Solo Decision Architecture (SDA) Framework

The Solo Decision Architecture (SDA) Framework operationalizes the foundational technique documented in the Methodological Layer of the Decision Architecture discipline at the individual scale, where a single Decision Architect is the unit of accountability for a consequential commitment. The framework is currently implemented on the Convoking4 platform, and this paper documents that implementation.

The Diagnostic Layer of the discipline establishes that consequential decisions are distorted by the compounding interaction of human cognitive bias, organizational dynamics, and the technical properties of generative artificial intelligence, with distortion forming inside one person's thinking before it ever reaches a team. The Methodological Layer establishes the technique that responds to the diagnostic: backcasting and the dual lens, with a decision architecture artifact as its output, and the five constraints any framework operationalizing the technique must meet.

The SDA implementation captures the practitioner's frame in a human-only Brain Dump, extracts four coordinates under the Honest Extraction rule, and proceeds through a nine-phase session that holds aspiration and constraint together through the dual lens. Structural mechanisms enforce the methodology's conditions at specific gates: the Camera Test on milestone inspectability, the ADICE Matrix on stakeholder assumptions, the Flinch Test on commitment acceptance, and the bidirectional Verification on artifact convergence. Platform-design enforcement of the four AI participation conditions produces the methodology's required conditions during the practitioner's normal use of the system rather than relying on the practitioner to maintain the conditions through self-discipline.

The paper documents the implementation's structural answers to the methodology's five constraints, names honestly the failure modes the implementation can exhibit when applied dishonestly and the failure modes the implementation does not address, and demonstrates compliance with each of the five methodological constraints established in the Methodological Layer. The SDA on Convoking4 is one of two platform-anchored implementations of the technique on a shared methodological foundation; the Business Decision Architecture (BDA) framework, forthcoming as the companion publication, operationalizes the same technique at the organizational scale.

The paper closes with empirical research questions specific to the SDA's claims, offered to the broader research community as a structured agenda for testing what the framework asserts about artifact examinability, the Stage 1 / Stage 2 boundary, milestone inspectability, commitment accountability, and the implementation's bounded scope.

DOCUMENT TYPE. Framework Layer (Individual) of the Decision Architecture discipline.

VERSION. Decision Architecture, Framework Layer (Individual), version 2.0.

AUDIENCE. Decision Architects (the practitioner audience); researchers in decision sciences, organizational behavior, and human-AI interaction; framework developers evaluating platform-anchored operationalizations of methodological standards.

POSITION IN THE DISCIPLINE. This paper is the third in a four-paper publication architecture documenting the Decision Architecture discipline. The foundational layer consists of the Diagnostic Layer (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19831515) and the Methodological Layer (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19832436), which establish the discipline's scholarly foundation. The implementation layer consists of this paper at the individual scale and the forthcoming BDA framework paper at the organizational scale.

LICENSE. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). The framework knowledge is freely available to any practitioner, researcher, or framework developer who wishes to apply, evaluate, or build on it.