CG Common Ground | Common Ground Systems
Common Ground data roomActive

Credibility and the story pipeline: a status and a source on every row

The internal system that keeps every claim Common Ground makes about its own work traceable to a source and a status, and the pipeline that turns a sourced row into a story; September 2026

IndustryCommon Ground's own operation
Project typeInternal proof and publishing system
DatesSeptember 2026
SeatChief Operating Officer, Common Ground

A firm that tells its own story across several public surfaces (a professional network, a website, a public wiki, a bid submission) runs into the same failure eventually: the same fact gets told three different ways on three different pages, and nobody can say which one is right until a client, a partner or a reader asks and gets three different answers. We had that problem. A live audit of our own public surfaces found retired figures still crawlable on a public wiki page nobody remembered was live, a structured-data file pointing at the wrong person's professional profile, and dozens of claims where two of our own documents disagreed with each other and both were still in circulation.

The fix was not a rewrite. It was a register: a row for every claim any of us has made or could make about our own work, each one carrying a status that answers one narrow question, what are we allowed to do with this sentence today and who has to say yes before it goes further, and a source the claim traces back to. The status does not rate how good the win is. A small, well-documented result can be locked and ready to use; a very large one can sit unresolved until someone actually reconciles the two documents that disagree about it.

On top of that register sits a story pipeline: sourced rows become full narrative pieces, written to a fixed shape (the decision, the reasoning, the work, the result, what it cost) so that a fact and the sentence carrying it can be separated, the fact stays fixed, and the sentence can change for the room it is told in.

Problem

The same fact about the firm's own work was being told multiple different ways across multiple live public surfaces at once, some of them retired figures nobody remembered were still crawlable, with no single place that said which version was actually correct or who had to approve which claim before it went further.

What we did

Built a claims register, one row per fact or claim, each carrying a status (locked, documented but never formally approved, gated to a specific partner, contradicted between two of the firm's own sources, or retired) and a source; audited every live public surface against it and found and fixed the worst mismatches; and built a pipeline that turns a sourced row into a full story, written once and told differently depending on the room.

Result

Every row in the register carries a status and a source. The public-surface audit that prompted it found a public wiki live and crawlable for months with nobody aware of it, a structured-data file naming the wrong person's professional profile, and retired figures still printed on pages that were supposed to have been updated.

The row is the fact, not the sentence.Jesse Fowler

Read on

01

The decision and the reasoning

Why we did it this way, told first.

Read
02

What we did and what it produced

The work, decision by decision, and the result.

Read
03

A slice of the project list

A few related projects.

Read
Team

Private side

The full report, the source files on record, the timeline and every figure with its source. Password.

Enter