Recoverability-Based Evaluation (RBE): What Performance Metrics Miss About Irreversible States

Recoverability-Based Evaluation (RBE) proposes a complementary evaluation framework that addresses a structural blind spot of performance-centered metrics. Across education, organizations, and health systems, high or stable performance is often maintained even as the system silently loses the ability to recover after failure. When collapse finally becomes visible, recoverability has already been exhausted. This paper argues that performance metrics measure observable output, not system viability. It introduces recoverability as a present-state structural property: whether viable return paths still exist from the current state. Recoverability is operationalized through three orthogonal components—Buffer (resource slack), Path Diversity (alternative trajectories), and Rollback/Retry Rules (formal recovery mechanisms)—forming the BPR framework. The paper explains why irreversible states systematically evade detection under performance-based evaluation, identifying mechanisms such as snapshot bias, optimization trade-offs, silent degradation, and an anti-phase signature in which increased effort or optimization coincides with declining recoverability. These dynamics are illustrated through domain case studies in education, organizational management, and health, without claiming shared causal laws. RBE is explicitly goal-conditional rather than normative: it becomes structurally necessary only for systems where long-term viability, repeated operation, and avoidance of catastrophic failure are core objectives. The framework is accompanied by practical tools, including an audit checklist, stress-testing templates, falsifiability conditions, and an optional compressed abstraction (Slack / Reconfigurability). By shifting evaluation from visible performance to latent structural options, RBE provides a diagnostic lens for detecting irreversible states before failure becomes observable—and for redesigning systems around the preservation of return paths, not merely short-term optimization.