How we think.
Notes on operating ontologies, the firm's thesis, and the work in progress. New writing arrives here.
The Operating Graph
The single, living model of your business that your tools and people should point to.
Two problems — questions that take days to answer, and automation that demos well then dies — are the same disease: a business whose model of itself was never written down. The operating graph is that model made explicit, single, and alive: the thing underneath your tools that should have been there all along.
Every Business Is Already an Ontology
You don't have one model of your business. You have five, and they don't agree.
You don't have an ontology — you have five, scattered across your tools and your people, quietly disagreeing. The only real choice is whether the model of your business is written down and shared, or trapped in the heads of people who could leave.
Questions Your Company Can't Answer in Under a Week
The simplest questions take a week to answer — not because the facts are missing, but because they are scattered.
The simplest questions about your own business — how many do we have, which customers are actually profitable, what breaks if one person leaves — take a week to answer. Not because the facts are missing, but because they're scattered across systems that were never built to agree.