01
Boundaries as Infrastructure
What happens when boundaries stop functioning as structural limits.
Human Systems Integrity Model
The system on paper is not always the system people live inside.
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HSIM is a framework I developed for examining what happens in the gap between the two. Policies can be sound. Roles can be defined. Procedures can exist. People can still end up working inside a completely different system.
How it happens.
A shortcut becomes normal.
An exception becomes precedent.
Someone quietly compensates for a weakness.
Responsibility shifts without anyone formally moving it.
People adapt to what is actually happening rather than what is supposed to happen.
Eventually the workaround is no longer the workaround. It is the system.
The question underneath HSIM
What is this system teaching people to do?
Look at the pattern.
If people repeatedly work around a process, something is teaching them that the workaround works better.
If one person keeps rescuing everyone else, something is allowing the system to depend on that rescue.
If the same failure keeps returning after different people have occupied the roles involved, changing the person has not changed the conditions producing the failure.
That is where HSIM looks.
The model.
Twelve connected ideas for looking at how human behaviour and systems shape each other over time.
02
Normalization of Deviance
How repeated exceptions slowly become ordinary practice.
03
ABC
Looking at what happens before a behaviour, the behaviour itself, and what follows it.
04
The Hidden Stabiliser
The person, process or workaround quietly keeping a weak system functioning.
05
Intermittent Reinforcement
Why inconsistent consequences can make dysfunctional patterns surprisingly persistent.
06
Learned Helplessness
What repeated failure, inconsistency or lack of control can teach people about whether action is worth taking.
07
Role Drift
How people gradually begin carrying responsibility or exercising authority that was never formally theirs.
08
Cognitive Dissonance
What happens when what people believe about a system conflicts with what they repeatedly experience inside it.
09
Behavioural Contagion
How tolerated behaviour becomes information about what is actually acceptable.
10
Threshold Theory
Why systems can absorb small failures for a long time before the effect becomes visible.
11
The Accountability Gap
The space between responsibility being assigned and responsibility actually being carried.
12
Rebuilding
Moving from identifying dysfunction to changing the conditions that keep reproducing it.
Where it came from.
I kept seeing the same thing in different places.
What was written down and what people actually did were not necessarily the same.
And the difference was rarely created in one dramatic moment. It accumulated.
People adjusted. Exceptions were made. Someone compensated. Something worked well enough to get through another day.
Each decision could make sense on its own.
The pattern only became obvious when I stopped looking at the incidents separately.
HSIM came from trying to understand that pattern.
The point.
The purpose of HSIM is not to design a perfect system.
People will improvise. Circumstances will change. Rules will encounter reality.
The useful work is finding out where the system and reality have separated, why they separated, what is currently holding the gap together, and what keeps reproducing it.
Because once you can see the system people are actually living inside, you can finally work on the right one.
Human Systems Integrity Model created by
Jessica de Lange.