Proposed Heuristic Indices for Engineering Sovereignty, Organisational Resistance, Deterioration Rate, Operational Isolation and Composite Fragility

Organisational fragility rarely arises from a single visible failure. It may develop gradually through the erosion of technical independence, resistance to change, the deterioration of critical resources and knowledge, the isolation of senior decision centres from operational reality, and the accumulation of weaknesses across several organisational dimensions. This technical note proposes five heuristic constructs for the exploratory diagnosis of such conditions: the Engineering Sovereignty Fragmentation Coefficient (ESFC), the Organisational Resistance Index (ORI), the Collapse Acceleration Index (CAI), the Field Operational Isolation Index (FOII) and the Composite Organisational Fragility Index (COFI). ESFC compares management-delegated engineering effort with independent engineering assessment. ORI combines the ratio of change-related contestation to field execution with the proportion of personnel meeting predefined resistance criteria. CAI expresses the observed mean rate of deterioration in liquidity and organisational knowledge. FOII measures the share of operational reports that reach a senior decision centre through indirect channels. COFI provides a provisional weighted architecture for combining four dimensions of organisational dysfunction. The constructs are conceptual and heuristic. They are not validated instruments, predictive laws, estimates of the probability or timing of failure, or substitutes for professional judgement. The paper therefore emphasises operational definitions, boundary conditions, data quality, reproducibility, responsible use and a programme for empirical validation.