Distribution is not federation

A platform team writes an excellent harness. It sits in platform-harness, governs nothing by accident, and is referenced in every architecture deck. Twelve service teams are told to adopt it.

Eighteen months later, how many of those twelve are actually governed by it?

Nobody knows — and that is the problem this distinction exists to expose.

Recorded is not enforced

A harness that exists somewhere is not a harness that governs here. The difference is not paperwork; it is whether anything in the subject executes, references, or enforces the shared rule.

The assessment records three states per dimension:

Provenance	What it means
local	The evidence is in the subject itself.
inherited	The shared habitat supplies it and it demonstrably reaches this subject.
inherited-unbound	The shared habitat declares it; nothing here executes it.

inherited-unbound caps the dimension at whatever the local evidence supports, and names the shared artefact that was expected to bind.

This is the same argument the instrument already makes about specifications you cannot verify: an unenforceable rule is aspiration, not control. A governance policy that lives in another repository and reaches this one through nothing but an architecture diagram is in exactly that category.

Why this is worth measuring

Because the two situations look identical on a slide and need opposite responses.

An estate where the shared harness binds everywhere has a maintenance problem: keep the binding current, watch the pins. An estate where the same harness is declared everywhere and binds nowhere has a much cheaper opportunity than it thinks — the habitat already exists. Nobody needs to build anything. Somebody needs to wire it up.

Without the distinction, both estates report "we have a platform harness" and the second one keeps investing in more harness while the governance gap stays exactly where it was.

An unbound rule is not a weak team

When a dimension is unbound across several subjects, that is a binding failure, not a capability failure, and it belongs to whoever provides the habitat. The portfolio report puts it in the common-weak column — the enablement backlog — rather than attributing it to each team in turn.

Getting this wrong would be worse than not measuring it. Telling twelve teams they each have a governance problem, when what exists is one unwired harness, produces twelve local workarounds and a fragmented estate.

The honest failure mode

Binding detection can be wrong, and the way it is wrong matters.

A team may bind its harness through a mechanism the checklist does not recognise. Reading that silence as "unbound" would accuse them of a discipline failure they do not have — and an assessment that does that once is not trusted again.

So the rule is: silence is not negation. Where no signal is found but there is no evidence of absence either, the dimension is inferred, and a clarifying question gets spent before anything is called unbound. Every binding finding names the artefact expected to bind and where it was looked for, so a team that binds differently can say so and correct the record.