---
title: "The Vocabulary"
book: "Collapse or Collapse"
author: "Vinay Pasricha"
url: https://vinaypasricha.com/books/collapse-or-collapse/vocabulary
status: "On Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HNL53J5R. The full text is shared on vinaypasricha.com with the author's permission."
---

# The Vocabulary

**The people**

*Keeper.* The one human who holds the company: allocator and judge, owner of the four core outcomes, designer of the whole, keeper of the doctrine. He runs nothing. Beside him, two humans and no functions; at one Outcome, one backup. *Master.* The one human who holds an Outcome: owns its playbook, reads its floor, decides its appeals and its Monday test. She has no staff and no agents beside her. *Aligner.* The one human who runs a vector and holds its gates. *Tuner.* The one human who builds and changes a vector’s chain, accepts or refuses the agent maker’s proposals, and can run the vector alone. *Pair.* An aligner and a tuner, each the other’s standby. *Backup.* The second person who shares a master’s or a Keeper’s room and can hold it alone any morning. The six: aligner, tuner, master, Keeper, and a backup for each of the last two.

**The units**

*Outcome.* A result someone outside the company receives and would miss, with the vectors that produce it and a master who holds it. It exists exactly as long as the result has no other owner. *Vector.* One running copy of an Outcome’s discipline: one result, aimed at one market, carried by one chain of agents, held by one pair. Vectors deepen, merge, and are lent. *Agent.* A skill, held by the machine, standing inside the vector that needs it, behind a gate. Every former function is either an agent or an Outcome. *Quartermaster.* The agent that manages a vector’s line agents and answers for the whole vector; the one face the aligner sees. *Line agent.* An agent that does one step of the chain. Among them, in every chain: the inspector, which checks every output against the playbook and may hold; the accounts agent, which keeps the vector’s cost and value and pays within its limit. *Agent maker.* The agent that builds, tests and upgrades a vector’s agents and proposes changes to its tuner. *Hands.* Any non-human automation, a humanoid, a drone, a wheeled robot, a machine that loads itself. An agent with hands is an agent.

**The rooms**

*Cockpit.* The pair’s room: one face at a time, nothing shown until asked, the gates, the signature. *Control room.* The master’s room: the floor of tiles, one per vector, coloured by state; the red nearest her feet. Nobody beside her. *Command centre.* The Keeper’s room: four columns, profit, customers, employees and society; the Outcomes as tiles; the doctrine tile. *Tile.* One vector or one Outcome, shown as a colour: pale is flowing, amber is a warning, red needs a human now. The tile takes the colour of the worst thing inside it. *Doctrine tile.* Three counts that must read zero: humans outside the structure, signals read from outside the engine, vectors without a pair or a written exception. *Edge colour.* The colour inside a tile that shows days lost outside the vector, at its edges and in the uncollapsed world.

**The acts**

*Gate.* A point where the chain waits for a signature. Irreversible gates (money, a name, a promise) carry a name and default closed. Reversible gates default open after a period the playbook sets; irreversible gates default closed. *Split.* A new Outcome opened from an existing playbook when a master’s floor holds more reds than she can read. *Co-signature.* The second name on an irreversible gate while its holder is below the threshold of judgement. *Signature.* The only authority in the company. Whoever signs a gate owns the result that follows, up to the next gate. Anyone whose name is on the tile may sign. A signature is never overruled. *Double signature.* The gate at the edge of a lent vector: two single signatures on one line, the vector’s aligner and the other company’s department head. *Hold.* An inspector’s signature that stops an output; either of the pair may appeal; the master decides at her own gate. *Flag.* A line in the record raised by any human with a name on a tile, naming an unowned result, its receiver, and why no chain produces it. Only the Keeper decides a birth. *Written on the wall.* The death of an Outcome: another Outcome produces its result, or its customer is gone. No decision is needed; the Keeper records it. *Monday test.* The one question each part of the company answers each week: the result, with no department in the chain.

**The rules of motion**

*Playbook.* The written design of an Outcome: chain, gates, limits, standards, thresholds. The master owns it; every agent maker reads it; nothing spreads between vectors except through it. *Record.* Everything every agent and human did, written, timed and replayable. A failure is reviewed from the record, in proportion to its size. *Design rate.* The rate at which a vector’s result is expected to grow as its agents compound. The gap between the design rate and the actual rate is the pair’s form. *Deepening.* The same vector producing a larger result each month, until one vector carries the company’s whole result; then it is lent. *Lent vector.* A vector running inside another company, whole or at its edge, behind a double signature, with the pair’s share following the result across the wall. *Collapse.* Dissolving departments into Outcomes and agents by the one test, revenue chain first and whole, then one department at a time. The second collapse is the one the market does to a company that waited. *Trial.* A known result tried in a new market: one vector, from an existing playbook, a quarter to prove it. Trials make vectors; births make Outcomes. *Born whole.* How an Outcome begins: at least one master and one vector of a new kind, from day one. A vector never becomes an Outcome. *Mirror, rest, replacement.* What follows falling attention: shown the record, given paid rest while the tuner runs the vector, then replaced. No warnings, no improvement plans. *The eight values.* What intention is, and what the four layers test: Teamwork, Friendliness, Helpfulness, Honesty, Reliability, Truthfulness, Integrity and Kindness, each tested by a behaviour the record can show. Each has a minimum standard, and a human reviews every verdict. *Setting.* A number the doctrine gives as a starting value and the playbook changes on the evidence, such as how long a reversible gate waits. A tenet is a principle; a setting is not.