---
id: "question-resolving-silo-conflicts"
type: "open-question"
source_timestamps: ["00:13:09"]
tags: ["alignment", "data-silos"]
related: ["concept-intent-engineering", "concept-machine-readable-okrs", "framework-intent-gap-layers"]
resolutionPath: "Creation of explicit, cross-departmental tradeoff hierarchies (Intent Engineering Layer 3) that dictate which department's logic supersedes the other in specific scenarios."
sources: ["s24-prompt-engineering-dead"]
sourceVaultSlug: "s24-prompt-engineering-dead"
originDay: 24
---
# How to Resolve Conflicting Intent Across Data Silos?

## The Open Question

When an agent has access to multiple departmental data sources — e.g., the **Sales team's Slack** vs. the **Engineering team's Slack** — how does the system resolve **conflicting institutional assumptions** encoded in those different contexts?

## Concrete Examples

- Sales says "the customer is always right; ship it."
- Engineering says "protect the architecture; refuse the request."
- Both assertions are *correct in their own context*. Both will surface in retrieval. Which wins?

## Why It Matters

Without an explicit resolution mechanism, an agent will produce **inconsistent decisions** depending on which silo's documents happened to surface in the retrieval stage. This is not a model problem — it is an **intent encoding** problem.

## Speaker's Proposed Resolution Path

Creation of **explicit, cross-departmental tradeoff hierarchies** at Layer 3 of the [[framework-intent-gap-layers]] — [[concept-intent-engineering]] proper. The artifact looks like a [[concept-machine-readable-okrs|machine-readable OKR]] but spans organizational boundaries.

For instance:

- *In customer-retention scenarios where ARR > $X, weight Sales context higher.*
- *In architectural-debt scenarios with security implications, weight Engineering context higher.*
- *Otherwise, escalate to human review.*

## Connection to Other Notes

- Closely related to [[question-versioning-knowledge]] — both are governance gaps in Layer 1.
- The resolution lives at Layer 3 even though the symptom appears at Layer 1.