Guide · explorable

Six-Tier Cascade

An organization is a stack of six specification tiers — each one a projection of the tier above it. At every boundary sits an acceptance test. Inject a defect at one tier and watch it propagate strictly downward. This is an illustration — to audit a real organization's specification, use the OrgSchema Audit.

Inject defect at:
T1 Owner Intent why the organization exists PASS
T2 Business Model how it creates and captures value PASS
T3 Business Entity the legal / structural vessel PASS
T4 Product what it offers PASS
T5 Process how the work is done PASS
T6 Organization the people doing it PASS

No defect injected — every tier conforms to the tier above it. Click a tier above to inject a misspecification.

What this shows. A defect at tier N makes tier N fail its acceptance test against its parent, and forces every tier below it to fail too — each one projects from the corrupted spec it inherited, so the defect runs strictly downward through the projection cascade. The tiers above the defect stay green: they are upstream of the corruption and remain the source of truth. The teaching point: a dysfunction you observe at the bottom (Tier 6, Organization) often originates at a higher tier (say Tier 2, Business Model). Diagnose top-down and repair the highest failing tier — the root — not the visible symptom at the bottom. In OST terms, dysfunction is a specification defect, not an execution failure.

What it does not claim. This is a pedagogical sketch of the published six-tier model — it carries no measurement, no probabilities, and no claim about any specific organization. Whether a real tier actually conforms to its parent spec is an empirical question for the OrgSchema Audit. Read it back through the COO path (and the org-theory path) on the Guide.

From illustration to specification audit

This explorable is a sketch of the six-tier cascade concept. A real diagnosis tests each tier-to-tier acceptance boundary against actual specification evidence and locates the highest tier that fails to conform to its parent — the root defect — rather than the symptom that surfaces at the bottom. That is the OrgSchema Audit. For the theory of what each tier is and why six, start from the COO path on the Guide.