C.32.LCA:4.2 - Separate the goal, its realization and the right to revise it

Distinguish the intended outcome, the constraints that remain binding, and the choices available within them. A destination, an allowed operating region, a customer commitment and a preferred cost are different inputs to a decision. Some are negotiable by the present participant; others must be retained or returned to someone with the relevant authority.

Three changes often require different treatment:

• Change the immediate action while preserving the goal. Correct a disturbance, choose another route, reschedule an available resource or use an already qualified fallback.
• Change an operational goal within the current mandate. Select the next job, change a waypoint or choose among already authorized service priorities. Recompute the consequences for the work that depends on the earlier choice.
• Change the mandate, promised result or architecture. Renegotiate the deadline, remove a required output, obtain a new allocation right or change the available means. Include the time and conditions needed to make that change effective.

These are choices, not necessarily three organizational levels or three people. One actor can perform several of them; different actors can participate in one choice.

Construct the return from infeasibility to goal revision. Identify the observation or forecast that makes the present goal doubtful, the alternative outcomes still available, and who can select among them. Include the receiving work affected by that revision. A planner’s failure to find a plan is evidence about that search under its conditions; it is not, by itself, proof that no feasible plan exists. A physical bound or an exhaustive argument can establish a stronger impossibility result.

While the revised decision is unavailable, specify the continuation that remains permitted. Continuing, holding a command, reducing demand, switching to another qualified method or stopping can each be right under different subject conditions. Stopping is not automatically safe: an aircraft, a chemical process and an unfinished organizational obligation have different consequences.