the stall where the Y-side is hardest to observe. Whether direct coupling is forming — whether buyers and producers are developing unmediated relationships — requires seeing what happens outside the intermediary's view. That data is rarely available from public sources.
This is why S5 claims should be held at medium confidence unless there is direct evidence of the substitution: intermediary relationships that persist across multiple cycles, actors who report no direct commercial relationships outside the programme structure, or connector organisations that explicitly position continued involvement as the success metric rather than relationship independence.
The leverage move for S5 requires more caution than for most stalls. Where direct coupling is genuinely not yet viable — because trust is insufficient, because actors are too early-stage, because the market is not yet thick enough — withdrawing intermediaries before the conditions for coupling exist will simply destroy the connections rather than transform them.
Where coupling is viable but not forming, the move is to introduce one structured programme where the explicit success metric is relationship independence: the number of actors who are transacting directly 12 months after introduction, without intermediary involvement. This does not eliminate the connector. It changes what success looks like — and begins to reveal whether the mediation is enabling coupling or substituting for it.
S5 has the lowest observability of any stall in the framework. The X-side — intermediary presence and activity — is visible. The Y-side — the absence of direct coupling — requires seeing what is not happening, which depends on data that intermediaries rarely produce about their own limitations. Claims should be held at medium or low confidence unless there is explicit evidence of persistent intermediary dependency across multiple relationship cycles, or direct testimony from actors about the absence of unmediated commercial relationships.
The diagnostic identifies which stalls are operating in your cluster — and which stacks they form. That is where intervention design begins.
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