What HAOP is
HAOP is a work-system design framework for analyzing how humans, AI systems, and organizations jointly produce performance, control, safety, and reliability. It extends the system orientation of Human and Organizational Performance to work in which AI materially selects, transforms, routes, suppresses, frames, recommends, approves, or acts.
The organization is treated as a performer because it allocates functions and authors the staffing, evidence, interfaces, throughput, incentives, permissions, escalation routes, authority, and acceptable tradeoffs under which human and AI performers act.
The human adapts, the AI optimizes, and the organization contains and governs.
This is compressed functional language. Performer is a functional category; the term implies no consciousness, intention, personhood, or moral agency.
Cite as: Ko, J. (2026). Human, AI, and Organizational Performance (HAOP): A Safety Framework for the AI Era (Version 6.0.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22072938
What the integrated framework covers
- The three-performer architecture, including the functional performer threshold.
- The five operating modes of AI: Responder, Signal Amplifier, Executor, Orchestrator, and Ensemble. Behavior-based and non-hierarchical; Ensemble is deployment-level; embodied AI is excluded from the taxonomy.
- Functional Permission: what the AI performer may access, sense, or filter and may recommend, initiate, execute, or coordinate without prior human intervention, as allocated.
- True Function and Illusory Function, with the nine-question True Function Test.
- The five-hazard register: physical interaction and machine agency; psychosocial conditions; human performance and verification; recursive information degradation; and fragmented control and concentrated accountability.
- Accountability by Control, including consequence, ownership, and design accountability.
- Human-in-the-Design, Verification Requirement, Verification Capacity, Verification Overrun, Verification Gates (human, automated, and hybrid), Verification Windows, and Workflow Profiles.
- Grounding and anchors: source, state, dynamics, and work-as-done grounding; anchor independence; renewal and invalidation; Anchor Access; and false grounding.
- Designed AI Reassessment Pause, the enforced positional control that protects the trajectory of agentic work.
- Workflow design obligations: Provision, Preservation, and Placement, including friction, slack, choke points, and protected constraints.
- The HAOP application of ARECC, stated as a ten-step work-design sequence with an operating return path.
- The human throughline, edge discipline, Imposed Offloading, pause controls, and the deposited purpose of the AI Deployment Safety Data Sheet.
What Revision 6.0 changed
Revision 6.0 restated grounding as a transition-specific condition of contact that the work system establishes and maintains, never an intrinsic property of a representation or a global property of a performer. It deposited the five operating modes and Functional Permission, restated the tool-to-performer threshold without the earlier containment clause, renamed the Designed Reassessment Pause to Designed AI Reassessment Pause, added renewal and invalidation requirements for anchors, stated anchor independence under the recursive-degradation hazard, and set conditions of validity for the ARECC analysis. Reference decay enters as a working construct; verifier readiness and reorientation enter as in-development terms.
Revision 6.0.1 is a disclosure-only revision: it expands the AI Assistance Disclosure and updates the cover and revision note. The text is otherwise unchanged from Revision 6.0.
Development status
Revision 6.0.1 is the controlling integrated public source. The framework remains under development and has not yet been empirically validated. Its measures are candidates. Numerical VReq/VCap ratios, aggregate indices, quantitative gate thresholds, and formal operating-envelope models remain exploratory or deliberately deferred.