ACP is not a “prediction engine.” Its advantage is that it makes institutional brittleness legible while systems still look solvent, compliant, and busy. The signatures below tend to precede visible failure by years.

A. Narrative substitution for enforcement

Signature:
Policies, dashboards, audits, or “controls” exist primarily as descriptions, not as mechanically enforced constraints.

What ACP detects:

  • Claims that cannot be tied to gates, tests, or irreversible artifacts
  • “Verified” processes that depend on trust, role reputation, or manual attestation
  • Compliance language that grows longer as enforcement weakens

Why this matters:
Institutions fail first at the boundary between words and action. Markets often don’t price this until enforcement suddenly matters.

B. Responsibility diffusion under scale

Signature:
No single actor can explain why a decision was made, only how it moved through the system.

What ACP detects:

  • Circular approval chains
  • Escalation without authority transfer
  • “Everyone followed process” outcomes with no accountable decision owner

Why this matters:
Systems with diffused responsibility survive routine operation but fail catastrophically under stress. This is invisible in financial statements.

C. Audit load inversion

Signature:
The cost (time, staff, tooling) of explaining decisions exceeds the cost of making them.

What ACP detects:

  • Post hoc reconstruction becoming standard
  • Defensive documentation replacing decision records
  • Increasing reliance on summaries instead of primary artifacts

Why this matters:
This signals a shift from operational competence to liability management mode. Institutions can stay profitable here — but only by hollowing out.

D. Exception normalization

Signature:
“Edge cases” quietly become the dominant path through the system.

What ACP detects:

  • Overrides, exemptions, emergency flags, discretionary bypasses
  • Controls that exist but 'aren’t appropriate in practice'
  • Informal knowledge replacing formal procedure

Why this matters:
Failure doesn’t come from breaking rules — it comes from surviving by not using them.

E. Legibility collapse under external scrutiny

Signature:
When questioned by outsiders (auditors, regulators, journalists), the institution cannot produce a coherent, bounded explanation without weeks of coordination.

What ACP detects:

  • Inability to answer “who decided” and “under what authority”
  • Retrofitted rationales
  • Shifting explanations depending on audience

Why this matters:
This is often the last stable state before crisis, not the first.