Start Here: Axion (Working paper v1.0)

A formal reference for the Axion diagnostic model used across the essays.

What it helps you see: misplaced complexity, broken correction loops, legitimacy conflicts.

Status: active working paper (updated as the model is formalised).

Cite / archive: Zenodo DOI — (your existing link)

If you want a fast diagnostic read on your organisation, start with the 5-essay reading order on the right.

This paper provides the formal reference point for the Axion model discussed throughout the site and related essays.

Field Guides & Applied Material (in development)

Practical diagnostic guides translating Axion into decision-making and intervention design.

  • Razor Diagnostic (2–3 weeks): locate misplaced load + correction loop failures

  • Confusion Tax Estimate (workshop): quantify cost of incoherence

  • Run/Serve/Change Boundary Map (exec working session)

Axion: A Structural Index for Organisational Coherence

Coherence is not culture. It’s a structural property — and when it breaks, you pay for it in latency, rework, risk exposure, and decision theatre.

Axion helps you diagnose

  • where complexity is being carried (often in shadow structure / wrong-level roles)

  • how variance is actually resolved (local-correction vs escalation)

  • where boundaries and legitimacy break, creating friction and “rational resistance”

Start with the pathway that matches your problem.

Read these 5 first

  1. Axion: A Structural Model of Organisational Coherence

  2. Where Does the Work Really Live?

  3. Run/Serve/Change Recursion, not Hierarchy

  4. Serve is not Support

  5. The Confusion Tax

Choose your starting point

A) Complexity in the wrong place (Physics / responsibility domains)

If delivery is slow and coordination is heavy, you likely have complexity sitting in the wrong responsibility domains.

Start with:

B) Escalation loops and theatre (Regulatory grammar)

If decisions crawl upward and exceptions dominate, your correction loops are broken.

Start with:

C) Hidden cost and rework (Confusion Tax)

If you can feel the waste but can’t quantify it, start here.

Start with:

D) “Difficult people” (Role responses to incoherence)

If you’ve got blockers, irony, compliance theatre, or quiet sabotage, assume structural causality first.

Start with:

  1. The Hierarchy of Work Complexity Is Inescapable (Even at Buurtzorg)

  2. Where Does the Work Really Live?

  3. Organisational Physics, Moral Gravity

  4. Axion: A Structural Model of Organisational Coherence

  5. Designing a Team for Run, Serve, Change

  6. Lewin, Rewritten

  7. The Confusion Tax

  8. Held Together by Non-Standard Leaders

  9. The Dashboard Isn’t the Work

  10. Three Axes — Now What?

  11. Run/Serve/Change Recursion, not Hierarchy

  12. The Six Survival Characters of Organisational Incoherence

  13. Serve is not Support

  14. The Blockers & The Ironists

  15. Change — The Work No One Is Doing: Systems Design at R+2