Why This Site

What I am researching, why it is published, and how to find your way around

MARKO ŽIVKOVIĆ In review

Genesis opens with nine vignettes and one conclusion: truth has a status, and we keep failing to track it honestly. This page says why I publish, what I am trying to understand, why the reference layers exist, and how the menus are organised — so you can navigate without reading the whole series first.

What I am trying to understand

I have not lived every vignette in Where Everything Breaks firsthand. They are composites — from reading, hearing accounts, and observation across contexts. What repeats, whenever people come together and something goes wrong, is not nine unrelated malfunctions. It is usually a problem with truth — or the lack of it — and with how people and institutions relate to truth: what they treat as settled, what they refuse to record, what they bury, what they dress up to look stronger than it is.

That convergence is what pulled me from anecdote toward theory.

My formal management work centres on strategy, innovation management, and change — especially dynamic capabilities (sensing, seizing, reconfiguring under uncertainty), the knowledge-based view (KBV) of the firm, and the role of organisational intelligence in strategic management. I am fascinated by rigidities and path dependencies — the internal forces that make adaptation expensive even when the outside world has already moved. I came to believe that understanding those forces deeply is central to understanding how sustainable competitive advantage is won and lost.

Companies often fail not because the market was unknowable, but because internal structure and culture blocked prospering, adapting, and therefore surviving in a more dynamic environment. The quality of judgment at the moment that matters — the commitment boundary — depends heavily on the substrate: the knowledge held when you bind. By quality here I mean closer to truth. The closer to truth the substrate, the better the judgment; the better the judgment, relative to organisations with a weaker substrate, the stronger the advantage; the stronger and more honest that substrate over time, the more likely the organisation is to endure.

In my Master’s thesis I argued that artificial intelligence behaves like a meta–dynamic capability: a capability that can boost every facet of dynamic capabilities — sensing, seizing, transforming, adapting, shaping, evolving. That booster sits at a higher order in the organisation’s capability stack. I expect it to accelerate failure for many incumbents whose pre-AI structures, rigidities, and path dependencies are no longer fit for the coming decade — and to enable a new generation of AI-native organisations built on different foundations. I am therefore interested in the fundamental layers required for sustainable organisations in the age of AI: not only models, but capture, provenance, tier, harness, and values.

One deep insight — as plain as it sounds — is that truth doesn’t change. Much of what goes wrong in organisations and in public life traces to a humbler failure: human minds (alone or in groups) are not reliably built to keep track of what really happened and how sure we should be. An AI-enabled thinking exoskeleton for individuals and organisations can help: amplify thought, preserve lineage, and track the epistemic tier of statements we produce or consume while we are already doing knowledge work — adaptive, flexible, elastic — so we remember how certain we ought to be without stopping the work to become librarians.

That infrastructure should be governed by values, with H0: Humane Core at the centre — humane ends constrain every mechanism. As judgment infrastructure, the research may one day improve collective and individual judgment; if it does, it may make the world we live in a little more honest and a little more survivable. That is worth publishing in the open.

Why I publish here

These ideas grew in study, conversation, and practice long before they became articles. I publish because private clarity does not compound.

Argument needs a record. Claims that live only in slides, chats, or memory cannot be refuted cleanly, cited precisely, or revised without rewriting history. A public site is an L0-style commit at author scale: here is what I believed on this date; challenge the step where you diverge.
Shared vocabulary beats private intuition. When the same structural failure appears in literature, in a post-mortem, and in a boardroom, it should have a name in the pattern library — not nine private diagnoses of “something about our culture.”
Specification precedes product. I am building toward judgment infrastructure — capture, tiers, harnesses, contestability — not selling it on these pages. The site is the working specification: dense enough to implement from, open enough to break.

I write in the first person where stance matters; the reference stack holds definitions and patterns so articles can stay argumentative rather than encyclopaedic.

The problems this work decomposes

The long arc above condenses into research questions I expect to refine for years:

Problem	Plain question
Honest capture	How do we record what happened and what was claimed without silently upgrading guesses to facts?
Epistemic status	How does every statement carry its strength, lineage, staleness, and who committed to it?
Commitment under uncertainty	How do we bind when stakes are real — without immunity from learning or rubber-stamp review?
Collective judgment	How do organisations assign tier, dissent, and authority without consensus theatre or diffuse write authority?
Hybrid intelligence	How do LLMs and automation sit inside a harness so fluent output cannot harden into fact at industrial scale?
Correction that travels	When evidence refutes a claim, how does the demotion reach everything that depended on it — refutation propagation, not silent forgetting?

Genesis is the long argument that these problems share one root. Patterns, terms, frameworks, and planned series are where I operationalise answers — mechanism by mechanism, failure by failure.

Why patterns, failure modes, and anti-patterns

I collect patterns (what helps), failure modes (how things break), anti-patterns (structural mistakes), dark patterns (dishonest substitutes), and biases (systematic misreadings) for three reasons aligned with the strategy above.

First, literature and experience name the same recurrences — locking organisations, tier collapse, publication over provenance. Cataloguing them is a step toward disabling known failure modes structurally rather than rediscovering them in every transformation programme.

Second, I hope higher-order regularities will appear between patterns — meta-patterns that reveal what substrate and governance are actually required. Genesis supplies theory; the library supplies cases; links between entries supply structure for that induction.

Third, the library is falsifiable. New cases should add entries or refine old ones; if a pattern never matches reality, it should be demoted or refuted like any other claim.

Start from the pattern library hub or follow links from any article. Quality mechanisms at the bind (peer review, stress testing, and the rest) are indexed there alongside canonical pattern entries.

How the site is organised

The top navigation has three regions plus search.

Artifacts

Reference material and tools that support the arguments — not the linear essay path.

Menu item	What it is	Start here
Reference / Knowledge stack	Values, principles, hypotheses, regulations, terms, authors, works — distilled vocabulary and stance	/reference/
Patterns	Failure modes, anti-patterns, dark patterns, constructive patterns, biases, aims	/patterns/
Frameworks	Interactive maps for decision and classification problems	/frameworks/
Maps	Concept maps — zoomable views of how ideas connect	/maps/

Reference stack order (conceptual, not reading order): values ground principles; hypotheses hold testable claims under active research; regulations cite external law with corpus stance; terms define shared language; authors and works record attribution. Patterns operationalise principles in situational form.

Articles and essays

Long-form collections — each develops an argument in sequence.

Entry	Use when
Genesis	You want the full theory from first principles — nine parts, read in order
Other collections	You want a discipline-specific path (e.g. Modeling Truth)
Threads	You want the same articles sorted by domain (truth, data, judgment, organisation, …) rather than authorship order

Genesis is the original series; threads are cross-cutting domains that never “finish.” Most articles tag one or more threads — follow a thread when your question is topical, not when you need the spine.

About and engage

Page	Purpose
About	Author stance, how to read tags, why this site exists (this page), thinking exoskeleton vision
Engage	How to reach me — discussion, corrections, collaboration

Use search (header) across articles, patterns, and reference entries when you know a keyword but not which menu owns it.

Suggested paths

If you came from Article 1 and want the theory spine: continue Genesis in order — next is Truth Doesn’t Change.

If you care about one domain: pick a thread (e.g. judgment, organisation).

If you hit a failure in production: search the pattern library or browse failure modes.

If a term is unfamiliar: open its term entry — hover links in articles often show a short preview.

If you need tag legend: read Content metadata for A1–A3 adoption and T1–T13 epistemic tier markers inline in prose.

What is not on this site

Legal advice — regulation entries are corpus context, not counsel.
Finished product — many Outlook items are A3 — exploratory; runnable systems follow the spec, they are not all shipped here.
Neutral textbook tone — articles argue; A tags say what I have adopted vs what I am still testing.

If something here should break your domain, say so via Engage — contestability is part of the method.