Unintended System Conditions. A USC is an unplanned state that builds up when principles are repeatedly violated. It is the default output of the system as currently designed, not a one-off incident or a people problem. Fixes aimed at symptoms improve things briefly before the condition reasserts itself. Which principles feed each condition is NOT stored here: it is derived at runtime from the consequence-to-condition links in the principle files.
Outcomes cannot be traced to the decisions that caused them. The system records outcomes but not reasoning, so improvement targets plausible causes and failures recur.
We know what happened. Nobody can explain why.
The delivery system produces outcomes that cannot be traced to the decisions that caused them. When something goes wrong, or goes unexpectedly right, the organization cannot reconstruct which decision, made by whom or what, at which point in the process, produced the result. Post-incident reviews describe what happened but cannot explain why it happened at the decision level. Accountability cannot be assigned because causality cannot be established. The condition persists because the delivery system was not designed to record reasoning, only outcomes. Without a traceable decision path, improvement efforts address what seems plausible rather than what is demonstrably true, and the same failures recur.
In human-driven delivery, Attribution Failure is painful but recoverable. You can interview the people involved, reconstruct the conversation, and trace a decision back to a human judgment call even when it takes time. In an agentic system, Attribution Failure becomes structural. Decisions pass through agent reasoning that may not be recorded, pipelines that transform context in ways that are not logged, and orchestration layers that resolve conflicts without documenting why. The causal chain does not just become hard to trace. It becomes architecturally invisible unless observability was deliberately designed into the system before it was needed.