Diagnostics

Corrective Debt Calculator

Prices the gap between an institution's capacity to act on people and its capacity to hear from them when it is wrong.

Overview

When to use the Corrective Debt Calculator.

Best for governance leads comparing what a system can do to people with what people can do back, before the next expansion decision.

  • Decision volume and automation growth for the last year.
  • Challenge intake route, staffing, and reversal latency.
  • The last time a handled exception changed an upstream rule.

Estimated time: 10–12 minutes

Studio support can help run the two-axis comparison and trace exception-to-revision paths.

Methodology

Two axes, one gap.

Action capacity and corrective capacity are stated separately and compared. The gap between them is the debt.

Inputs

  • Action-capacity growth band for the last year.
  • How challenges and exceptions are received and answered.
  • Reversal latency from challenge to restored state.
  • Whether handled exceptions ever change the rule that produced them.
  • Whether recurring workarounds are inventoried and reviewed.

Procedure

  1. Score action-capacity growth and each corrective-capacity component.
  2. Compute the corrective debt score and its trajectory.
  3. Estimate the absorption share: corrective effort that changed nothing upstream.

Outputs

  • Corrective debt score and tier.
  • Absorption share estimate.
  • Debt trajectory: compounding, steady, or flat.

Measures

  • How fast action capacity — decisions automated, data integrated, downstream dependence — compounded over the last year.
  • Corrective capacity on its own axis: challenge intake, reversal latency, upstream revision, and workaround handling.
  • The accumulated gap between the two, with its trajectory.

Does not measure

  • Exact financial exposure or legal liability.
  • Whether any single past decision was right or wrong.
  • Model quality: retraining and accuracy are action capacity, not correction.

Assumptions

  • Inputs describe the last twelve months, not the deployment plan.
  • Corrective capacity is measured where challenges actually arrive, not where the org chart says they should.
  • A recurring workaround is a presumption of upstream design failure, which the inputs treat as evidence.

Instrument prompts

  • Action-capacity growth: compounding, steady, or flat over twelve months.
  • Challenge intake: dedicated resourced team, shared inbox, or no route.
  • Reversal latency: same day, days to weeks, unknown or unbounded.
  • Upstream revision: never, occasionally, or regularly.
  • Workaround register: inventoried and reviewed, informal only, or none.

Rubric

  • Growth scored on compounding / steady / flat.
  • Intake scored on none / shared inbox / dedicated team.
  • Reversal scored on unbounded / days-to-weeks / same-day.
  • Revision scored on never / occasionally / regularly.
  • Workarounds scored on none / informal / inventoried.

Scoring logic

  • Each component contributes its band weight; the total normalizes to 0–100.
  • Tiers: critical, high, moderate, low.
  • Absorption share derives from intake, revision, and workaround bands.

Validation notes

Calibrated against the casebook: the cases that scored worst on the six state variables also produce the highest debt bands here.

Scores stabilize when the operator states correction staffing in numbers rather than intentions.

  • Counting the appeals queue as corrective capacity when it resolves cases and changes nothing upstream.
  • Reading workarounds as resilience and scaling the system on absorbed labor.
  • Using model metrics — accuracy, retraining — as evidence of corrective capacity.

Replicability

  • Collect the growth band and the four corrective-capacity bands.
  • State challenge volume and correction staffing for the same period.
  • Run the calculator and record the tier with the absorption share.
  • Re-run after any scope expansion and compare trajectories.

Example outputs

  • Corrective debt scorecard with tier and trajectory.
  • Absorption share with the exception classes that produced it.

The presumption this tool applies

A recurring workaround is a presumption of upstream design failure, not evidence that adaptable humans can handle the edge cases. The presumption is rebuttable: show that the workaround is a product of preference rather than compensation. Until it is rebutted, repeated adaptation counts as rigidity being subsidized by human flexibility.

Related: Workaround presumption · Corrective debt · Exception absorption

Run the tool

State the two axes for the last twelve months.

Five inputs: how fast action compounded, and four measures of the capacity to hear from people when it is wrong.

Results

Corrective debt readout.

Use the shareable link in the expansion review.

Scholarly metadata

Authorship

Contact: diagnostics@ethotechnics.org

Publication details

  • Published: Dec 3, 2025
  • Last updated: Sep 18, 2026
  • Version: v1.3.0
  • DOI: Pending Zenodo deposit

License: CC BY 4.0

Credit Ethotechnics Institute Diagnostics Lab, include tool name + version, and link to the canonical permalink.

Archive: Wayback Machine history

Changelog

  • v1.3.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added the Corrective Debt Calculator, which prices the gap between action capacity and corrective capacity on two axes, with the absorption share and the workaround presumption as inputs.
  • v1.2.0 · 2026-09-06 — Added the Delegation Audit, which walks one workflow through the six state variables.
  • v1.1.0 · 2026-01-09 — Published method cards, transparency notes, and replicability guidance for each diagnostic.
  • v1.0.0 · 2025-12-03 — Initial diagnostics suite release.

Copy citation (APA/BibTeX)

Cite this page Formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX, RIS

Version

v1.3.0

Last updated

Sep 18, 2026

DOI

Pending Zenodo deposit

APA

Ethotechnics Institute Diagnostics Lab. (2026). Corrective Debt Calculator. Ethotechnics Institute. https://ethotechnics.org/diagnostics/corrective-debt-calculator

MLA

Ethotechnics Institute Diagnostics Lab. "Corrective Debt Calculator." Ethotechnics Institute, 2026, https://ethotechnics.org/diagnostics/corrective-debt-calculator.

Chicago

Ethotechnics Institute Diagnostics Lab. "Corrective Debt Calculator." Ethotechnics Institute. Sep 18, 2026. https://ethotechnics.org/diagnostics/corrective-debt-calculator.

BibTeX

@misc{diagnostic_corrective-debt-calculator,
  title={Corrective Debt Calculator},
  author={Ethotechnics Institute Diagnostics Lab},
  year={2026},
  howpublished={Ethotechnics Institute},
  url={https://ethotechnics.org/diagnostics/corrective-debt-calculator},
  version={v1.3.0}
}

RIS

TY  - WEB
TI  - Corrective Debt Calculator
AU  - Ethotechnics Institute Diagnostics Lab
PY  - 2026
UR  - https://ethotechnics.org/diagnostics/corrective-debt-calculator
ER  -