The Attribution Gap

An architecture theory of why enterprises systematically destroy the capabilities they depend on most — and how to detect, measure, and correct it.

Healthy, growing firms repeatedly eliminate capabilities they still need — not the weakest in a portfolio, but disproportionately some of the strongest. This series explains that paradox as an architecture and incentive problem, reduces it to observable signatures in records organizations already hold, and provides a rigorous programme for testing and correcting it.

Article 1 — The Attribution Gap and Capability Loss (Foundational Paper · v8)
Introduces the attribution gap: the widening distance between structural dependency on a capability and the formal credit assigned to it. Argues this is not negligence but the predictable result of incentives that penalize visibility of hard-to-manage dependencies. Distinguishes decay by neglect from decay by incentive — and identifies the second as the mechanism behind capability loss.

Article 2 — Measuring the Attribution Gap (Measurement Companion · v2)
The empirical companion. Reduces the theory’s three claims to measurable, non-circular observables and sequences the evidence work as a staged ladder, cheap-first. Specifies five signatures — from the can’t-kill-but-unlisted contradiction to the raised-and-ignored pattern — the cleanest discriminator between neglect and incentive as the driving mechanism.

Article 3 — [Title] (Working Paper · v_)
The governance response: what an organization that has diagnosed the attribution gap can structurally do about it.

The Attribution Gap

The Attribution Gap

Attribution Gap Meassurement Protocol

Bridge: The Attribution Gap and Capability Loss

The Attribution Gap and Capability Loss