Mechanisms by Problem Family

A problem family describes the recurring structural condition that makes a solution necessary—the why behind an intervention. It is different from a solution family, which describes how an intervention acts, and from an origin domain, which describes where a mechanism arose.

The broad vocabulary was independently proposed twice, reconciled, and stress-tested before assignment. Subfamilies were derived only after the broad families had been populated, so they reflect recurring problem patterns in the actual archetypes rather than a hierarchy guessed in advance. Every solution archetype then received one primary family and one primary subfamily through two independent reviews with recorded rationales and adjudication of disagreements. Mechanisms inherit that reviewed classification from their primary archetype. Choose a family below, then a recognizable subfamily; click a column header to sort.

Problem family	Mechanisms	Archetypes	Description
Accumulation, Depletion & Degradation	269	28	Stocks, burdens, exposures, debt, wear, waste, or support capacity change cumulatively until viability or performance is eroded.
Adaptation, Variation & Context Misfit	421	46	A response, repertoire, population, rule, or design no longer fits changing, heterogeneous, novel, or adversarial conditions.
Agency, Participation & Relational Trust Failure	199	24	Actors cannot or will not initiate, persist, exercise responsibility, cooperate, or participate meaningfully because efficacy, ownership, belonging, willingness, or relational trust is weak.
Authority, Accountability, Legitimacy & Fair-Process Failure	336	36	Consequential power or decision processes lack legitimate authority, answerability, impartial standards, transparency, voice, review, or remedy.
Boundary, Scope, Access & Spillover Failure	359	39	A system draws or enforces the wrong perimeter, assigns scope or ownership poorly, governs crossings badly, or displaces effects beyond the frame in which decisions are evaluated.
Capacity Scarcity & Resource Contention	245	23	Available operational capacity, material supply, space, or service is insufficient or contested relative to claims that cannot all be satisfied.
Communication, Meaning & Context Breakdown	421	50	Intended meaning fails to survive encoding, transmission, audience interpretation, language, medium, or pragmatic context.
Complexity, Entanglement & Change Burden	253	33	A system has too many intertwined concerns, parts, interactions, or decisions to understand, alter, validate, or maintain safely.
Composition, Interface & Interoperability Failure	345	36	Parts that should assemble, exchange, substitute, or evolve independently cannot do so reliably because their contracts, interfaces, standards, or assumptions do not fit.
Congestion, Backlog & Flow Breakdown	201	28	Work, matter, information, people, or value cannot move through a path or service system at the required rate, distribution, or continuity.
Coordination, Dependency & Sequencing Failure	401	41	Interdependent actors, tasks, decisions, or states fail to align their responsibilities, shared state, timing, commitments, or order of action.
Correctness, Conformance & Formal Validity Failure	568	64	An output, process, requirement set, relation, transformation, or computation fails the validity conditions it must satisfy, or those conditions cannot be completely or feasibly met.
Decision, Search & Optimization Failure	535	69	Actors cannot reduce options, compare tradeoffs, stop inquiry, select a robust course, or commit coherently under accepted objectives and constraints.
Exclusion, Inequality & Distributional Harm	182	20	Access, benefits, burdens, voice, coverage, or risk are distributed in ways that systematically exclude or disadvantage cases, places, or groups.
Fragility, Failure & Continuity Risk	205	29	Essential function is vulnerable to disruption, common-mode failure, or recovery that is too slow, incomplete, or uncertain after a fault or shock.
Goal, Value & Purpose Misalignment	157	18	Actions, metrics, incentives, or subgoals diverge from intended purpose, or legitimate goals and values conflict without a defensible priority.
Hazard Exposure & Uncontained Harm	136	14	People, assets, communities, or environments are exposed to harmful forces, leakage, contamination, abuse, or propagation beyond safe bounds.
Identity, Provenance & Integrity Failure	307	34	A system cannot establish that an entity, record, source, version, or state remains the same, authentic, attributable, consistent, and uncorrupted across time and transformation.
Incentive Conflict, Gaming & Collective-Action Failure	471	46	Payoffs, private information, or strategic interdependence make harmful, deceptive, extractive, or noncontributing behavior individually rational.
Information Overload, Search & Attention Failure	308	33	A reader or operator cannot locate, prioritize, retain, judge, or act on relevant information because inputs exceed cognitive and retrieval capacity.
Instability, Runaway Feedback & Cascades	248	33	Internal dynamics amplify disturbances, oscillate, diverge, overshoot, or propagate local changes into disproportionate system-wide effects.
Learning, Knowledge & Capability Gaps	313	35	Actors lack durable knowledge, skill, practice, calibration, transfer, absorption, or capability needed for competent action.
Observability, Measurement & Feedback Gaps	404	46	Relevant state, change, performance, or error cannot be faithfully sensed, measured, represented as a signal, or returned to the actor that must respond.
Representation, Classification & Model Misfit	834	96	A category system, schema, frame, model, or abstraction organizes reality in a way that hides, distorts, conflates, or misclassifies what matters.
Scale, Hierarchy & Emergence Mismatch	445	54	Local, aggregate, nested, or system-wide levels follow different dynamics, causing conclusions, controls, or benefits at one level to fail or reverse at another.
Timing, Transition & Path-Dependence Failure	488	58	Outcomes fail because actions, observations, commitments, or state changes occur at the wrong time, cadence, phase, order, or historical moment.
Uncertainty, Evidence & Inference Failure	829	101	A belief, claim, explanation, forecast, comparison, or causal conclusion is not adequately warranted by the available evidence and assumptions.

59 registry mechanisms do not have one unambiguous inherited problem-family/subfamily pair.