Skip to content

Correction Synchronization Workflow

Correction workflow — instantiates Summary-Substance Alignment Audit

Once a correction is decided, drives it through every human-owned surface that repeated the error and confirms each was fixed, so no stale copy is left behind.

A Correction Synchronization Workflow starts after a divergence has been found and a fix decided, and solves the fan-out problem: one substance has many human-authored summaries — the abstract, the sales one-pager, the onboarding email, the partner brief — and a correction that stops at the source leaves the rest quietly contradicting it. The workflow routes the decided correction to every dependent surface, assigns each to the person accountable for it, and tracks each to confirmed closure. Its defining discipline is that the correction is not "done" when the substance is fixed; it is done when the last derived summary has been updated by its owner and that update has been verified.

Example

A SaaS company's docs team corrects a data-retention figure in its product documentation — the substance said data is kept 90 days; it is actually 30. Fixing the doc is step one of many. The workflow lists every human-owned surface that repeated the 90-day figure: the in-app help tooltip (owned by the product team), the sales one-pager (marketing), the security questionnaire boilerplate (the trust team), and the onboarding email sequence (lifecycle). Each surface gets a correction task routed to its owner with a deadline, and an escalation owner is named for any that stall. The workflow tracks each to "fixed and verified" and keeps an append-only correction log, so a month later the question "is the 30-day number consistent everywhere we said 90?" has an auditable answer instead of a hopeful one.

How it works

  • Enumerate the dependent human-owned surfaces that carried the claim now being corrected.
  • Route the decided correction to each, as a tracked task assigned to that surface's accountable owner.
  • Name an escalation owner for any surface whose fix stalls, so a correction cannot die in someone's queue.
  • Track to verified closure and keep an append-only log, so the correction is auditable and no surface is silently skipped.

It coordinates people and ownership; it does not decide whether to correct, and it hands the machine-cached copies to a different mechanism.

Tuning parameters

  • Fan-out completeness — only surfaces the org directly controls, or also syndicated and partner copies that need a request rather than an edit.
  • Ownership granularity — one correction owner for everything, or a named owner per surface; the latter is slower to set up but far less likely to drop a surface.
  • Escalation timer — how long a surface may sit unfixed before it escalates.
  • Verification strictness — trust the owner's "done", or require confirmation that the surface actually changed.
  • Correction visibility — a silent fix or a posted correction notice on each surface.

When it helps, and when it misleads

Its strength is that a fixed substance stops contradicting itself across the surfaces people actually read, and the append-only log makes "did we really fix it everywhere" answerable rather than assumed — the discipline of maintaining a single version of record and reconciling every copy to it.[1] Its blind spot is any surface missing from the enumeration: an un-listed copy is never told. The classic misuse is quietly editing a summary to match without recording that a correction occurred — reconciliation used to erase history rather than to fix it. The discipline is to drive off a maintained inventory of surfaces, keep corrections logged, and verify closure rather than trusting it.

How it implements the components

This workflow fills the human coordinate-and-close side of the audit's correction machinery:

  • correction_distribution_path — the routed path a decided correction travels from the substance to each human-owned dependent surface, as tracked work.
  • claim_owner_and_escalation_owner — names who is accountable for correcting each surface and who the fix escalates to if it stalls, so nothing dies in a queue.

It moves an already-decided correction across people; it does not detect the divergence or fire the trigger that a correction is needed (Body-Change Summary Invalidation, and the review mechanisms), and it does not reach the machine-cached previews no editor re-opens — that fan-out is Social-Preview Cache Invalidation.

Notes

The division of labor with Social-Preview Cache Invalidation is deliberate: that protocol reaches the machine copies in other companies' caches that no person will re-open; this workflow reaches the human-authored surfaces whose owners must be told, tasked, and chased. A correction needs both legs — the machines that won't fix themselves and the people who won't unless assigned.

References

[1] Version of record — in scholarly and journalistic publishing, the canonical, citable version of a document; a corrections workflow exists precisely to reconcile every downstream copy back to it after it changes. ↩