The Resolved Half

Every company runs on facts about itself, and they come in two kinds. Some are authored: somebody writes them into a system, and they stay there until somebody writes something else. Others are resolved: they became true because a group of people decided something, in a meeting, in a thread, on a call, and no system was ever the place they were written down. The difference is not one of degree. An authored fact arrives together with the artifact that proves it, so confirming it means going to the place it is kept. A resolved fact arrives with nothing. It is expected to generate artifacts afterward, in other systems, but the map from a decision to the artifacts it should generate is neither one to one nor stable, so confirming one means inferring it across systems against an expectation that keeps moving. That asymmetry is why the authored half of business context has mature tooling and the resolved half has only close neighbors built for other questions. Holding the resolved half requires four capabilities that no existing approach combines, whatever else each of them does well. Forming a decision from accumulated evidence rather than from decision-sounding language. Distinguishing the several different ways a decision stops being the current answer, commonly collapsed into one transition called supersession and in fact at least four. Asserting that no decision exists, as a positive answer rather than a plausible guess. And showing why a current answer is current. This paper sets out those four requirements, proposes a taxonomy for the second and the third, examines why the available approaches produce something else, and describes the approach Rithmo takes. It is a thesis about a problem. Where it describes a design rather than a running behavior, it says so.