Phase-Gated Architecture
A large work is cut into phases, and each phase's output is what the next phase is allowed to consume.
When a body of work is too large to hold in one head, the way it fails is predictable: several people work at once on different assumptions, and the contradictions surface late, in the finished product, where they are most expensive. Phasing is the answer. Survey before you judge; audit before you fold; agree the disposition before anything is rewritten; rewrite before anything is archived.
The gate is the part that does the work. A phase ends with an artefact — an inventory, a ledger, a set of dispositions — and the next phase begins from that artefact rather than from the sources directly. That is what keeps the whole effort consistent: everyone downstream is reading the same agreed thing, and a disagreement about the artefact is surfaced once, at the gate, rather than a hundred times inside the later work.
It has a cost, and the cost is honesty about it: phases can become a bureaucracy, a body can spend two seasons surveying and none building, and a gate can turn into a place where work waits for someone's attention. The guard against that is the same rule the production pattern uses — only constraint-free work is released, and the look-ahead exists to clear constraints before they become a queue.
Used well, it pairs with showing before doing: the gate is where the sample is shown, agreed and generalized, and the phase behind it is where the agreed shape is applied at scale.
Also called: phases and gates Stands on: Pull planning · Work Breakdown Structure · Show-Before-Doing Protocol Opens onto: Disposition Categories · Milestone · The look-ahead · Constraint · Progressive canonization · Weave, don't delete In play: table · beyond Sources: the Wiki Turn's working decisions, Phase-Gated Architecture (draft) · Phase 2 — The Audit Ledger, its method and disposition legend (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The Great Weaving — Concept Ledger Open: named as a working decision of one project and never generalized; how it relates to the seasonal rhythm every Cell already runs, which is its own kind of gate, is unaddressed.