# INTENT — decision-canon

## Mission

Establish a coherent, extensible **Decision Canon** that provides:

1. a shared language for thinking and talking about decisions,
2. a unified Decision Object capable of representing decisions across radically different levels of rigor and consequence,
3. a taxonomy of decision kinds, methods, authority modes, and effects,
4. a progressive formalization model that keeps simple decisions simple,
5. a machine-processable foundation for governed human, agentic, and hybrid decision systems,
6. a way to model policies and constitutional decisions as decisions whose effects shape future decision spaces,
7. and a closed-loop learning model connecting decisions to execution, outcomes, retrospectives, and policy evolution.

## Problem

Decision-related disciplines are fragmented.

Relevant bodies of work include:

- normative decision theory,
- Bayesian decision analysis,
- causal inference,
- multi-criteria decision analysis,
- operations research,
- robust optimization,
- game theory,
- behavioral decision theory,
- naturalistic decision making,
- complexity-oriented decision making,
- organizational decision rights,
- business rules and DMN,
- workflow systems,
- control theory,
- reinforcement learning,
- policy design,
- and governance.

Each contributes useful abstractions, but no single practical object model spans the whole lifecycle:

```text
situation
→ framing
→ evidence
→ alternatives
→ values
→ analysis
→ authority
→ commitment
→ execution
→ observation
→ learning
→ policy evolution
```

The canon shall explore that missing connective layer.

## Core hypothesis

A **Decision Object** can serve as a first-class unit of agency.

It should record an authorized commitment made from a particular frame, knowledge state, and value system, together with intended effects and sufficient lineage to observe and learn from what follows.

The object must support progressive formalization:

```text
informal choice
→ recorded decision
→ structured decision
→ analyzed decision
→ governed decision
→ executable decision
→ policy decision
→ constitutional decision
```

## Key design principles

### One semantic object, progressive formality

A trivial choice must not require heavyweight structure.

A consequential policy decision must support deep analysis, explicit authority, evidence, machine-readable effects, and retrospective learning.

### Explicit incompleteness

Unknown, estimated, assumed, inferred, observed, and decided must remain distinguishable.

### Decision quality is not outcome quality

The decision record must preserve what was knowable at decision time so that outcomes do not rewrite history.

### Capability and authority are independent

The canon must distinguish:

```text
can
may
should
will
did
```

### Policies are decision effects

A policy decision changes the rules under which future decisions are made.

### Constitutional decisions alter decision-making itself

Constitutional decisions may change authority structures, policy creation rules, fundamental constraints, or mechanisms for delegation and escalation.

### Decisions form a graph

The canon should support explicit decision lineage such as:

```text
derived-from
implements
governed-by
delegated-by
authorized-by
triggered-by
depends-on
challenges
reviews
supersedes
revokes
exception-to
resulted-in
learned-from
```

## Intended uses

The canon should eventually support:

- architecture decision records,
- product and investment decisions,
- security decisions,
- autonomous-agent delegation,
- policy modelling,
- governance systems,
- approval and escalation systems,
- incident decision reconstruction,
- decision retrospectives,
- machine-executable decision services,
- organizational decision intelligence,
- and simulation of ecosystem evolution under different policies.

## Non-goals

The canon is not intended to:

- replace every existing decision-analysis method,
- impose quantitative analysis on all decisions,
- force all decisions into one universal workflow,
- collapse values, evidence, uncertainty, and authority into one scalar score,
- or treat policy as merely another business rule.

## Long-term ambition

Create a practical and formal foundation for **adaptive socio-technical decision systems** in which humans, agents, services, and institutions can make, delegate, execute, review, and evolve decisions while preserving authority lineage and epistemic context.