Gravity Grains

Agent Alignment

Hourglass Agents serve as the organization’s architectural stewards. Their role spans their individual responsibilities within their hourglasses and they are collectively responsible for perceiving the external forces that inform and shape the existence of the hourglass itself. Agents align themselves to the organization’s vision, its constraints, its emerging patterns of motion, its evolving surfaces, and its legacy. This practice enables Agents to determine the structural health of the hourglasses and provide their unique perspectives to the business.

This chapter introduces the perceptual and diagnostic disciplines that enable Agents to see the Universal Arc of motion, to recognize the surfaces that influence the shape of the work, and to synthesize these observations into Structural Profiles. These capabilities form the foundation for evaluation through the application of the Minimal Surface Cost Model (MSCM) and prepare the assessment scope for other methods. The MSCM quantifies the structural conditions that justify, alter, or invalidate the hourglass.

Hourglass Framing

The framing around the hourglass is a filter that orients the workings of the hourglass to serve a specific project. That frame anchors the hourglass into the business plan and gives it a specific position across the offices and domains that hold influence over that project. The hourglass structure itself does not change outside of the central authority of Gravity Grains revisions.

Agent Alignment routinely seeks to validate whether the framing around the hourglass is consistent with the business's reality. The frame represents the fit of new motions of work against established Structural Profiles. As conditions change and portfolios evolve, Hourglass Agents are positioned to quantify the change and recommend adaptation that complements executive assessments.

In practical terms, the Hourglass Framing asserts that the contained hourglass is operating under a Minimal Surface Cost Model and is calibrated for an exact project. The frame is the object of evaluation. The MSCM does not evaluate the hourglass structure itself. It evaluates the frame that wraps the structure and binds it to a specific project.

The Universal Arc

The hourglass shape is inherited from the Universal Arc. This Arc is revealed by the consequences of change itself. Within the hourglass, movement follows this Universal Arc across divergence, convergence, compression, diffusion, and expression. Hourglass Agents use this Arc as a baseline for understanding how situations evolve and where structural intervention may be required.

Divergence reflects the proliferation of ideas, needs, and interpretations. This altitude identifies the forces that hold tangible value in action or pressure by inaction.
Convergence reflects the narrowing of possibilities into intentions. Ambiguity decreases and alignment increases around how the stimulus could be satisfied using various implements and their consequences.
Compression reflects the distillation of optionality into viscerally understandable and consequentially vetted choices. The motion has moved from chaos into the shapes of various missions.
Diffusion reflects the immediate expansion of interpretations following any decision. This is a necessary distribution of thought that allows more than one person to assert work.
Expression reflects the result of the work as it is received across the organization and experienced against the infinite probability of the world with the permission to experience it.

These motions form the temporal structure through which all Structural Surfaces are encountered and through which the Structural Profile is formed.

Structural Surfaces

As work moves through the Universal Arc, it encounters seven Structural Surfaces that shape its trajectory and determine the frame’s structural disposition. Agents identify these surfaces to understand how the work obtains its shape and whether there are factors that could improve how work is interfaced. The primary surfaces include:

Governance Surfaces: The points where authority, approval, or governance must be engaged.
Organizational Surfaces: The interfaces where teams, domains, or disciplines must align.
Abstraction Surfaces: The interpretive layers, frameworks, languages, and abstractions through which missions are understood.
Disciplinary Surfaces: The boundaries between specialized domains, proto-languages, and competing definitions.
Commitment Surfaces: The points where missions must commit resources, time, or irreversible action.
Infrastructure Surfaces: The external systems, platforms, and capabilities that missions depend on.
Value Surfaces: The interfaces where delivered work becomes usable, valuable, or industrially leveraged.

These surfaces are universal. They appear in engineering, policy, research, product development, organizational transformation, and most other applications of change. Each surface influences the work and thus influences the hourglass frame’s disposition. By naming and observing these surfaces, Agents gain additional insight into how the Universal Arc is performing across them.

Drag and Leverage are two characterizations of forces that shape the motion of the Universal Arc across the Structural Surfaces. Drag slows motion, increases cost, and introduces friction. Leverage accelerates motion, reduces cost, and amplifies the effectiveness of each unit of work.

Structural Profile

These observations form the Structural Profile of the hourglass frame. The Structural Profile is the input to the MSCM.

Drag and Leverage

Drag arises when surfaces resist motion. Drag is not caused by individuals or teams. It is the natural result of the interfaces where intent meets constraint. Drag slows movement through the hourglass, increases the cost of alignment, and reduces the coherence of distributed work. Drag accumulates when:

governance surfaces multiply or become opaque.
organization surfaces require excessive negotiation.
abstract surfaces introduce interpretive drift.
disciplinary surfaces create integration overhead.
commitment surfaces expose fragility in consequences.
infrastructure surfaces are brittle or misaligned.
value surfaces are distant or poorly defined.

Leverage appears when surfaces support, accelerate, or amplify motion. Leverage is created when the architecture reduces friction, clarifies intent, and aligns distributed work. Leverage accelerates motion, stabilizes diffusion, and improves downstream expression. Leverage appears when:

governance surfaces are clear, bounded, and predictable.
organization surfaces maintain coherence across disciplines.
abstract surfaces preserve meaning as work expands.
disciplinary surfaces integrate cleanly and consistently.
commitment surfaces reveal truth early and safely.
infrastructure surfaces provide stability and reuse.
value surfaces are immediate, usable, and well positioned.

These perspectives enable Agents to intervene at the structural level, where the most durable improvements can be made across an organization. The Minimal Surface Cost Model quantifies these structural conditions and is a primary tool used to position, analyze, and form a resolution for an hourglass frame.

Computing the MSCM

With the Structural Profile established, the MSCM provides a quantitative method for evaluating the frame’s structural viability.

The Minimal Surface Cost Model is an evaluative tool that Hourglass Agents use to determine whether an hourglass frame should exist, continue to exist, or be fundamentally changed. The MSCM quantifies the Structural Profile of an hourglass frame and reveals the cost of managing the surfaces of a given architecture through the Universal Arc.

Scoring Drag and Leverage

To compute the MSCM, each surface is evaluated through its drag and leverage characteristics using a consistent 1–10 scale. This scale provides a common language for quantifying structural conditions across diverse contexts:

Drag: Higher scores indicate greater structural resistance. A score of 10 represents a surface whose friction is nearly impossible to overcome.
Leverage: Higher scores indicate greater structural support. A score of 10 represents a surface whose alignment with the frame is exceptionally strong.

Each surface is expressed as a ratio of drag to leverage. Ratios below 1 indicate favorable conditions, ratios near 1 indicate borderline conditions, and ratios above 1 indicate discouraging conditions that may require structural intervention.

Because the MSCM is multiplicative, each observation must be attributed to only one surface. Double‑counting artificially inflates the final MSCM value and distorts the evaluative signal. The Agent’s task is to determine which surface most directly governs the observed condition and to score it accordingly.

When the seven surface ratios are multiplied, the resulting MSCM value reflects the overall cost of managing the hourglass frame through the Universal Arc. This value does not evaluate the hourglass structure itself; it evaluates the frame that binds the structure to a specific mission.

Understanding the MSCM

The MSCM evaluates an architectural frame across seven structural surfaces. Each surface is scored twice: once for its drag characteristics and once for its leverage characteristics. These scores reflect the structural cost and structural benefit associated with maintaining the frame across that surface.

Drag: the structural resistance the frame must overcome
Leverage: the structural support the frame receives

Each surface resolves into a ratio that expresses its structural disposition:

r_s = s_d / s_l

r_s: ratio for surface s
s_d: drag score
s_l: leverage score

The MSCM for a frame is the product of these seven ratios:

MSCM = ∏_s ( s_d / s_l )

MSCM: overall structural cost score
∏_s: product taken across all seven surfaces
s_d: drag score for surface s
s_l: leverage score for surface s

The MSCM does not measure performance or predict outcomes. It measures structural viability and inevitability: the degree to which the frame is aligned with, or resistant to, the organization’s reality. Lower values indicate structural justification, values near one indicate marginal conditions, and higher values indicate structural cost or untenability.

MSCM < 1: structurally justified
MSCM ≈ 1: structurally tolerable
MSCM > 1: structurally costly
MSCM ≫ 1: structurally untenable

The MSCM is one of the structural instruments within Hourglass Architecture used to evaluate the viability of competing frames. Its purpose is not to produce a universal score, but to reveal the structural differences between frames and to quantify the conditions that justify, alter, or invalidate an hourglass frame.

By grounding the hourglass frame in measurable structural conditions, the MSCM ensures that hourglasses remain connected to the organization’s reality and provides a persistent metric for identifying surfaces that would benefit from innovation or disruption.

The MSCM evaluates seven structural surfaces, each representing a distinct dimension of drag and leverage:

G = Governance Surfaces
O = Organizational Surfaces
A = Abstraction Surfaces
D = Disciplinary Surfaces
C = Commitment Surfaces
I = Infrastructure Surfaces
V = Value Surfaces

The terms goad and civ serve as conceptual anchors for understanding the tension inherent in structural motion.

The term goad reflects the stimulation of action or reaction, often through discomfort or resistance. The term civ represents civility, civilians, and civilization. Together they capture the tension that initiates movement within the hourglass, where stimulation becomes situation and begins the disciplined progression toward program and pain. They remind us that driving change away from entropy requires deliberate effort across every surface.

This chapter prepares the Agent to compute the MSCM by identifying the surfaces, motions, and forces that shape the Structural Profile. The next chapter teaches how to use the MSCM to determine whether an hourglass frame should be created, continued, adapted, or dissolved, and how to decide whether work belongs within an existing hourglass or requires a new one.