Signals, Decisions, Tasks: The Three Objects That Run Your Company

Every company runs on three things. Not ten. Not fifty. Three.

Signals — things you observe. A competitor launched a feature. Your conversion rate dropped. A customer said something interesting. An agent flagged an anomaly.

Decisions — choices you make in response. Expand to a new market. Reprioritize the roadmap. Hire for a role. Kill a feature.

Tasks — work that results from decisions. Build the landing page. Run the analysis. Ship the fix. Research the competitor.

Most tools only track the last one. That's a problem.

The broken chain

When you only track tasks, you lose the why. Six months from now, someone will look at a task called "Add EU pricing page" and have no idea:

• What signal triggered it (40% of trial signups came from EU)
• What decision created it (expand to EU market in Q3)
• What the rationale was (competitor pricing gap + user demand)

The task exists in a vacuum. It gets done or it doesn't, but the intelligence behind it evaporates.

The connected chain

In Cockpit, these three objects are linked:

A signal gets logged when you or your agents observe something worth noting. It has a confidence level, a category, and an implication.

A decision gets created when you choose to act on a signal (or multiple signals). It records the rationale, links to the signals that informed it, and notes which areas of the business it impacts.

A task gets spawned from a decision. It carries the full provenance: which decision created it, which signals triggered that decision, and which briefing originally surfaced the observation.

Why provenance matters

Three reasons:

Accountability. When someone asks "why are we doing this?" you can trace it back to the exact signal and decision. No guessing, no archaeology.

Learning. Over time, you build a record of what signals led to good decisions and what signals were noise. Your intelligence loop gets smarter.

Portability. If you export your data or graduate a project to a new team, the full context travels with it. Tasks without context are just a to-do list. Tasks with provenance are operational intelligence.

Start simple

You don't need to be religious about this. Start by logging one signal a day. When you make a decision based on it, record the link. When the decision spawns work, let the chain connect.

Within a week, you'll wonder how you ever ran without it.

Cockpit tracks signals, decisions, and tasks with full provenance built in. See how it works