About Realis
Realis Institute is an independent laboratory developing Institutional Physics, a constraint-based account of how institutions hold or lose contact with reality under sustained load.
What It Does
Realis develops and publishes the instruments of Institutional Physics: standards, diagnostics, methods, and case studies. In practice, the work comes down to one question, whether an institution can still make decisions grounded in reality once things start to go wrong. The instruments are built to show when a system's decisions have stopped being reliable, to help keep pressure from replacing judgment, and to show how to correct a problem without absorbing the failure that caused it.
The work is for leaders, legal professionals, engineers, and policy practitioners dealing with problems that do not stay fixed. Decisions get made, reviewed, and corrected, and the same issues keep returning, responsibility stays unclear, and outcomes keep getting worse. Most approaches assume the system still works: that reviews lead to correction, that good information leads to good decisions. When that stops being true, those approaches stop working.
The same failure structures recur in fields that otherwise share nothing. Aviation accidents, financial collapses, healthcare failures, and policy breakdowns often fail in the same way, and the work aims to recognize the pattern early enough to act on it before it becomes irreversible. The instruments come from studying real failures wherever they occur and identifying the structure they share.
Realis is not consulting, advice, or strategy, and it does not attempt to manage decisions inside a failing system. What it does is narrower and prior to all of that: it evaluates whether valid decision-making is still possible at all, and identifies the constraints any corrective action must satisfy.
Independence
Realis Institute is structurally independent. It takes no political alignment, serves no advocacy agenda, and does not adjust its instruments to the preferences of funders, partners, or adopting institutions. Collaboration is limited to organizations committed to rigorous and reality-oriented practice.
Founding Steward
The Realis corpus was developed by Christina Óvári, who maintains responsibility for the foundational work while the field is still forming.
She came to it from the building trades and from flying. She works in the Spenglermeister tradition, the German master craft of architectural sheet metal, where a roof installed two hundred years ago can still be read by the next person who climbs up to it, and judged: keep it, repair it, or take it off. She also builds and flies experimental aircraft, where an airplane is only as safe as the record behind it and the inspection in front of it, and where being wrong about the structure is not an abstract problem.
Both are trades where work is judged by whether it lasts, and where the standard is what lets someone who was not there know what was done and whether to trust it. That is the idea the corpus is built on. It studies institutional decisions the same way: from the structure, and from whether it is still sound.
Self-Positioning
Realis publishes three self-positioning documents. CSS-001 states what the corpus claims and at what warrant. CSS-002 states how a result becomes a claim. DR-RSI-001 states what Realis subjects itself to externally, including the limits of specifying its own stabilization from inside.
Contact
For institutions exploring pilots, training, research collaboration, or standards adoption, Realis Institute responds directly.