Sagas

Every piece of work serves something bigger, and most systems lose track of it by the second handoff. The ticket doesn’t know about the quarter’s objective. The script doesn’t know why it runs. The person — or the AI — doing the task gets the what with the why stripped off.

Thanks, Computer’s answer is to make intent data. A saga is a mission that spans many arcs, the way an arc spans many events — the top rung of the ladder the overview introduced (saga: why, quarters; arc: what, weeks; event: now).

Because every operation reads the same shared document, the why rides along with the what. Stamp the saga onto arcs as they open:

WHEN @stack == "support/dispute"
SET .saga.name = "q3-retention",
    .saga.goal = "keep churn under 2%",
    .saga.metric.churn_target = 2,
    .saga.metric.current_churn = 2.7

Now every downstream participant works in context. The AI op drafting a refund reply writes a different email when the document says the mission is retention. The human approver sees the goal next to the amount. The cron sweep can prioritize arcs by the saga they serve. The objective isn’t in a slide deck the task never met — it’s a field in the envelope, three steps away from every decision.

If your organization runs OKRs, the mapping is direct: a saga is an objective, its arcs are the initiatives advancing it, and the beats are the work — with the alignment carried in-band instead of reconstructed at review time.

Departments cut the other way

A department (an op stack) isn’t a rung on this ladder — it’s the playbook that handles arcs of a kind. Sagas usually cross departments: “launch in Europe” includes arcs handled by legal, billing, and support. The ladder says why work exists; departments say how a kind of work gets done.

All of this is optional

None of these layers is machinery you must adopt. Events work alone. Name an arc when beats need to belong together; name a saga when arcs do. They’re conventions over the shared document — fields you choose to carry — which is exactly what makes them cheap to start and impossible to outgrow. (And to be clear for the distributed-systems reader: this is the storyteller’s saga, not the saga pattern — no transaction or compensation semantics implied.)

Start small: run your first stack on bare events. The day a customer matter spans two emails and a cron sweep, give it an arc. The day someone asks “which of these actually serve the launch?” — that’s the day you have a saga.