Decision

• Observation
• Interpretation
• Decision
• Adaptation
• Verification
• Learning

Definition

The decision stage allocates change: what holds, what moves, who holds authority for each, and what evidence will indicate success.

The claim, and it is the load-bearing one

Brand identity and brand expression are different classes of object and must be governed differently. Identity compounds through repetition and resets when changed. Expression must change continuously because it competes in an environment that changes continuously. Traditional brand management protected both and treated change to either as indiscipline. This model protects only the first.

Preconditions

A stated core. An organization that cannot say who it is for, what it refuses to do, and why it is chosen has an unresolved position rather than an adaptation problem, and adapting around it produces faster incoherence.

Known limits

The distinction between a core that is genuinely stable and one that is merely unexamined is not observable from inside. The proposed test is whether the organization can state what would change its mind. If nothing would, the core is frozen rather than protected.

That test is asserted here rather than demonstrated. Recorded in Appendix B.

This page expands one stage of the cycle set out in Section 7. The commercial practice built on the model is described separately by Digilu.