PS-PRI-196 · r1
PRIORITIZATION
OBSERVED
ENGAGED
URGENCY SET ELSEWHERE
The sender decides how urgent it is; the cost of interrupting is decided where it arrives.
01 DEFINITION
Condition in which the importance of a message is fixed by whatever generated it while the cost of delivering it depends on what the person is doing when it arrives, and the generating side has no view of that.
02 CONDITIONS
UNCERTAINTY
MISSING
What the recipient is doing is not available to the thing deciding how loudly to arrive.
TIME PRESSURE
HIGH
Some of what comes through this channel cannot wait, which is why the channel interrupts at all.
ERROR ASYMMETRY
ASYMMETRIC
Interrupting needlessly and failing to interrupt are not comparable failures.
OPERATOR STATE
CONCURRENT
The person is in the middle of something the sender cannot see.
03 WHERE IT APPEARS
MEDICALAlerts are graded where they originate and land on people whose current task the originating system cannot see.
TELECOMPaging severity is assigned by the detecting system and received by someone who may be mid-remediation of something worse.
ENERGYAnnunciations are ranked by the plant and arrive at an operator whose situation is not part of that ranking.
LOGISTICSExceptions are raised with a priority set at the source and delivered to people driving, loading or counting.
MANUFACTURINGStation calls carry a severity decided by the station and interrupt whoever is nearest, whatever they are holding.
PUBLIC SERVICENotifications graded by the issuing body reach people in circumstances the body has no way to know.
04 WHAT AEON WORKED THROUGH HERE
One channel carried both the trivial and the things that must not wait, and the surface receiving them knew nothing about what the person was in the middle of. The work went into which messages are entitled to take the whole surface, and into what the rest do instead of asking.
What stays unresolved is which side should give way — a message that defers to the situation can be the one that needed to interrupt, and one that never defers teaches people to clear it without reading.