A framework by Gareth Faull for running an organisation as durable Products rather than a sequence of projects, backed by two draft normative standards — the Product Tree Standard, a portable Product → Goal → Job → Work Item grammar, and the Ledger / Kernel Standard, an append-only, provenance-first substrate where every change goes Propose → Plan → Apply and AI can propose but never holds authority on its own.
Business Gardening
Business Gardening is a framework by Gareth Faull for running an organisation as a set of durable Products instead of a sequence of projects. It was published in September 2026 as four “foundation edition” v0.1 documents: two books and two draft standards. Its central claim is that organisations are rarely short of alignment (OKRs, roadmaps, dashboards) but are short of coherence, meaning being able to trace any piece of work back to the purpose it serves, and back through the decisions that shaped it.
- Product Tree Standard: the portable Product → Goal → Job → Work Item grammar, catalogued as its own entry.
- Ledger / Kernel Standard: a deliberately small substrate built on stable identity, append-oriented history, native time (separate
recorded,occurred_atandeffective_attimestamps) and provenance on every change. Governed change runs Propose → Plan → Apply. A Plan is a deterministic, inspectable set of mutations against a known revision, and Apply is atomic. “AI MUST NOT be treated as an implicit source of authority.” - Garden Architecture: the platform design, with Kernel, domain Ledgers, Runtime Store, Coherence Layer and Core. People and systems reach it through “Dots”, APIs, MCP servers, connectors and events. Tools are bounded capabilities, and a CTRL Dot authorisation layer decides which of them may be used in the current context. It describes itself as open-source and “post-agentic”.
- Business Gardening: the practitioner book. It covers stewardship, pruning, “decisions leave rings”, and coherence measures such as Time to Purpose, Orphan Work Rate and Work-to-Purpose Distance. The worked example is Euston station modelled as a Product over nearly two centuries.
In API operations, Business Gardening names an API platform as a Product more readily than most frameworks do. Its own running example is an API Platform whose goal is self-service onboarding and whose Job is “understand why I do or do not have access”. APIs appear twice in the model: as a Product in their own right, and as Materials linked to the Work Items that produce them. That makes it a demand-side model, one that describes what an organisation is trying to do, much like the Turbo EA Reference Catalog and TOGAF/ArchiMate capability maps. It differs from them in one respect: it is organised around a single organisation’s own products and jobs, not around a shared industry reference taxonomy. Its Ledger Kernel, with its insistence on provenance, append-only correction and inspectable plans before any change, is close in spirit to Domain-Driven Design bounded contexts carried through time.
Maturity, as observed on 2026-09-24: everything is a single-author v0.1 draft. The documents carry no stated license, and there is no public source repository, schema or reference implementation yet. Both standards are written in normative MUST/SHOULD language with numbered conformance clauses, so they are specifications in form. They are not yet specifications with adopters.
