Using Mechanic

Mechanic is the right half of the analytical chain. Nexus maps what is required; Mechanic asks what actually exists behind those requirements, and what it would take to make governance real rather than documented.

The central question Mechanic asks of every governance control is: does a functioning operational mechanism sit behind it? If so, is every component of that mechanism in good shape? If not, what specifically is missing — and what kind of intervention would address it?

What Mechanic does

Each mechanism in Balcony is a structured assessment of a governance process. You document what currently exists across several components — Inputs, Outputs, Objective, Scope, Tooling, Metrics, and Ownership — and the pattern of what is present, partial, or absent tells you exactly where the governance is strong and where it is fragile.

This is not a tickbox exercise. The diagnostic is per-component, which means the finding is specific: a mechanism missing ownership requires a very different intervention than one missing metrics. Both are problems; only one of them is solved by writing a policy.

The mechanism portfolio

Mechanic's home page is the portfolio — the full list of mechanisms in your workspace, with at-a-glance health indicators for each. The portfolio gives you a governance-wide view: which controls have functioning mechanisms, which are partial, and which have nothing operational behind them.

What this section covers

• Building a mechanism — what each component is, what it means, and how to fill it in.
• Mechanism health — how health is assessed per component, and what the overall status (Functioning, Partial, Critical) means.
• Chains — connecting mechanisms into sequences where one mechanism's output feeds another's input.
• Dashboards — visualising metric data from mechanisms in configurable dashboards.