Field Notes03Observation
The record shows what people did, not what stopped them
Reporting is consistently good on decisions and actions and consistently thin on problems and constraints. The gap is not random — it sits at the front of every chain.
August 2026
This is the single clearest pattern in the archive’s own data, and it shapes what we can publish. Announcements, funding rounds and product launches are reported; the conditions someone was working against usually are not, because nobody writes them down until afterwards, and often not even then. It is why our research queue is almost entirely interviews.
What this rests on
Facts below are read out of the archive at the moment this page is built. Our reading of them is labelled separately.
From the archive
6 vs 0
Across the published chains, 6 problem and constraint links are undocumented, against 0 decision and action links.
Not a single decision or action link is undocumented. Every gap in the archive is a problem or a constraint — the half that says why the decision was hard.