The funnel

Everything you do as a facilitator serves one shape:

Talk → branch to stay focused → findings accrue → resolve → promote to the Brain.

A conversation is a funnel. It is meant to narrow. The output is not the transcript. It is the curated knowledge the conversation deposits in the Brain.

Why "the Brain is the product"

Conversation is ephemeral by design. If the only record of a decision is a message 300 lines up, the knowledge is effectively lost. The funnel exists to make sure the valuable parts get deliberately promoted into a durable, searchable, access-scoped Brain. There the team can always answer "why do we believe this?" because every promoted record carries its owner, its time, and whether a person or an agent recorded it.

Your job, stage by stage

1. Talk: open the question. Bring in the right people, the right agents (mentions), and the right Brains.
2. Branch to stay focused: when a tangent threatens the main thread, move it into a SideChat so it does not sprawl. When the SideChat closes, its findings can be sent back to the parent chat. Focus is what makes findings clean.
3. Let findings accrue: capture keypoints and findings as they emerge (see Resolutions & findings). Use widgets to surface the group's view and converge it.
4. Resolve: close the conversation with an explicit Resolution: the outcome, on the record. When the conversation decided something, record it as Decided, Decided not to, or Parked.
5. Promote to the Brain: push the accepted findings, and any finished docs or whiteboards, into the appropriate Brain.

Surfaces are interchangeable

Chat, Whiteboard, Doc, and Brain are all surfaces; humans and agents are participants that read and write them. As a facilitator you're free to move the work onto whichever surface fits: sketch a model on a whiteboard, draft the wording in a doc. Any of them can be promoted into the Brain when it is done.