Observed patterns

The symptoms change names. The structure keeps repeating itself.

These pages preserve the operating patterns that led to IVA without turning the research portal into another service site.

By Evan FosterPublished
Structural failureApproval bottlenecksHidden labor

Common manifestations.

Approval bottlenecks

A decision must climb to people who can reject it but cannot repair or implement it.

Slow decision rights

The answer is known near the work while legitimate authority sits farther away.

Broken handoffs

Context disappears between functions and gets rebuilt through repeated correction.

Unclear roles

Ownership, approval, execution, and cleanup overlap until work is duplicated or abandoned.

Stalled strategy

The plan preserves priorities but does not alter authority, capacity, funding, measures, or review routines.

Structural overload

The same people carry formal responsibility, informal repair, reporting, and institutional memory until the lane fails.

Patterns are evidence, not automatic diagnoses.

A repeated symptom can indicate an architectural problem, but IVA recognition still requires documentation, persistence, materiality, cross-functional impact, and verifiability. The purpose of the pattern library is to make structural questions visible enough to investigate.