Fable
Every sentence must be tied back to a post
The consultant in Lighthouse Town was very articulate. Whether shipowners asked about weather, cargo prices or dock rules, he could give fluent advice, and the townspeople liked him very much for a time.
The trouble appeared after a heavy fog. The consultant said the east dock could still berth ships, and the fleet followed suit, only to find that a no-berthing order had been posted the night before. The consultant's tone was certain, but the basis was stuck in old memory.
The mayor first had the advisor speak more cautiously, requiring "possibly" at the start of every sentence. This made the answers sound safe, but it didn't make the facts more reliable.
Later, the tower keeper laid down a new rule: any answer involving real-world status, policy, pricing, inventory, and customer commitments must be tied back to current evidence. Without evidence, it must be stated that a query is needed.
The consultant began by checking lighthouse records, dock announcements, contract ledgers, and tool return results before organizing an answer. Every key judgment was followed by a source or system status.
This changed the workflow. Consultants no longer handled all judgments based on old memory, but were forced to align with the real world: what the lighthouse found, what the notice said, what the current state of the dock was. Gradually, townspeople learned to distinguish two kinds of cleverness: one is making things sound complete, the other is knowing where to go to verify. The former suits casual conversation; only the latter can take on shipping routes, payments, and client commitments.
The team also saw that grounding is not omnipotent. An expired evidence base, retrieval errors, or dirty data returned by tools can all make answers wrong along with their evidence. So the evidence itself must also be governed. Later, the manager wrote this lesson into daily rules: first look at the scenario, then look at the boundaries, and finally look at who can take over when it fails. Only when all of these are clear does a beautiful demo become deliverable work.
From then on, Lighthouse Town no longer rewarded the best storytellers, but those who could tie words back to facts. The lighthouse keeper also set up inspections. Expired notices had to be taken down, revised contracts had to be dated, and abnormal tool returns had to raise a red flag. Otherwise, even though a consultant cited a sign, the sign itself might already have been blown crooked by the wind, and errors would keep spreading dressed up as evidence.