Request For Guidance

A question sent to those who know a domain, asking for their best understanding before a decision or a piece of work depends on it — how a body borrows wisdom it does not hold.

The request names four things: the question, what the asker already holds, what the answer will decide, and by when it is needed. The answer carries three: the guidance, the confidence behind it, and the reasoning. Both are kept in the open record, so the next person with the same question finds the exchange rather than repeating it (Knowledge as commons, Curation).

Two rules make it safe to use, and they are the whole of its governance. A request does not oblige the receiver to answer. Guidance does not oblige the asker to follow it. The asker remains the decider, and the record shows what was asked, what was said, and what was actually done — which is also how the guidance itself is eventually judged. Remove either rule and the instrument becomes a permission system, which is the exact thing a body without a centre cannot afford (Sovereignty, Subsidiarity).

It is load-bearing because expertise is unevenly distributed and always will be, and a body has only two honest ways to handle that: concentrate authority where the knowledge is, or make the knowledge askable. The first builds a hierarchy; the second builds a commons. A request for guidance is the small, repeatable act by which the second one is chosen, over and over, by people who will never meet (Guide Cells, Federation).

In practice it is one of the standing doors any Actor may walk to, beside the proposal, the issue, the decision recorded, and the gap learned from. Its paper floor is a letter; its screen form is a page with the same fields. Requests travel across a membrane in both directions, and what crosses is a question and an answer, never an instruction (Selectively Permeable Membrane).

Also called: RFG · asking the whole Stands on: Guidance · Asking Questions · Current Best Understanding · Knowledge as commons Opens onto: Guide Cells · Requests and offers · Proposal · Issue · Decision Records · LIØNSBERG Mission Control · Process (and the Process List) In play: Home · beyond — one of the five doors of the big room Sources: Request For Guidance.md (wiki root; frontmatter marks it a a proposal, unreviewed, drafted from senses in live use) · Process For Requests For Guidance, LIØNSBERG Process List (draft) · Guide Cells.md (draft) · LIØNSBERG Mission Control.md, §the desks (unmarked) · lionsberg.wiki: Request For Guidance Open: Nothing states what a body does when a request is sent and no answer comes, or how an exchange is retired when its guidance is later shown to be wrong.