Delegation and handoffs

A gate answers may I. An organization also has to answer who should. An agent that hits its ceiling has not failed, it has found the edge of its authority, and the useful next step is not a refusal. It is a route.

Memnox can answer the routing question because the organization's responsibility and authority facts are verified records, not an org chart export. Who owns payments, who may approve at this size, and who is accountable for this system are facts with provenance, and a route is computed from them.

Two of the six answers

The evaluate call can answer delegate and escalate, and they are different instructions.

Routing to the tightest ceiling is deliberate. Send everything to the top and the top stops reading, and an approval nobody reads is a permission with extra steps.

Authority narrows as it moves

When work passes from one actor to another, the authority it carries is the intersection of what both hold, never the union. An agent with a $5,000 ceiling that hands work to another agent does not lend it a bigger one, and a person delegating to an agent delegates a slice of their authority, not their seat.

The rule has no exceptions because every exception is the same hole: a chain of handoffs that ends up holding more authority than anybody in it.

A handoff is not an approval

An escalate or delegate answer opens a handoff, and the distinction from an approval is kept on purpose. An approval asks whether an action may proceed. A handoff asks whether somebody will take the work. Only the people it names can answer, and only once.

An agent can also ask the routing question before it starts, through the MCP tool which_agent_should_handle, which reads the same facts. Purpose and declared actions decide the answer, so the reply to a refund question is the finance agent and not whichever agent asked most recently.

Precedent: the route the organization keeps taking

The third input to routing is what kept happening. Precedent reads the organization's own behaviour: three escalations of the same verb to the same person is a rule nobody got round to writing. An agent that can see the precedent stops re-litigating a settled question, and a reviewer who can see it has the evidence for writing the rule down.