The autonomy dial and the panic switch
You control how much each head does on its own with two things: a per-head autonomy dial — off, supervised, or auto — and one tenant-wide panic switch that pauses your whole team, or one part of it, immediately. The dial is the everyday setting. The panic switch is the one you reach for when you want everything to stop now.
What do the three dial positions mean?
Section titled “What do the three dial positions mean?”Off — the head takes no action in its area.
Supervised — the head does its work and brings it to you. You stay in the loop on its steps.
Auto — the head handles routine work on its own, within the hard floor described below.
The dial is set per head, so a head you trust can run at auto while another stays supervised.
Where does my team sit today?
Section titled “Where does my team sit today?”Ten heads are enrolled, and every one of them is at supervised. That is the deliberate starting point: you see what each head proposes before it acts, and you move a dial only when you have watched that head long enough to want to.
How do I stop everything right now?
Section titled “How do I stop everything right now?”Use the panic switch. It is tenant-wide and takes effect immediately — you do not walk down a list changing dials one at a time. You can pause the entire team, or pause just one part of it and let the rest keep working.
The switch changes what your heads are allowed to do right now. It does not rewrite the dial settings you chose, so your configuration is intact when you lift the pause.
What happens to a head that is paused or rolled back?
Section titled “What happens to a head that is paused or rolled back?”Its effective autonomy is lowered, regardless of what its dial says. Business-Gym resolves a value
called effectiveAutonomyMode that folds a panic pause, or an automatic rollback, back down to
supervised.
So a head whose dial reads auto cannot act at auto while it is paused or rolled back. The safer of the two always wins. This is why the panic switch is reliable: it does not depend on every dial being reset correctly.
Can a head at “auto” send or spend on its own?
Section titled “Can a head at “auto” send or spend on its own?”No. Two things never happen without a human, at any autonomy level:
- No autonomous external send — nothing leaves your company to a customer, supplier, or anyone else until a person approves it.
- No autonomous money movement — no payment, transfer, or trade is initiated by a head.
This is an invariant, not a default you can loosen. Auto changes how much routine, internal, reversible work a head can do unattended. It does not change the floor.
How should I use the dial in practice?
Section titled “How should I use the dial in practice?”Leave a head at supervised until its proposals stop surprising you. Move it to auto only for the parts of its work you would have approved unread anyway. Keep the panic switch as your undo for the whole team — it is faster and more reliable than reversing dials under pressure.
Next: see what a department head owns, or how the inbound → approve → execute loop decides what needs you.