Diagnostic Framework

Diagnostic Sequence

  1. Policy Diagnosis — Was the policy objective sufficiently defined and matched to the mechanism chosen?
  2. Governance Diagnosis — Were responsibility and authority aligned across the implementing network?
  3. Dependency Diagnosis — Where were critical dependencies concentrated? Did they have redundancy?
  4. Capacity Diagnosis — Which capacity domains were sufficient? Which were insufficient?
  5. Debt Diagnosis — What implementation debt existed before the stress event?
  6. Fragility Diagnosis — Was the failure driven by veto fragility, execution fragility, or both?
  7. Outcome Analysis — At what stage did implementation succeed, degrade, or break?
  8. Intervention Design — What would improve the probability of achieving the intended outcome?

Diagnostic Classifications

  • Policy design failure — the mechanism could not produce the objective
  • Authority failure — the implementing institution lacked the necessary authority
  • Capacity failure — the institution lacked specific capabilities required
  • Dependency failure — a critical dependency broke without redundancy
  • Fragility failure — an external actor or condition disrupted the pathway
  • Debt revelation — accumulated structural weakness made failure likely
  • Adaptive failure — the system could not diagnose and correct course
  • Recovery success — the system failed initially but demonstrated adaptive capacity
  • Design adequacy question — governance performed adequately; policy design limitations explain outcome

Change Log

VersionDateChangesRationale
v1.02026-07-11Initial Diagnostic FrameworkExtracted from PL-201 Loom Analysis Protocol v1.1