Glossary / The language of company work
Clear words. Clear boundaries.
Core terms for understanding how Crew One organises work, authority and company learning.
Terms
- AI-native company
- An organisation designed to capture, coordinate and compound leverage across humans and AI workers. It turns intelligence, experience and execution into durable capability while preserving human understanding and control.
- Approval gate
- A checkpoint where an action pauses for a decision under the company’s approval rules. Delegating work does not grant extra authority.
- Capability
- A repeatable, governed ability the company can exercise reliably. It combines context, standards, authority, method, evidence and approved learning. It remains useful when the worker or model changes.
- CEO Review
- The executive management ritual that shows what changed, what was learnt, where founder judgement is required and what may safely happen next. It is not the product category.
- Chief of Staff
- The coordinating role between the founder and specialist Crews. It assesses requests, plans work, coordinates hand-offs and follows through within the company’s authority boundaries.
- Compounding
- How useful work creates greater future capability. Decisions, reasoning, outcomes and approved learning improve future judgement when the organisation can retrieve, govern and reuse them.
- Crew
- An accountable responsibility, authority and capability boundary. A Crew scopes a company function or recurring business loop. It is not a separate artificial person or brain.
- Decision trace
- The record behind a decision: who chose what, when and on what evidence. It keeps a past call legible so it can be inspected, corrected and understood.
- Execution
- One attempt to perform a Task. It records the worker, model, runtime events, costs and evidence. Changing the worker does not change the Task’s finish line.
- Human API
- The founder as the company’s routing layer for context, instructions and approval. When the company cannot move without going through your head, you are the human API.
- Operating memory
- Company-owned decisions, context and approved learning that can inform future work. Raw transcripts and worker self-reports do not automatically become organisational truth.
- Orchestration
- Coordinating work and hand-offs across the relevant workers and Crews. The company retains responsibility, context and authority as execution moves between them.
- Outcome
- The observed result of work, with verification where required. Activity or a worker’s completion report is not sufficient proof of a consequential outcome.
- Playbook
- The approved method for doing work. A Playbook carries company-owned operating knowledge rather than depending on a particular model or worker.
- Precedent
- An approved organisational change that is allowed to shape future work. In Crew One every approval, correction and exception is recorded as a decision trace, and only the learning you approve becomes precedent. Proposing learning from verified outcomes is being built.
- Skill
- An action used within a method. Skill = action. Playbook = method. Capability = ability.
- Task
- The required organisational outcome and finish line. A Task is distinct from the Execution that records one attempt to achieve it.
The distinction that matters
Task ≠ Execution
The finish line stays with the company. The attempt can change.