Tenability: A Name, a Test, and Seven Drafting Devices for Procedures That Do Not Have to Be Broken

Formalization is necessary to operation and is the standard remedy after coordination failure: when an event goes badly, the response is almost always more specification. This paper argues that the remedy routinely produces the defect it was meant to cure, because a procedure specified tightly enough to remove discretion cannot be followed in the conditions for which it was most needed. The cost is not the single departure but the standing the instrument loses once it is known to require breaking.A formal structure is tenable when it can be complied with as written across the conditions it governs, including conditions it did not anticipate, without anyone having to breach or override it. Tenability is distinct from flexibility, vagueness, and permissiveness, and is achieved by restricting what an instrument claims rather than by adding to it. Seven drafting devices accomplish that restriction: scope restriction, tiered normativity, anchored discretion, burden allocation, precedence rules, guidance by worked example, and temporal and successional scoping. The paper treats these as alternative routes to one property rather than a checklist, illustrated from statute, case law, and municipal and federal practice, including a 2025 decision voiding a municipal agreement drafted so that it had to be broken.The contribution is conceptual: a name, a diagnostic test applicable to any existing instrument, a repair inventory pairing each device with the failure it forestalls, and a reframing of policy review from what an instrument omits to what can no longer be followed. Existing work names the tension between rules and practice but takes the drafting as given.