Pillar
The Temporal Layer
Every score is a snapshot of one moment, and a firm is not a moment. What a record of those snapshots adds: how each score moved, whether the firm has changed enough to sit at a different lifecycle stage, and whether its declared setup still describes what the fund is doing.
3 pages
- Why the same score means opposite things depending on directionA 62 that used to be 55 and a 62 that used to be 71 are not the same firm. What the four trend readings mean, and why a score with a direction attached says something a snapshot cannot.
- When you have grown into a different kind of firmA firm can accumulate the structural markers of a later stage without deciding to become one. How a transition is surfaced, the three responses available, and why the stage never changes on its own.
- When your declared configuration stops describing your fundWhat a staleness flag detects, the two conditions that raise one, and why it says nothing about the validity of a score or the quality of a firm.
How to read this layer
The Temporal Layer produces no new scores of its own. It records each score the model produces, marks whether it is improving, stable, or declining over a recent window, surfaces a suggestion when a firm has accumulated enough structural change to warrant a different lifecycle stage, and flags a configuration that has stopped being maintained while the fund has kept deploying. It observes and records, which is a smaller job than the three engines do and a different kind of job.
Direction disambiguates a number in a way a single reading cannot. A moderate score that has been climbing describes a firm fixing things. The same score falling describes a firm in the middle of a problem. Those are opposite situations reported by an identical figure, and only the history separates them.
Each snapshot stores the lifecycle classification in force when it was taken. That detail matters more than it sounds: because nearly every reading is calibrated to lifecycle stage, a comparison across a transition would otherwise be comparing scores computed against different expectations. A fund whose configuration is too incomplete to score still gets a row, recorded as not computable rather than omitted, so the timeline shows when the fund was set up rather than beginning abruptly at the first complete configuration.
These pages are reference material for a reader already looking at a trend arrow, a transition prompt, or a staleness flag and wanting to know what it means.