Context — What Must It Have In Front Of It?
Completion requirements
The second discipline: the standing material a workflow loads every cycle so its output fits the organization it serves. Five chapters.
3. Objectives are not directives
A strategic objective is not actionable. Hand one to a capable system and you get confident work aimed at the wrong target.
| Objective | Directive | |
|---|---|---|
| Example | "Improve onboarding" | "Reduce time-to-first-commit for new engineers from 9 days to 5, without changing the review requirement" |
| Contains | A direction | A target, a constraint, and a way to check |
| Delegable? | No | Yes |
The translation is the operator's work — it is not something to delegate to the system that will execute it.
This is where the Four Questions from Module 1 re-enter: intended outcome, constraints, what success looks like, how results are validated. A directive that cannot answer all four is an objective wearing a directive's clothes.