Decision classes
A decision class sorts every Verb by whether its effect can be undone and what is at stake, and the class sets how long an Action waits.
A decision class sorts every Verb by two questions: can its effect be undone, and is money, a customer or the brand at stake? The class sets the tier, and the tier sets the delay window.
Two questions
The first question is reversibility. A two-way door can be walked back by a later Action at little cost: a draft edited, a backlog re-ranked, a sync retried. A one-way door cannot: money has left, a Message has been read, buyers have seen a Price.
The second question is stakes: money, customers or the brand. An Action that touches none of them is low tier whatever its size. An Action that touches one of them broadly is high tier, even when a later Action could undo part of it.
The classes
| Kind of door | Typical Actions | Tier | Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two-way | Edit a draft, rank a backlog, retry a failed sync, answer a customer in an open conversation | Low | None |
| Two-way, visible | Publish a Page, change DNS, turn on a Flag | Medium | 1 business hour |
| One-way, bounded | Refund within a Limit, pay a bill, send one quote | Medium | 1 business hour |
| One-way, broad | Raise a Price, start ad spend, send an outbound campaign, sign an Agreement | High | 1 business day |
Answering a customer in an open conversation is low tier on purpose. Speed is the customer's stake there, and review still runs before every reply.
Floors and raises
Verbs that move money, carry legal effect, publish, change DNS or retire a record never sit below medium. A namespace's Settings may raise any Verb's class. Nothing lowers a class below its floor.
An Evaluator may raise one Action's tier by amount or by blast radius: how many Startups, customers or pages it touches. It never lowers one. Every Verb's reference row shows its default class, and every pending Action shows the class it ran under.
In practice
A b2c meal-planning app runs with no humans. Its Content Lead edits recipe drafts all day with no window. Publishing a new landing page waits one business hour, and a $300 weekly paid-social test waits one business day.
One morning the Marketing Lead queues a 30 percent discount email as a bounded send. An Evaluator counts 40,000 recipients and raises it to high tier. The email waits a business day, which gives the Studio's watchers time to read it.