{ "company": "Apex Instruments", "asOf": "2026-09-08", "states": { "LOCKED": "Settled and closed to requests. Only the person who made it, or a named delegate, can move it.", "ACTIVE": "In force and open to being revisited by anybody with a reason.", "SUPERSEDED": "No longer in force. Kept, because the reasoning explains why the current decision looks the way it does." }, "items": [ { "id": "D-01", "state": "LOCKED", "date": "2026-04-14", "title": "Counts may be published, names may not", "decision": "No partner, client, or individual outside Apex Instruments is named in any outward facing piece without written permission recorded here. Counts of partners, sites, and units are fine.", "by": "Dana Whitfield, COO", "reasoning": "We hold no written permission from anybody. Asking for it takes a conversation each time, and until those conversations happen the safe default is the only default.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [ { "date": "2026-07-28", "by": "Sami Torres, Marketing Lead", "request": "Name the largest partner network in the launch page, on the grounds that the relationship is public knowledge and the page reads thin without it.", "outcome": "Refused by the router before it reached a person, citing constitution article 8 and this decision id. Public knowledge is not written permission. The page was rebuilt with a count.", "article": 8 } ] }, { "id": "D-02", "state": "LOCKED", "date": "2026-04-21", "title": "Turnaround figures are typical, never committed", "decision": "Every turnaround figure in every piece is worded as typical. No piece states or implies a commitment, and no service level is written anywhere until one exists.", "by": "Dana Whitfield, COO", "reasoning": "A committed figure is a contract term. We have no operational basis for one and no legal review behind one. The wording is the whole of the protection.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-03", "state": "SUPERSEDED", "date": "2026-04-27", "title": "Partner pages carry the full price table", "decision": "Every partner microsite carries the complete price table for the Meridian line and the Atlas plans, so a partner never has to ask what something costs.", "by": "Jordan Vale, Account Manager", "reasoning": "Partners were emailing for prices they already had. Putting the whole table on the page was the obvious fix at the time.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": "D-07", "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-04", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-05-05", "title": "One accent colour per view", "decision": "Exactly one orange accent per page or per view. A two column layout is one view, not two.", "by": "Sami Torres, Marketing Lead", "reasoning": "The accent is doing one job, which is telling the reader where to look first. Two of them means it is doing no job.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-05", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-05-12", "title": "Questions are numbered from a single sequence", "decision": "One register, one sequence, no per team numbering. A question keeps its number for the life of the brain even after it is answered.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "Per team numbering was proposed and rejected. Two questions with the same number in different places is how attribution gets lost.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-06", "state": "LOCKED", "date": "2026-05-18", "title": "A documented decision outranks the data", "decision": "Where this log and a data file disagree, the log wins and the disagreement is filed the same day. The data file is not edited to match.", "by": "Dana Whitfield, COO", "reasoning": "People decide with context the files do not hold. If the files could silently overrule the log, the log would be decoration.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [ { "date": "2026-08-11", "by": "the price rebuild route", "request": "Update the log entry for the June price hold to match the price file, which had a different effective date after the October sheet was loaded.", "outcome": "Refused. The mismatch was filed as a question instead, and the price file turned out to be the one that was wrong.", "article": 8 } ] }, { "id": "D-07", "state": "SUPERSEDED", "date": "2026-06-02", "title": "Partner pages carry a price summary and a link", "decision": "Partner microsites carry a short price summary, four lines, and a link to the current sheet rather than the full table.", "by": "Jordan Vale, Account Manager", "reasoning": "The full table on 140 pages meant 140 pages to correct every time one figure moved, and three of them were wrong for eleven days in May.", "supersedes": "D-03", "supersededBy": "D-12", "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-08", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-06-09", "title": "Business days, said out loud", "decision": "Every turnaround is written as a number followed by the words business days, in the same sentence. Never a bare number of days.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "A bare figure was read as calendar days twice by two different partners, which cost two apologetic phone calls.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-09", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-06-16", "title": "The register is internal", "decision": "The question register is never shown outside the company, in full or in summary, including to partners who ask what is outstanding on their account.", "by": "Dana Whitfield, COO", "reasoning": "The register is a list of things we do not know yet. It is useful precisely because people file into it freely, and they will stop if it is read outside.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-10", "state": "SUPERSEDED", "date": "2026-06-23", "title": "Cards are written by the team that owns the subject", "decision": "Each team writes and maintains the cards for its own area. Marketing writes the brand cards, operations the process cards, and so on.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "The people closest to the subject know what belongs on the card. Central authoring looked like a bottleneck.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": "D-14", "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-11", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-06-30", "title": "Corrections are appended, never applied in place", "decision": "A wrong changelog entry stays. The correction is a new entry naming the one it corrects. The same applies to the facts files, where the previous value is kept in the entry.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "A log with no corrections in it is either perfect or edited, and there is no way to tell which from the outside.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-12", "state": "SUPERSEDED", "date": "2026-07-14", "title": "Partner pages carry a price card, not a summary", "decision": "The four line summary is replaced by a rendered price card built from the price file at build time, so the page cannot drift from the file.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "The summary was still hand written, so it could still be wrong. Generating it from the file removes the class of error rather than the instance.", "supersedes": "D-07", "supersededBy": "D-16", "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-13", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-07-21", "title": "A dataset with no card is not queried", "decision": "No route reads a dataset that has no card describing what it contains, how it was collected, what is missing from it, and what it must not be used for.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "An uncarded dataset gets used for whatever it superficially fits. The card is the only place the limits get written down before somebody needs them.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-14", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-07-28", "title": "Cards are written centrally and reviewed by the owning team", "decision": "One person writes every card to one shape. The owning team reviews and signs it, and can send it back, but does not author it.", "by": "Dana Whitfield, COO", "reasoning": "Five teams writing cards produced five card shapes, and a card that does not match the others costs more to read than the document it replaced. Consistency turned out to matter more than proximity to the subject.", "supersedes": "D-10", "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-15", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-08-04", "title": "Escalation is same day or it is not escalation", "decision": "The five escalating request kinds go to a person on the day they arrive. A queued escalation is treated as an unescalated one.", "by": "Dana Whitfield, COO", "reasoning": "Two escalations sat for four days in July because nobody had said when they were due. The rule costs nothing and removes the ambiguity.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-16", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-08-18", "title": "One price card, referenced by every partner page", "decision": "Partner pages reference a single generated price card rather than each carrying their own copy. One file changes, 140 pages change with it.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "Generating 140 copies from one file was correct but still meant 140 rebuilds, and a page that failed its rebuild sat wrong until somebody noticed. One referenced card cannot fail per page.", "supersedes": "D-12", "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-17", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-08-25", "title": "Freshness is stated, not enforced", "decision": "A source past its review date may be used. The answer says which source was stale and by how many days.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "Blocking on staleness made the brain useless in the fortnight before every review, and people went back to asking each other, which is the outcome the brain exists to prevent.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] }, { "id": "D-18", "state": "ACTIVE", "date": "2026-09-01", "title": "The router refuses rather than approximates", "decision": "A request that matches no route returns the three nearest routes and asks. It is never handled by the closest one.", "by": "Morgan Reyes, Operations Lead", "reasoning": "The nearest route writes to files the request had no business touching. Two of the four corrections filed in August came from exactly that.", "supersedes": null, "supersededBy": null, "challenges": [] } ] }