Field Definition
The discipline of designing, diagnosing, and maintaining the structural conditions that determine whether organizations can make good decisions and hold themselves accountable for outcomes over time.
Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ is the architecture of authority, accountability, and continuity that sits beneath organizational performance.
It's not about teaching people to make better decisions. It's about building the structural conditions that make good decisions possible—and sustainable—in the first place.
This includes: who has the authority to decide, who bears the consequences, how decisions are remembered over time, how responsibility is distributed without diffusion, and how truth can be spoken without political cost.
Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ is the discipline of designing the structural conditions—authority boundaries, accountability mechanisms, decision rights, and memory systems—that determine whether organizations can make good decisions and hold themselves accountable for outcomes over time.
It treats decision-making and accountability as infrastructural problems, not performance problems. When decisions consistently fail, when accountability evaporates, when the same mistakes repeat—these are symptoms of structural breakdown, not individual incompetence.
Organizations fail predictably when the structure beneath decision-making and accountability is poorly designed, invisible, or contradictory.
Authority separates from responsibility. People are held accountable for outcomes they cannot control. Decision rights are ambiguous. Ownership is diffuse. No one can act, and no one is truly responsible.
Decisions are forgotten. The system loses memory of why choices were made. Rationale evaporates. Context disappears. The organization repeats the same failures because it cannot remember what it learned.
Truth becomes politically expensive. Reality cannot be named without career risk. Signals are distorted. Feedback loops break. The gap between what is happening and what can be said grows until the organization operates on fiction.
These are not communication failures. They are structural failures. And they compound in AI governance contexts, where decision rights about model behavior, accountability for system outcomes, and continuity of safety commitments are often invisible, contradictory, or nonexistent.
Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ is a distinct discipline. It overlaps with organizational design, change management, and AI ethics—but it is not reducible to any of them.
Org design focuses on structure (reporting lines, roles, teams). Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ focuses on the authority and accountability patterns that exist regardless of org chart. It asks: who can actually decide, and who actually bears consequences?
Change management focuses on adoption and transition. Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ focuses on durability and continuity—how decisions and accountability hold over time, especially when pressure increases or leadership changes.
AI ethics focuses on values and principles. Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ focuses on the operational structures that make ethical commitments enforceable—who has authority to halt a deployment, who is accountable when harm occurs, how safety rationale is preserved.
Where organizational design asks "how should we structure?", change management asks "how do we transition?", and AI ethics asks "what should we value?", Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ asks: "How do we build the conditions where good decisions are structurally supported and bad decisions have clear, traceable accountability?"
Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ solves a specific class of organizational breakdown:
These failures are especially catastrophic in AI deployment contexts, where decision rights about model behavior, accountability for system harm, and continuity of safety commitments determine whether organizations can govern AI responsibly—or whether AI becomes ungovernable.
If you are responsible for systems where authority is unclear, accountability is diffuse, and decisions fail to hold over time, this discipline provides the diagnostic and design tools to make structural dysfunction visible and correctable.
If your work involves diagnosing why organizations fail despite competent people and good intentions, Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ offers a framework for identifying and correcting structural breakdowns that exist beneath behavior, culture, and communication.
If you work in responsible AI, algorithmic accountability, or AI policy, this discipline translates directly into your domain. AI systems inherit the decision and responsibility infrastructure of the organizations that build and deploy them. When that infrastructure is broken, AI governance becomes impossible.
If you study organizational theory, governance, decision science, or responsibility attribution, Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ provides a structural lens that bridges normative frameworks and operational reality.
The operational framework for Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ is Coherence—a diagnostic system for identifying, naming, and correcting structural failure in human systems.
Coherence diagnoses organizational breakdowns through three structural vertices:
Coherence uses two diagnostic primitives to make structural failure observable:
Where Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ defines the field, Coherence provides the method. It is the diagnostic infrastructure that makes structural failure visible, nameable, and correctable.
Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ is a field in formation. There are multiple ways to engage:
Infrastructure is only visible when it fails. The work is to make failure visible before it becomes operational crisis.
Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ treats authority, accountability, and continuity as load-bearing structures. When they fail, organizations collapse—not because people are incompetent, but because the infrastructure beneath decision-making and responsibility was never properly designed.
This discipline exists to make that infrastructure visible, diagnosable, and maintainable.
Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ is developed and advanced by Justin R. Greenbaum, founder of Greenbaum Labs. The diagnostic method—Coherence—is published regularly on Substack, where Failure Modes and Field Notes are explored in depth.
For advisory engagements, organizational diagnostics, or questions about applying Decision & Responsibility Infrastructure™ to AI governance or enterprise operations, contact justin@greenbaumlabs.com.