One. The Drift versus Design Matrix, which diagnoses
The question it answers: where is this organisation designing the relationship between its people and these systems, and where is it drifting into one? Four positions, and most functions are in a different one from the one their leadership would name.
Used since at least 16 November 2025, where the matrix is named as a framework from the book. It is the instrument the rest of the argument is built on. The matrix.
Two. The Twelve, which interrogates
Twelve questions a board should ask about AI, in four groups, each paired with the answer that should worry you, with the one that matters most at the end. The value of a board question lies entirely in knowing what a bad answer sounds like, so the bad answers are printed next to the questions.
Free, published in full, and written to be read out in a meeting. The twelve questions, and one page for the board pack.
Three. Rules Before Tools, which decides
One day with the executive team, and the rule that gives it its name: the rules are written before the next tool is bought, not after it has been deployed and the question has become how to justify it.
What comes out is three lines: what the machines may do, who can stop each one, and how the organisation would know if it went wrong, in the room’s own words rather than a consultant’s. Rules Before Tools.
Four. The Delegation Boundary Map, which draws the line
Where the decisions actually sit, function by function, and which of them have moved without anybody deciding that they should. It is the instrument that turns a policy about AI into a statement about particular decisions, which is the only form a board can hold anyone to.
Five. The Drift Index, which measures
The annual reading: how far organisations have drifted, published on a stated cadence so that the second edition is comparable with the first and the tenth is a record of what happened to a generation of work.
It is in progress rather than published. The cadence is stated in advance deliberately, because an annual instrument whose date is announced after the data is collected is a report rather than an index. What it will measure, and when.
The concepts the instruments are built on
Two ideas sit underneath all five and are not instruments in their own right. Capability debt is what an organisation accumulates when it automates faster than it maintains the ability to do the work unaided. The missing rungs is what happens to the route by which juniors became seniors when the junior work is the work that goes first.
The missing rungs and synthetic seniority are claimed as coinages here. Capability debt is not: it has been used and developed across four dated essays in three different senses, and no dated first use has been established, which is recorded on the accuracy page along with everything else this research has got wrong.
Using them without me
All five are published rather than licensed. Run the matrix on your own leadership team, put the Twelve to your own executive, and hold your own Rules Before Tools day. Nothing here needs a signature and nothing is behind a form.
What an outside person adds is the part an internal one cannot: asking whether the person named as the check on a system could actually catch a wrong answer, which is an uncomfortable question to put to a colleague and a straightforward one to put to a stranger who sells you nothing else.
