HDI Glossary

These are the five terms an HDI audit uses to describe human dependency. Each one names a specific, measurable thing rather than a general condition, and each has its own page with the full definition, why it matters operationally and how it is measured.

• Bus Factor — The bus factor is the number of people whose sudden unavailability would stall a process, project or entire operation — named for the grim question "what happens if this person is hit by a bus?".
• Operational Leak — The operational leak is the number of working hours per month an organisation absorbs in manual coordination, hand-offs, status-chasing and compensating for human dependency — work that exists only because processes depend on people rather than systems.
• Coordination Dependency — Coordination dependency is the degree to which work moves through an organisation only because people manually push it: approvals collected by hand, hand-offs that need a reminder, status assembled in meetings, progress that stalls whenever the person doing the pushing is busy or away.
• Perception Gap — The perception gap is the measured difference between how leadership believes the operation runs and how it actually runs at the frontline.
• Key-Person Risk — Key-person risk is the exposure an organisation carries when a critical process, decision or body of knowledge depends on one individual — so that their absence, departure or overload directly threatens output.