There is a version of professional success that is internally coherent and collectively unsustainable. You learn the rules of your field. You optimise within them. You advance. The rules reward you for treating them as permanent, so you do. This is not cynicism. It is rational behaviour inside a system that is structured to make the whole invisible.
The problem is that the whole is not holding as well as the logic assumes.
In accounting, there is a concept called the going concern assumption: the presumption that a business will continue to operate indefinitely, and that current conditions are the permanent background against which everything is measured. The assumption is useful. Without it, valuation becomes impossible. But it is still an assumption, not a finding.
Most professional environments apply something like this to their own rules. The current system is the system. Optimise within it. Anything that does not play by its rules is unworldly, or insufficiently rigorous, or naive. The reading is internally consistent. But it tells you more about the frame than about the work being assessed.
The individual logic and the systemic logic do not contradict each other at the level of any single career. They only contradict each other at the level of the whole. That is precisely what the going concern assumption is designed not to see.
Why an alternative looks naive
Work that accounts for the whole tends to look naive to people operating inside the individual logic. It does not have a proprietary methodology. It does not scale in the obvious way. It does not fit the categories that professional credibility tends to reach for first.
These are real observations. None of them addresses what the work is actually trying to do. They address what it would look like if it were a different kind of thing.
The question the going concern assumption forecloses is whether the rules themselves are producing good outcomes for the people who will inherit their consequences. That is not a naive question. It is the obvious question if you start from the evidence rather than from the frame.
A wider aperture is not the same as an undisciplined one. Accounting for the system is not the same as ignoring how the system works.
Who this is for
The people for whom this work is useful are generally not arriving with a checklist. They are the ones who have already noticed that the going concern is not going as well as it should, and who cannot yet name what they are looking for.