Recommend Is Not Authorize
Orville Davis·Author
A drafted next action can look finished. On a signed-in Decision Case it is still a proposal. A named person decides, and evidence has to be on the case before that proposal is treated as the decision.
Recommend is not authorize. A recommendation is an argument. Authorization is an act by a person who can be named.
Reliability work produces drafts quickly. Stretch the interval. Replace the assembly. Hold the unit. Add a route. A reliability engineer, a contractor, or a model can write that sentence in minutes. The sentence is useful. It is not permission to do the work.
Sync keeps the two apart on the signed-in Decision Case. A signed-in user can complete the case in a fixed order: Question, Evidence, Recommendation, Human decision, Action, Verification, and Learning. Orville Davis states that order in Field Manual v0. The manuals index lives at /manuals. This essay is why the order refuses to collapse. The manual is the public contents.
The case opens on a question
A Decision Case opens on a reliability or maintenance question a person can decide: what happened, what should happen next, or what can wait. The question is recorded before evidence is attached and before anyone is asked to approve. A question that never acquires an evidence record remains a question.
That first step is the Question chapter. It does not name a site, a unit, or a result. It records the order.
Evidence is required before the proposal counts
Evidence is the part of the case a later reader can inspect. It holds observed fact, assumption, and what is still missing. The recommendation waits on that record. A proposal with no basis is not ready for a human decision.
Evidence is required before a recommendation is treated as a decision.
If the basis is not on the case, the text is still a suggestion, however complete the wording looks. Observed fact, assumption, and the gap have to stay distinct. Merging them is how a hypothesis becomes a work instruction without anyone noticing the switch.
The Evidence chapter states that gate. Stage-1 evidence is the record held on the case. A live connector that pulls historian or control-system tags sits outside this edition.
The recommendation is not the decision
The recommendation states a proposed next action, the evidence it uses, and the uncertainty it leaves in view. The signed-in Decision Case can hold that proposal so a person can read it. Drafting the proposal leaves authority where it already sits.
A named person accepts, rejects, escalates, or returns the recommendation. That act is the human decision. The case keeps the person and the proposal together: who decided stays visible beside what was proposed. Until that act is recorded, the case is still a proposal. Authority stays with the person who can accept the operational consequence.
Read those two steps as separate chapters: Recommendation and Human decision.
Action, verification, and learning stay on the same record
Action is the record of the work the human decision authorized. It states what was approved to happen next and keeps that statement on the case, beside the question and the evidence. Work that follows the decision moves through the customer’s systems of record and the people who already hold operating authority.
Verification records whether the authorized action did what it was supposed to do, and which evidence would show that. The check sits on the same record as the question, the recommendation, and the human decision. A live pull of control-system tags is not the proof this edition describes.
Learning keeps the closed case so a later question can see what was believed, what was authorized, and what was checked. The signed-in loop ends on that record.
Those chapters are Action, Verification, and Learning.
Where the public statement lives
Field Manual v0 is the public contents of this loop. Start at the manuals index or open Sync Field Manual directly. Each step below is a chapter stub. Later editions can deepen a chapter. The spine stays in this order.
Decision Case spine
The standing rule sits beside the spine: Honesty boundaries.
What this article is not claiming
This is an essay about the Decision Case order, not a customer case study. It names no plant, states no savings figure, and claims no prevented failure.
Stage-1 readiness means a signed-in user can complete the Decision Case — question, evidence, recommendation, human decision, action, verification, and learning — and Field Manual v0 describes that journey. This edition does not describe plant execute, a live connector tag pull, SMTP invite delivery, or automatic revocation of access on expiry as live.
Companion reading on why a recommendation still needs a reconstructable record: Evidence Lineage Is Not Optional.
Read the case, then bring a question
Field Manual v0 states the order and the boundaries. The Reliability Engineer workspace is where a signed-in Decision Case is completed. A Reliability Assessment is the bounded review when the question is whether the records can support a conclusion.