The Standard

Everything that ships gets your eye on it, and that is why you sit in the chair you do.

The constraint is not that the work gets checked. It is that you are the guardian of what good looks like. It is a skill you have learnt and honed over years, and it has never been written down. So nothing moves without you or the one other person who can, and the queue forms behind two people rather than behind a process.

The quality bar for one work type, written down.

Not a style guide and not a tone document. A bar specific enough that somebody else can apply it, and specific enough that you can tell from the output whether they did.

• The standard for one work type, written
• A QC gate the team can run without you in the room
• The session that puts it into use, with the people who will use it

Rung 3 is where the standard is written down, so work can be handed over and checked against something real. Review stops being a gate and starts being a sample.

This is designed to support that move. It does not promise you will land there, and anyone who promises you a rung is selling you something.