CausonomyThe science
Causonomy derives its structure rather than observing it. Everything below follows from a single starting point: what must be true of any system that can be said to fail.
Activities
A system acts on forms — things that persist and remain identifiable, whether physical, informational or symbolic. There is a closed set of ways an action can impact a form: it can change what the form is, where it is, whether it persists, or what it is subsequently permitted to do. Nothing else is available. From that exhaustive partition follows a closed set of universal activities: storing, moving, acquiring, releasing, transforming and checking. Every operation in any organisation is one of these, or a composition of them.
Forms
Each activity acts on forms that its own success or failure depends on. Storing has what is held, what came in and what went out. Transforming has what is consumed and what is produced. Checking has what is examined and what it is judged against. These are not categories imposed on the domain; they are the parameters without which the activity cannot be said to have occurred.
Deviations
A form can be wrong in its quantity or in its structure. An activity can be wrong in its occurrence, its magnitude or its timing. These two families are exhaustive and do not overlap: whatever is observed is one or the other, and the distinction determines where its causes lie.
Causes
Combining the activities, the forms and the deviations yields the complete set of ways a normative system can fail — each of them a Negative Outcome with a determinate structure. For each, the set of causes that could have produced it is derived from the same basis, through the management actions any system must perform to govern itself: defining what is required, anticipating it, initiating it, bounding it, authorising it, and confirming it happened.
The result is a closed causal field. Not a checklist of likely causes, and not a taxonomy assembled from experience, but the set that structure permits.
What follows from closure
- Completeness is decidable. An investigation can state what it has not yet eliminated, rather than stopping when an answer feels sufficient.
- Two investigators converge. Working the same stated problem against the same field, they reach the same set — differences become differences of evidence, not of imagination.
- The unfamiliar is reachable. A cause nobody in the room had thought of is still in the field, because the field was derived rather than recalled.