The definition
“The hazardous condition in which a person is held accountable for a verification that exceeds the capacity to verify under the conditions provided.”
It occurs when the requirement to check exceeds the capacity to check. It is a state of the system, not a state of the worker.Verification Overrun appears at the point where a person must interpret, review, approve, or intervene — so it can look like a human-performance problem. But the requirement, the allocation, and the conditions under which the check must be performed are set upstream, through design, procurement, and workload.
A hazard condition, not an incident
Verification Overrun is hunted the way safety professionals already hunt hazards: proactively, in the design of the work — the lineage of job hazard analysis, hazard registers, and hazard hunts. It can sit inside a workflow indefinitely without producing a visible event. Its measure is prevalence: how many verification gates in the workflow lack adequate capacity — not an incident or near-miss rate.
The four inputs of Verification Capacity
All four are conditions of the work, not properties of the person.
- Domain knowledge — the expertise the check requires.
- Evidence and context — what the verifier can actually see about how the output was produced.
- Time — the time required to execute a rigorous check, not the time the queue allows.
- Authority — the standing to act on what the check finds, including a safe path when the check cannot be completed.
When accountability for the verification is retained while any of these is structurally unavailable, the hazardous condition exists — whether or not anything has gone visibly wrong yet.
Naming history
This hazard was originally deposited under the working title Cognitive Overrun. It was renamed on principled grounds: verification capacity is located in the conditions of the work, not in the person, and the name now says so. The earlier deposit remains part of the citable record as lineage.