CG Common Ground | Common Ground Systems
What we did and what it producedActive

The work, decision by decision

The register, in practice

  1. One row per claim, not per achievement. A single win can produce several rows if it has several moving parts (a dollar figure, a date range, a channel, a count), because each part can have its own status and its own source, and the sentence around them is what changes by audience, never the parts themselves.
  2. Every row carries a use lane. A claim usable in a formal bid may not be usable in a casual post, and a claim safe for an internal record may never be safe for a public one. The lane travels with the row, not with whoever happens to be drafting that day.
  3. A public-surface audit, run cold against the register. Every live public page was checked against the register rather than against memory, which is how a public wiki that had been live for months with no sitemap and no internal links pointing to it was found at all, and how a structured-data file naming the wrong professional profile was caught.
  4. Contradicted rows get fixed first. Of everything in the register, the rows where two of the firm's own documents disagree are the only ones doing active damage, because each one is currently live on some surface in two different forms at once. Those get resolved before anything else.

The story pipeline

  1. A sourced row becomes a full story on a fixed shape. The situation and the people in it, the decision and the reasoning behind it, the work told as a numbered sequence of choices, what it produced with one figure a reader could actually check, and what it cost to hold the line. One pull quote per story, in the partner's own voice, drawn from the voice engine described elsewhere in this room.
  2. The fact stays fixed; the sentence around it moves. The same underlying row can be told as a short line in a bio, a paragraph in a proposal, an answer on a call, or a full narrative page, and none of those tellings need to sound alike. What never moves is the number, the date, who did it, and the use lane. What always moves is tone, length, order and how much of it gets told.
  3. One stat, one time. Every number or credential appears once per submission or page, never repeated for emphasis, and every section of a piece gets its own supporting story rather than leaning on the same figure twice.
  4. No macro aggregates on a pitch surface. A career total, a lifetime dollar figure, or a project count does not appear on any surface built to help someone decide whether to hire the firm. A figure appears only inside a specific story, and only when a reader could actually check it against something (a unit count, a date, a named partner, a public record). A firm's own record layer, built to be retrieved and cited rather than read for a pitch, is held to a different rule and may carry a broader figure once it is properly sourced.

What we kept, replaced and installed

We kept the underlying facts, all of them; nothing in this system exists to make a weaker claim sound stronger. We replaced the habit of writing every bio, post and proposal from memory against whichever old document happened to be open, because that habit is what let the same fact drift into three versions in the first place. We installed the register with its statuses and use lanes, the public-surface audit as a recurring check rather than a one-time sweep, and the story pipeline that keeps the fact and the sentence separate.

What it cost, and what we would watch

Building the register meant sitting down and formally ruling on roughly sixty contested rows in a single pass, which is unglamorous work that produces no new material, only clarity about the material that already existed. What we would still watch: a public record layer is genuinely different from a public pitch surface, and the two get different rules on purpose (a record page may carry a properly sourced aggregate; a pitch page never does), and it is easy to blur that line by accident if the two kinds of page are not labeled clearly to whoever is writing them that day.

What it produced

Every row in the register carries a status and a source. The public-surface audit that prompted the system found and corrected a mis-pointed structured-data identity file, surfaced a public wiki that had been live and unlinked for months, and retired several figures that were still printed on pages nobody had checked since they were written. The story pipeline built on top of the register now produces the firm's proof-of-work material for its own submissions and public record.

A slice of the project list

A few related projects.