Paper
When the Organisation Is the Trap
What a Precise Definition of Hierarchical Decision-Making Reveals About the Psychological Harm It Produces
Where choices bind people by position and nobody has to explain them, people cannot act on what they perceive or be heard about it. Add an ordinary job, with outcomes they answer for but cannot influence and a cost of leaving that grows every year, and these are the conditions Judith Herman identified as the mechanism of psychological trauma.
AuthorJorn VerweijPublished byDecision Free Solutions, Theoretical Positioning SeriesVersionDraft 114.0, 23 September 2026Rights© 2026 Decision Free Solutions. This paper may be passed on in full and unchanged.
Contents
- About this paper
- 1What Herman means by powerlessness and captivity
- 2Herman’s conditions reach practically everybody
- 3HDM: the architecture that forecloses response
- 4The individual attribution of failure as the activating threat
- 5Why people stay
- 6Who is most exposed to the harm
- 7What six occupational health models have been measuring
- 8The hazard that is not on the register
- 9How HDM reproduces itself — and what cutting management layers does to it
- 10From stress to trauma: one mechanism, one spectrum
- 11HDM harm is structural, not demographic
- 12Where five adjacent accounts locate the harm
- 13The logic of HDM points to unasked research questions
- 14Conclusion: the structure is the harm
- References
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