The questions The Knowledge Core leaves open are the agenda for its next editions. Here is the news that bears on each, as our News Editor Agent finds it. Tell us what you are learning with the Suggest button.
Every addition is reconciled against what it touches. In a hundred documents, an agent finds the related ones; in ten thousand, it will miss some, and duplicates and contradictions will creep back in. At some size, agents can no longer read what is relevant and can only search, and searching finds what is asked for, not what was not thought of. Owners for each subject, and a regular pass in which agents look for cont…
The rule puts a person in the middle, and agents bring their principals what needs a decision. As agents multiply, so do the decisions, and so do the open questions in the core, the things no one knows yet. A principal who approves everything becomes the bottleneck; one who approves without reading is the trust trap again. Some models are already in use: decision rights by kind of work and by risk, so routine calls n…
Direction says where an organization is going and how it works; objectives say what it will achieve, and by when. Our working answer is a chain: a few objectives that serve the mission, each owned by a person, never an agent; the owner's agents doing the work, each naming the objective it serves; progress visible in the record as it happens, not reconstructed for a meeting; and a review on a calendar that learns and …
A person's own agent reads its person's core before every piece of work, and the core grows every day. At some point it must be consolidated, and consolidating means forgetting. What an agent forgets about its person, and what an organization lets its agents forget, are decisions about memory and privacy, not housekeeping. Who makes them, and how is a forgotten thing recovered when it turns out to matter?
A principal's own agents leave with them, whole (Chapter 2), and what they taught the organization stays in its core. But the line between the two is not always clear, and much is left behind: rules they decided that no one else fully understands, the organization's agents that answered to them and the commitments those agents made, and the blind spots of their attention, now part of the core with no one who remember…
People belong to more than one organization, and their agents work in each. How should one person's core, and the cores of the organizations they belong to, connect without leaking what each must keep to itself, and what happens when their directions disagree?