The framework
Read Rules Run.
One specification for how a business holds what it knows.
Data contracts exist for tables. Nobody wrote them for the prose a business actually runs on. The decisions, the standards, the way things are done here. Read Rules Run is that specification, and everything on this site is built to it.
Three letters, in this order.
The order is the argument. RUN does not sit on top of the other two. It is what keeps them true.
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READ
For every fact the business depends on, there is exactly one place that owns the answer, it is current, and the system says so rather than guessing.
It is not a folder and it is not a discipline. It is a guarantee about answers, including the answer "I cannot tell you, and here is why".
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RULES
Every claim the business makes about how it behaves is written down, in one place, and enforced by the system instead of by memory.
Every rule lives here, whatever it governs. A rule about where a fact is kept is still a rule, not a filing convention.
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RUN
The work itself. Fed by READ and RULES, feeding straight back into both, so the source of truth gets better every time somebody uses it.
One loop, turned by a named person. Reconcile, do the work, write back what happened. Activity on its own is not RUN.
Underneath the three sit four non-negotiables.
Every ops consultant will tell you about one source of truth and nothing falling through the cracks. So will every project-management template. That is not the framework. This is.
A non-negotiable is not a rule that matters a lot. It is one whose removal makes every other rule impossible to check or impossible to recover.
Declare
Every claim is stated in full, in the same shape every time.
No rule-voiced prose with nothing behind it.
Own
Every rule and every fact has exactly one place that owns it. Everything else calls it or is built from it.
Repeating a fact is not the violation. Repeating it without naming where it came from is.
Record
Decisions are added to, never rewritten. Superseded, not edited. State lives in files, not in conversations.
The only one of the four that admits no exception, because declaring an exception is itself an act of recording.
Review
At least one scheduled review, which finds the rules that are missing and prunes the ones that are dead.
And which has to be able to report its own staleness. A review that cannot say it stopped running is not a review.
There is no fifth.
The four are not four rules. They are the same invariants stated at the highest altitude they can be stated at, and every other rule in the framework is one of those four seen from closer up.
So when somebody proposes a new rule, the question is never which bin it goes in. It is this:
Is this the same invariant as one of the four, from lower down?
It always is. That is what makes the floor a floor, and it is why the framework has not grown a fifth letter every time somebody had a good idea.
What it cannot tell you.
A system never holds the thing itself. It holds a representation of it. The meeting is not in the system. The calendar entry standing for the meeting is.
That bounds exactly what this framework can promise you, and the bound is worth saying out loud rather than discovering later.
It can tell you the session was scheduled, delivered and billed. It cannot tell you it was any good.
Everything the framework does, it does inside that line. Anyone who offers you more than that is selling you the map and calling it the ground.
The specification itself.
Read Rules Run is written as a specification, versioned, and pinned to a version by each system built on it. A system pinned to an older version keeps meaning what it meant then.
It is not published yet, and I am not going to publish it on the strength of a diagram. It gets published when a real operating system has been run against it and passed. Mine is the first one being held to that.
When it is published it will be free to read, and it will live at readrulesrun.com.