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Dependency Capture Exit Design

Break role-capture incentives by independently verifying the underlying need, measuring durable resolution, transferring capability, and making exit possible without recreating dependency.

Overview

Break role-capture incentives by independently verifying the underlying need, measuring durable resolution, transferring capability, and making exit possible without recreating dependency.

Structural problem

An agent gains status, income, authority, identity, or access from being indispensable to a recurring problem and can covertly preserve, obscure, or reproduce that problem so the valued role remains necessary.

Intervention logic

Separate need verification from the role holder, expose incentives and dependency pathways, define durable resolution metrics, transfer knowledge and capability, create substitutes, protect challenge, and bind handoff or sunset to independent evidence.

Components and mechanisms

The required components make the recurring structure explicit; mechanisms are selected as domain-specific implementation machinery. The distinction is preserved in the accompanying stub files.

Boundaries and review

The draft remains provisional. Reconciliation should test aliases, normalize component and mechanism slugs, and verify that no accepted neighbor already preserves the same load-bearing intervention structure.

Common Mechanisms

  • capability_handoff_checklist
  • dependency_reduction_scorecard
  • exit_readiness_review
  • fixed_term_or_sunset_mandate
  • independent_needs_assessment
  • open_documentation_package
  • outcome_based_contract
  • post_exit_dependency_audit
  • rotation_or_term_limit
  • second_source_review

Compression statement

When an agent gains status, income, authority, identity, or access from being indispensable to a recurring problem and can covertly preserve, obscure, or reproduce that problem so the valued role remains necessary., separate need verification from the role holder, expose incentives and dependency pathways, define durable resolution metrics, transfer knowledge and capability, create substitutes, protect challenge, and bind handoff or sunset to independent evidence.

Canonical formula: dependency_capture_exit_design = scope + evidence + governed transformation + validation + feedback + recovery

Abstractions this archetype builds on — directly (a source ingredient) or as a related pattern. Links follow the typed catalog namespace.

Built directly on (4)

Also references 10 related abstractions

  • Accountability: Responsibility for actions.
  • Authority Handoff: A role with binding authority and attached state transfers between occupants without breaking either.
  • Conflict of Interest: Competing incentives.
  • Dependency: Directed relation in which one element relies on another being present, prior, compatible, or supplied, with a specifiable failure mode if the condition is unmet.
  • Feedback: Outputs influence inputs.
  • Habit: A cue-triggered, automatically executed action sequence that persists under outcome devaluation.
  • Incentive: A deliberately placed payoff signal attached to a behavior at a leverage point.
  • Lock-In: Forward-looking cost of switching exceeds the forward-looking cost of staying, even when a superior alternative exists.
  • Observability: Infer internal state externally.
  • Proximity Capture: An observer with a duty of independent judgement gradually absorbs the target's frame through sustained proximity, eroding the independence the role requires.

Variants

Narrower or domain-specific specializations that share this archetype's core structure. Recognized variants are established; candidate variants are provisional.

Consultant Dependency-Capture Variant · subtype · recognized

A Dependency-Capture Exit Design subtype distinguished by an external adviser preserves proprietary indispensability.

  • Distinct from parent: This subtype foregrounds an external adviser preserves proprietary indispensability.
  • Use when: The case is distinguished by an external adviser preserves proprietary indispensability; The parent intervention structure still applies.
  • Typical domains: organizational governance, consulting, public administration, care and support
  • Common mechanisms: independent needs assessment, fixed term or sunset mandate, outcome based contract, capability handoff checklist

Crisis-Maintainer Capture Variant · subtype · recognized

A Dependency-Capture Exit Design subtype distinguished by an emergency role preserves the crisis that justifies authority.

  • Distinct from parent: This subtype foregrounds an emergency role preserves the crisis that justifies authority.
  • Use when: The case is distinguished by an emergency role preserves the crisis that justifies authority; The parent intervention structure still applies.
  • Typical domains: organizational governance, consulting, public administration, care and support
  • Common mechanisms: independent needs assessment, fixed term or sunset mandate, outcome based contract, capability handoff checklist

Caretaker Dependency-Capture Variant · subtype · recognized

A Dependency-Capture Exit Design subtype distinguished by support is structured to prevent beneficiary autonomy.

  • Distinct from parent: This subtype foregrounds support is structured to prevent beneficiary autonomy.
  • Use when: The case is distinguished by support is structured to prevent beneficiary autonomy; The parent intervention structure still applies.
  • Typical domains: organizational governance, consulting, public administration, care and support
  • Common mechanisms: independent needs assessment, fixed term or sunset mandate, outcome based contract, capability handoff checklist

Near names: Role-Capture Dependency Disruption, Manufactured Dependency Exit, Problem-Sustaining Role Capture Control.