CONCEPT
Structural Secrecy
Vaughan's concept for the way <em>organizational architecture</em> — divisions, hierarchies, specialized vocabularies, reporting channels — filters and distorts information as it moves between units, with the result that critical signals are lost not through suppression but through the ordinary operation of institutional life.
Structural secrecy describes the phenomenon by which information that could have prevented catastrophic failure exists within an organization — documented, available, accessible — but does not reach the people who need it at the moment they need it, because the structure of the institution filters and transforms the information as it moves through channels designed for specialized communication. The filtering is not deliberate. It is a structural consequence of complex organizations dividing labor, specializing knowledge, and translating between vocabularies. In the AI era, structural secrecy extends into the opacity of the tools themselves: the reasoning behind large language model outputs is not merely hard to surface but structurally inaccessible in the form a human reviewer would need to inspect it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Vaughan developed the concept through her Challenger research, demonstrating that the O-ring data which should have grounded the launch was available within the responsible organizations but was
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