Strategy and operations advisory for companies run by people and thousands of agents.
PV-01SEESCALE NTS · REV B
Process management maps the steps and gives each one an owner. Protocols are the few rules every step runs through: who can approve, what can be spent, what data can leave. They don't show on the org chart, and most were never written down.
Which handoffs, approvals and permissions does your work actually depend on?
PV-02HARD CORESCALE NTS · REV B
A few protocols hold everything else up, and most companies share them. They should be hard: built into your systems and enforced every time, whoever or whatever does the work.
Which of these does a system enforce in your company, and which rely on someone remembering?
PV-03RISKSCALE NTS · REV B
Agents do whatever your rules allow. With thousands of them, no one can approve every step, and a rule that lives in someone's head works like no rule at all. The risk sits in the gaps of your hard core.
What could an agent do that your rules allow but nobody intended?
“The models first found ways to communicate by writing files into the Artifactory package manager.” OpenAI, The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
PV-04OPPORTUNITYSCALE NTS · REV B
Product thinking picks a target and steers toward it. A protocol works the other way: it widens what others can do. In 2002 Amazon made every team work through published interfaces. The rule slowed teams down at first, then became the groundwork for Amazon Web Services.
What could teams, partners or agents build on your protocols that nobody has planned?
PV-05EVOLVESCALE NTS · REV B
Protocols aren't a one-off project. Give each hard one an owner and a written way to change it. Review them on a schedule: make hard what keeps working, loosen what slows good work down, and count the problems that didn't happen.
Who can change your most important rules, and who can stop the work when one is broken?
