A Unified Diagnostic Architecture of Organisational Failure: Foundational Heuristic Indices

Abstract

Organisations seldom fail through a single visible defect. In mature organisations, deterioration can accumulate through administrative burden, friction in decision-making, weakened execution, financial dysfunction, strategic rigidity and defensive behaviour. This paper sets out the foundation of a diagnostic programme that examines such conditions through separate, transparent heuristic indices, and defines the vocabulary on which the later papers of the series rely. It defines what ‘organisational failure’ and ‘fragility’ mean in this programme, and proposes three constructs: the Compliance Density Index (CDI), which relates compliance and documentation effort to execution effort; the Committee Inflation Index (CII), which relates the person-time consumed by committee processes to decision output against a stated reference; and the Composite Organisational Fragility Index (COFI), a four-dimension composite whose dimensions are defined, normalised and fed by indicators proposed in Papers II to V. The paper revises the earlier edition by removing underived alert levels for CDI and CII, rebuilding CII on person-hours per decision, giving COFI computable components and a non-compensatory companion reading, and adding literature positioning, synthetic worked examples and a validation programme. The constructs are screening lenses. They indicate where investigation might begin; they do not establish failure, misconduct or causation. No empirical results are reported.