The logic of HDM points to unasked research questions

The core of this paper is definition and derivation: the definition of a decision, the three components of HDM, and what follows from them by logic. Derivations are tested by logical scrutiny, and data does not decide them. Alongside them sit empirical predictions. The evidence assembled here is consistent with those predictions, and none of it comes from a study designed to test them. Most of what is argued in this paper is therefore derived and supported, and not verified.

The research topics below are where verification could come from.

• The three conditions measured as one exposure. Accountability without control, failure attributed to the person, and a cost of leaving that rises with tenure are treated in the literature as separate variables. DFS predicts they are one exposure, and that measured together they account for harm that none of them accounts for alone. No instrument exists for the gap between what a position is answerable for and what it can influence.
• Whether the harm needs a hostile actor. Herman’s condition for prolonged and repeated trauma is a captor (Herman, 1992a), and the abusive supervision literature measures sustained hostile display from a named supervisor. DFS predicts a substantial group at burnout level and beyond who report no such person and show the full mechanism anyway. The International Trauma Questionnaire has never been used in a workplace sample with the architecture measured alongside it. If harm tracks hostile display and nothing else, the argument in this paper is wrong.
• How common the architecture is, and whether leaving escapes it. Section 5 argues that leaving an employer moves the person without ending the exposure, because the next organisation is likely to run the same architecture. No estimate exists for how many do. What turns on it is whether a person can solve this by changing jobs, or whether only a change of architecture helps. And it sets the size of the hazard employers are now required to identify and control. Whether an organisation requires the reasoning behind a binding choice to be given, and questions about it answered, before people act is observable from inside, and no survey asks it.
• Failure attributed inward where the cause was structural. The attribution literature separates universal from personal helplessness by what the person concludes. DFS predicts a third case: the structure attributes the failure to the person whatever they conclude, and the damage to self-esteem follows even where they correctly identify the structural cause. The construct has no measure.
• The harm of seeing what is needed and being unable to contribute it. DFS predicts that harm rises with perceptiveness for the outcome at hand, independently of workload: the more clearly a person perceives what achieving it would require, the more the foreclosure costs them. Moral injury research locates a comparable harm in being made to act against one’s values. This is its counterpart in being prevented from acting on what one perceives.
• Whether the most perceptive are overrepresented among the harmed. Perceptiveness builds from exposure to events at a rate set by perceptive capacity (Verweij, 2026e), so DFS predicts cumulative exposure tracks that capacity rather than years served: two people with identical tenure in identical roles do not carry the same dose. The consequence is that among people at burnout level and beyond, high perceptive capacity should appear more often than in the workforce they came from. A survey of people still employed should show the opposite, because the architecture has already removed them.
• What removing a management layer does to the managers who remain. DFS predicts that widening spans of control raises harm for those left holding directive authority over more people, and that the compensatory work displaced by removing the layer returns within a few years under new names. Organisations are flattening now, and both are open to observation.
• Whether a structural account does the work a trauma narrative does. The second stage of Herman’s recovery framework works on an account of what happened, and where the harm produced no event there is none to work on. DFS produces an account of a different kind: what the conditions were, what they produce, and why no incident attached to it. Whether that does the work for a person recovering is a question for clinicians and for people who have been through it. DFS makes no clinical claim.
• Representation improved without the architecture changing. DFS predicts that appointing people from under-represented groups into positions inside the architecture does not improve their wellbeing, and worsens it where the position is the exposed one the glass cliff research describes. The prediction has not been tested directly.