Explore the Six Depths
A systems lens for how coherence holds—or fails—across scale, pressure, and time.
Systems don’t fail at one layer.
They fail by propagating—from individuals to teams, from teams to organizations, from organizations to institutions, and outward into civilizational trust.
The Six Depths model helps you locate where a failure is emerging, how it spreads, and what controls actually reduce it.
How to use this page
- Identify the pattern you’re seeing (Verification Gap, Dependency Trap, Authority Without Friction, etc.).
- Ask: At what depth is it starting?
- Ask: Where is it showing up next?
- Apply controls at the trigger depth and the receiving depth—or the system will relive the failure in a new form.
If you try to solve a depth problem at the wrong depth, you get theater: policies that don’t change behavior, training that doesn’t change incentives, audits that don’t change permission.
The Six Depths
Civilizational
When shared trust and legitimacy erode, correction only arrives through crisis.
Institutional
When oversight and authority boundaries weaken, power escapes constraint.
Organizational
When incentives outrun safeguards, delivery pressure overrides responsibility.
Team / Community
When truth becomes unsafe to speak, failure hides until it explodes.
Individual
When fear and status pressure override judgment, drift begins quietly.
Technological / System
When systems can’t prove permission and behavior, risk becomes invisible.
Why this model matters
Most failures are misdiagnosed because they’re treated as “local.”
A technical fix is deployed to solve a team truth problem.
A policy is written to solve an incentive problem.
A training program is launched to solve a permission problem.
The Six Depths is how you stop fixing the symptom at one layer while the cause migrates to another.
Explore by Pattern (diagnosis → action)
If you already know what you’re seeing, start here:
Pattern → Control Mapping
Move from drift diagnosis to minimum viable controls.
Learn it in the wild
Case-style diagnostics (FAIL / INCONCLUSIVE / PASSED)
Live signals mapped to patterns and controls
Controls + evidence packs for AI systems under pressure
Closing
Systems survive not by avoiding failure, but by building mechanisms that detect and correct drift before collapse.
Depth tells you where to intervene. Controls tell you how.
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