A Field of Practice
Organizations don't break because people are wrong. They break because the structural conditions underneath — authority, accountability, continuity — weren't designed for the speed and scale they're operating at. This is the discipline of making that visible.
Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ is the architecture of authority, accountability, and continuity beneath organizational performance. Not the decisions themselves — the structural conditions that make good decisions possible.
At scale, authority separates from responsibility. Decisions lose their rationale. Truth becomes expensive to speak. No one designed it this way — it's the physics of organizations under speed and complexity. DRI™ makes that physics visible.
As AI adoption accelerates, organizations rely less on the human beings who've been absorbing these structural gaps. The buffers are disappearing. The infrastructure underneath has to hold — or the dysfunction surfaces at scale.
The diagnostic method for DRI™. Three structural vertices — when they reinforce each other, the system holds. When they drift apart, people absorb the cost.
Is reality being accurately perceived and spoken? Can the system see what is actually happening, and can participants name it without distortion, fear, or political cost?
Does decision-making power match responsibility? Are the people with the power to decide the same people who bear the consequences?
Are commitments, decisions, and narratives stable over time? Does the system remember what it decided and why?
This isn't about what organizations are doing wrong. It's about what happens structurally when scale and speed outpace the infrastructure underneath.
Structural conditions look different from every chair. Find yours.
Failure Modes name structural conditions that emerge predictably at scale — not mistakes, but physics. Functional Field Notes surface patterns while interpretation is still forming. 17 FMs. 21 FFNs. Three tiers.
Showing 8 of 17 Failure Modes. Full taxonomy includes 21 Functional Field Notes. The taxonomy is evolving — 4 of 21 FFNs are confirmed.
Seven instruments that observe, summarize, and suggest. They do not decide. The human stays in the loop — that's the point.
Detect failure mode patterns in organizational signals.
Surface early warning signals before failure becomes entrenched.
Orient on the diagnostic map. Identify where you are in the system.
Record when authority acted. Preserve decision rationale over time.
Prove fixes are real. Confirm structural change, not cosmetic adjustment.
Test if fixes hold over time. Monitor for structural decay.
Custody of meaning across time. Track how decisions survive handoffs.
The build record of DRI™ — published at the pace the work moves. What the diagnostic pipeline has found, where the methodology falls short, and what it cannot yet see. 15 entities. 5 sectors. Limitations disclosed.
A diagnostic that measures gaps must disclose its own.
DRI™ is developed by Justin R. Greenbaum, powered by Greenbaum Labs. The work is published in the open.
Decision & responsibility infrastructure. Advisory work, AI governance, and the Coherence framework.
A personal AI workshop running on local compute. The infrastructure that powers the diagnostic pipeline.
Essays on coherence, decisions, and building infrastructure for what matters. The Coherence Record lives here.
DRI™ is a field in formation. The work is public. The methodology is transparent. The canon is evolving.
Infrastructure is only visible when it fails. The work is to make failure visible before it becomes operational crisis.