Self-critique isn’t the same as being critiqued. AFS has had plenty of the first. This page is an attempt at the second.
Over the past year I’ve written a fair amount trying to break AFS — where it’s exposed to specific kinds of error, how much it leans on practitioner judgment, what it borrowed and from where, cases where a correct diagnosis still didn’t survive contact with the organization. All of it was written by me, from inside the approach. That’s the limit of what follows, and I’d rather say so than let it pass as independent scrutiny.
Below: the minimum foundational material needed to know what’s being critiqued, then the critical papers themselves. None of it is presented as settled. It’s here so someone with no reason to go easy on AFS can tell me where it doesn’t hold.
FOUNDATIONS
AFS Governing Law — the founding claim: fitness is proven, not presumed.
AFS Fitness Sequence — the four-stage diagnostic logic the approach runs on.
AFS FVI Lens — the Fitness–Validation–Intelligence lens the whole cycle runs through.
AFS Architecture — the structural overview tying the pieces together.
CRITICAL SERIES
AFS Stress Testing — six weaknesses in AFS’s core claims, named without hedging.
The Three Kinds of Wrong — where AFS sits exposed against Dave Snowden’s error typology.
The Canon Problem — the risk of AFS becoming what it was built to replace, plus The Practitioner as Instrument on judgment at the individual level.
AFS Originality Audit — an open inventory of what AFS borrowed, and from where.
The Diagnosis Was Correct — two cases where a correct reading still failed on contact with the organization.
Fitness-Washing — how the vocabulary gets used to dress up decisions that were never tested.
Closing
If you find a failure mode I missed, that’s worth more to me than agreement with the ones I found. Tell me where this doesn’t hold up.
Contact: / LinkedIn / mario.aiello@gmail.com]
Adaptive Ways 