The join set of a finite collection of smooth embedded submanifolds of a
mutual vector space is defined as their Minkowski sum. Join decompositions
generalize some ubiquitous decompositions in multilinear algebra, namely tensor
rank, Waring, partially symmetric rank and block term decompositions. This
paper examines the numerical sensitivity of join decompositions to
perturbations; specifically, we consider the condition number for general join
decompositions. It is characterized as a distance to a set of ill-posed points
in a supplementary product of Grassmannians. We prove that this condition
number can be computed efficiently as the smallest singular value of an
auxiliary matrix. For some special join sets, we characterized the behavior of
sequences in the join set converging to the latter's boundary points. Finally,
we specialize our discussion to the tensor rank and Waring decompositions and
provide several numerical experiments confirming the key results