Definition
The finite human resource an arrangement consumes when it demands that people adapt to it: the attention, memory, flexibility, time, health, and care that keep a mismatched system functional. It is finite and politically consequential: the resource ethotechnical design exists to spend only when necessary, and to preserve when an arrangement could instead absorb the complexity itself.
It matters because an arrangement that treats adaptive capacity as unlimited reads the people who compensate for it as resilient rather than as a resource being consumed. The discipline's working distinction is between compensatory adaptation, which is effort required because the arrangement failed to accommodate foreseeable reality, and the productive or reciprocal adaptation that learning, cooperation, and care require.
Tests that show it is in place
- Each consequential workflow names the adaptive capacity it requires of its users, not only of its operators.
- Demands that foreseeable variation could remove are treated as design gaps rather than as user burdens.
- The measure distinguishes capacity consumed by mismatch from capacity spent by choice.
References
- Ethotechnical design · Theory
- Core axioms · Doctrine