The Shift
The reflex to improve what exists
Faced with the fragility of evidence, the natural reaction of organizations is almost always the same. We seek to improve what already exists. We add mandatory fields, reinforce validation workflows, keep logs longer, and ask teams to write more. The effort is sincere, often costly, and sometimes even effective in the short term. Yet, the problem does not go away.
More structure does not create proof
These responses rest on an implicit assumption: if tools are organized well enough, evidence will eventually emerge. But organization does not produce proof; it produces coherence. Workflows impose a path, but they do not guarantee that the actual decision was made within that path. Logs describe what systems do, not what authorities declare. Documentation formalizes narratives, almost always after the fact. In every case, the evidence remains derivative.
An entire missing category
What is missing is not an additional rule, another tool, or better human discipline. An entire category of infrastructure is missing: a decision evidence infrastructure. Its role is not to decide, nor to govern, nor to control. Its role is to capture the existence of a decisional fact at the precise moment it occurs - before any interpretation, before any reconstruction. As long as this category does not exist, every attempt at proof relies on secondary traces, which are fragile by nature.
From reconstruction to anchoring
This is where the shift lies. It is no longer about reconstructing after the fact, nor analyzing more finely, nor governing more strictly. It is about recognizing that certain facts must be anchored at the moment they exist, before time, systems, and interpretations alter them. Evidence is not deduced. It is anchored, or it is lost.
A clear boundary
From this observation, a clear boundary emerges. On one side are the systems that decide, execute, communicate, and analyze. On the other is an infrastructure of factual, neutral, and independent anchoring, whose role is not to intervene, but to attest. This shift does not make decisions better. It makes their existence less debatable.
What this shift makes possible
Once this shift is made, the nature of the question of proof changes. It ceases to be a fragile exercise in justification and becomes a problem of verification. Not because organizations have better control, but because they finally possess facts that do not need to be narrated.