Glossary

Words this site refuses to use loosely.

Each term below has one canonical definition, linkable by anchor. When a page uses one of these words, it means exactly this.

Successor #: The company-specific compound agentic operating system EUMENON builds for one business: state, memory, episodes, policies, skills, models, tools, evaluation, authority, verification, recovery, and learning, operated as one accountable system. Not a model, a fine-tune, an automation bundle, or a chatbot. The successor →
Eumen #: The conversational and voice surface between people and the successor: review, explanation, correction, questioning, and approval. People may call the whole system Eumen, but the talking interface is not the full technology. What Eumen is →
Owner dependence #: The condition where a company's consequential decisions route through its owner, so continuity, price, and the owner's time are all hostage to one person's presence.
Judgment-heavy work #: Work where a rule or lookup does not settle the case: someone must interpret company-specific context, incomplete facts, competing objectives, relationship history, authority, risk, reversibility, and consequences, then act, wait, refuse, or escalate. Distinct from work merely being difficult, and separate from where the work is performed. The full definition →
Decision episode #: A reconstructed record of one consequential decision: the situation, the information actually available at the time, the alternatives, the choice, corrections, and later results.
Recovered judgment #: The operating judgment extracted from behavior, comparison, explanation, correction, and outcomes across many episodes. An owner's explanation is attributed evidence and is tested like any other claim.
Capability #: A compiled, testable unit of operating competence: memory, a policy, a skill, tool behavior, or a model adaptation, with an explicit scope and an evaluation record.
Decision class #: A named category of recurring decisions that is trained, evaluated, granted, and measured as a unit: exception pricing, credit release, scope changes. Authority moves class by class, never all at once. How an engagement stages this →
Release #: The decision that a capability which passed evaluation may be used at runtime. Separate from authority, and from responsibility transfer.
Authority #: Explicit, granular, revocable permission to create defined external effects. Earned through demonstrated performance and recovery under increasingly real conditions; it can expand, narrow, expire, or be revoked.
Consequence envelope #: The explicit limits around what a class of work may commit, spend, or change: amounts, counterparties, reversibility, timing. Work inside the envelope proceeds under granted authority; work outside it escalates to a person by rule.
Responsibility transfer #: The separate decision that makes the successor the accountable owner of exact supported work. Released capability and granted authority do not by themselves transfer responsibility.
Effect verification #: Independent, read-only observation of what actually changed after an action. A tool's success report is never accepted as proof of an external effect.
Required-work denominator #: The complete set of work a claimed operating scope was responsible for, fixed before results are known. Founder independence is measured over the whole denominator, not a favorable sample.
Normalized baseline #: The agreed starting measurement the two tests are scored against: company value and founder operating time, adjusted for unusual or owner-specific items and fixed in writing before results are known. The two tests, in full →
The two tests #: The conjunctive gate on EUMENON's $200,000 contingent build fee: independently measured sale value at least 2 times the agreed normalized baseline, and founder operating time at least 80 percent below the agreed baseline. No sale is required; if either test fails, the contingent fee is waived. What counts as proof →
Successor Foundation #: The $25,000 first phase of an engagement: reconstruction of how the company operates and decides, and the foundation of its successor. The offer →
Managed operation #: The $5,000-per-month phase in which EUMENON operates the successor: monitoring live work, capturing corrections, testing coverage, investigating errors, and expanding earned authority.
Key-person risk #: The exposure created when essential judgment lives in one person, whoever that person is. Hiring a strong operator relocates it; only structure removes it.
Pull test #: Shorthand used on this site for the question every succession event asks: remove one person and watch whether the company holds. A transferable company survives the pull. Succession →