- Amplifiers and brakes
- Forces — chiefly policy and fiscal terms, capital, and community opposition — that do not merely add or subtract time linearly but can multiply the effect of every other force or halt a project entirely, and therefore often decide a project's real fragility or strength.
- Binding constraint
- The single force currently gating a project's progress — the slowest blocking factor that sets the pace regardless of how ready the others are. It migrates over a project's life as each constraint clears, so it must be re-identified continually rather than assumed fixed.
- Corroboration
- The discipline of confirming a signal against independent sources that would have to move together if it were real. Because the layers have different custodians and failure modes, agreement among them turns a noisy raw signal into trustworthy evidence.
- Coupled forces
- The principle that power, capital, physical build, people-signals, policy and fiscal terms, and community opposition move each other rather than acting independently, so a constraint solved in isolation can be nullified by another and their scores cannot simply be summed.
- Critical path
- The longest chain of dependent tasks in a project, which sets the minimum possible time to completion. Shortening a task off the critical path saves no time; the current front of the critical path is usually the same thing as the binding constraint.
- Falsifier
- The specific, observable event a practitioner names in advance that would prove a thesis wrong. Committing to it before the fact guards against rationalizing away disconfirming evidence and enables fast, calibrated updating when the world contradicts the view.
- People-signals
- The fastest, earliest layer of intent — hiring posts, executive moves, and reallocation of specialized talent — that precedes formal disclosure by quarters. Powerful but noisy, so it should move a thesis only when corroborated by independent layers rather than on its own.
- Signal stack
- The layered set of observable traces a real project leaves — interconnection queues, permits and zoning, grid telemetry, corporate and financial disclosure, and people-signals — each with a characteristic latency, reliability, and bias, read together so the layers check one another.