Governance

A Constitution for every decision, not a policy binder nobody reads.

Governance fails when it lives in a document separate from the decision it is meant to constrain. The Decision Constitution is attached to the decision itself, and the workspace enforces it before approval, not after.

The Decision Constitution

Rules that block, not rules that advise

Each decision carries its own Constitution: the mandate that authorized it, what the decision is permitted to do, what it is explicitly prohibited from doing, hard limits, and the triggers that force escalation to a named authority. Unlike a policy document, the workspace will not let the decision reach approval while a Constitutional article is unresolved.

What the Constitution defines

Six required articles

Mandate

Who authorized this decision and under what scope.

Permitted uses

What the resulting system or decision is explicitly allowed to do.

Prohibited uses

What it is explicitly forbidden from doing, regardless of business pressure.

Hard limits

Quantitative thresholds that cannot be exceeded without re-approval.

Escalation triggers

Conditions that automatically route the decision to a named senior authority.

Intervention authority

Who can pause or reverse the decision once it is in production, and how.

Enforcement

Constitutional status is a gate, not a checkbox

Blocking by default

An unresolved article blocks progression to the approval stage — it cannot be waived by a status change alone.

Visible in the Dossier

Constitutional status appears on the first page of the Dossier, not buried in an appendix.

See a Constitution applied to a real decision.

The sample dossier includes a fully drafted Constitution with an active escalation trigger.