Principle
The Constitution
The principles governing how organizational cognition should be built, trusted, governed, and overseen.
The Canon · Part V — Core Principles
Constraints, not aspirations
The Constitution translates the framework’s purpose into principles that constrain how cognition is built. The Canon is emphatic that these are not aspirations but constraints: a design that violates them is, by definition, outside the Canon.
The seven design principles
Judgment first — information exists to improve judgment, and for no other reason. Memory compounds — institutional memory is an appreciating asset. Relationships create meaning — meaning emerges from the connections among records, not from records in isolation.
Identity precedes intelligence — reasoning operates on things, so a failure of identity is, sooner or later, a failure of reasoning. Ontology shapes understanding — the model an organization adopts determines the language in which it can think. Evidence before confidence — confidence should emerge from evidence, never the reverse. Learning completes cognition — every important decision should leave the organization better able to make the next one.
These principles are expressed, in governance terms, through the eight constitutional articles — from Freedom and Trust through Data Sovereignty, Fields of Use, and Human Oversight — that govern trustworthy cognition in practice.
Related Concepts
Applied In
Where this concept does concrete work across the architecture.