About the Researcher

The Specification Stack

Dmitry Zharnikov

Framework Author

Every operational system I have worked on posed the same problem: how to specify what an organization does precisely enough that the specification is testable, transferable, and survives contact with the people who must execute it.

I spent two decades discovering this across every level of the specification stack. As finance and administration director at an industrial machinery plant, I administered a production efficiency project under German Lean consultants — the foundational lesson was not the methodology itself but the resistance: people do not reject better processes, they reject processes imposed without translation. As one of the key project managers in a transfer of bearing production from Russia to India — technology, equipment, sales network — I disassembled a working system and rebuilt it in a new context with new people. Orgschema would call this forking: same contracts, rewritten procedures. I did it with machine tools before I did it with YAML.

At the holding company level, I designed a methodology for a corporate knowledge base — how to separate reusable structure from specific content. As a self-employed consultant, the work converged on system design: a farm management service for small family farms, and an M&A project management system that used LLMs to multiply the throughput of a boutique firm. Each project was the same underlying problem — specify operations precisely enough that they become executable and transferable.

Two decades of building and redesigning operational systems produced the intuitions. Large language models made them researchable. A PhD and an MBA provide the research discipline; LLMs multiply it.

The Organizational Schema Theory emerged alongside the Spectral Brand Theory from the same insight: businesses are simultaneously perception systems and specification systems. SBT models the perception side. Orgschema models the operational side. Neither view alone is complete.

This profile highlights the experience most relevant to Organizational Schema Theory — the operational axis of a career that also has a perception axis. The same background viewed through a signal lens appears on spectralbranding.com/about.

Intellectual Priors

Every framework carries frozen assumptions — design decisions made before the first line of specification was written. Three intellectual priors shaped the Organizational Schema Theory:

• The Goal Eliyahu M. Goldratt

  Systems thinking and constraint analysis. A system's output is governed by its bottleneck, not its average performance. The TDD cascade inherits this: each level is a constraint on the level below it, and validation flows upward through the bottleneck, not around it.

• The Toyota Way Jeffrey Liker

  Operational standardization with built-in continuous improvement. Toyota Production System is orgschema's closest analog in the physical world: standardized processes, separation of what from how, and the principle that the standard is not a ceiling but a baseline for kaizen. The difference: Toyota's specification is analog and proprietary. Orgschema makes the pattern digital, version-controlled, and forkable.

• TRIZ — Theory of Inventive Problem Solving Genrich Altshuller

  Systematic innovation through contradiction analysis. Altshuller studied millions of patents and extracted universal patterns of invention — proving that creative solutions follow discoverable structural rules. Orgschema applies the same premise to business design: operational problems are not unique, they are instances of recurring structural contradictions. The contract-procedure separation, the executor topology, the forkability principle — all resolve contradictions that traditional business design treats as trade-offs.

Education

• MBA, 2018 WU Vienna University of Economics and Business — Executive Academy
• PhD, Economics, 2005 Russian State University of Trade and Economics
• Specialist, Economics, 2000 Moscow State University of Commerce

Links

Contact

Research inquiries: [email protected]