Observation

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

Definition

Observation is the continuous collection of signals bearing on how an organization is understood, found, and experienced, gathered without a conclusion attached.

The claim the model makes

That collection and judgment must be separated in time. A signal evaluated at the moment of collection is evaluated by whoever collected it, against whatever they already believed, and the record of it inherits that judgment permanently.

Preconditions

A defined set of surfaces. A defined interval. A store that appends rather than overwrites, since the interval between two states is the only thing that cannot be reconstructed later.

Known limits

Observation is bounded by what is public. Procurement policy, private recommendation, and internal competitor decisions are unobservable and frequently decisive. A record that does not mark its own blind spots overstates its completeness.

Open question: whether an explicitly bounded record is epistemically better than a broader one that does not know its edges. 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.