The states

Between one act and the next, the work rests. A state says where an item has got to, and it holds there until somebody picks the next act up. Every state after the first is the act that produced it, in the past tense.

A failed verification is not a state change. The work is returned inside the act it never left — an item whose specifications were sent back is still Accepted, because it is not yet specified. The same holds at every gate.

Two paths return to Accepted, and both mean the same thing: the criteria were wrong. One leaves Actioned when validation fails outright; the other leaves Validated when something surfaces afterwards. Either way the work goes back to the specifying, because there is nothing wrong with the change — only with what was asked of it.

Each return goes to the state that owns the problem, not to the start. That is one rule rather than a pair of special cases, and it is what keeps a return proportionate to what was actually found.

Returning is not failure of the track. It is the track finding the thing it exists to find, at the first point anybody could have found it.

Retraction

Retraction is available from every state the sift has let through. A Decider withdraws the commitment and the work stops, from Accepted through to Validated.

The two ends are excluded for opposite reasons. At New nothing has been agreed to, so there is no commitment to withdraw — a request turned away there, whether as a duplicate or rejected outright, is Closed, and costs nobody a conversation. At Complete it has already been delivered, and there is nothing left to withdraw either.

A state is not a work queue

The state says where an item is, and therefore what should happen to it next. It does not say when, or by whom — an item can sit at Specified for a month without that meaning anything is wrong.

Finding work is a separate mechanism. Something on the item has to call it to action; what that something is — an assignee, a label, a column, a notification — belongs to the application. Without it, people go looking for work by scanning states, and the state field quietly becomes a priority list.

A concession may be recorded at any point. It is a record on the work of what could not be met — never a decision, never a branch. It changes nothing about where the work goes; it changes what is known about it, and who is answerable for that.