21st Century Marketplace Vision - Our User Community - Part XV

Integrating hebia.ai’s Seven Pillars into Synallagi

George Sivulka’s seven pillars advocate for a fundamental transition: moving from individual Artificial Intelligence productivity toward a robust institutional Artificial Intelligence capability. This framework posits that durable value is not achieved by simply accelerating individual tasks, but by redesigning the institution to coordinate, learn, decide, and act collectively at scale.

Within this context, Artificial Intelligence in Enterprise Resource Planning represents a total redefinition of operational competence rather than a mere tool upgrade.

For Synallagi, the inclusion of these seven pillars of Artificial Intelligence within our Information Technology Organizational Construct. Means the architecture will evolve beyond providing user assistance. It must also function as an institutional operating system for oil & gas profitability—one that disciplines bias, detects signals, coordinates actions, and generates a strategic competitive advantage while acting autonomously within a framework of governed authority.

Tokenized Assets Demand Reporting Discipline

A Synallagi-driven marketplace assumes a world in which transactions occur among individuals and organizations operating across jurisdictions, currencies, and multiple representations of value. In that environment, the Internet of Information becomes inseparable from the Internet of Value. The network no longer serves merely to transmit information. It becomes the infrastructure through which value itself is represented, transferred, and exchanged. Currency, Intellectual Property, data, and asset interests all become capable of direct movement across the network. A Synallagi becomes the means and the method. 

That development has immediate consequences for oil & gas. If ownership interests in Joint Operating Committees are to become tokenized, then the underlying asset must be supported by accounting and reporting of a standard sufficient to attract capital and satisfy SEC compliance requirements. The aggregated and ambiguous financial statements of the producer firm will not meet that test. They do not provide the property-level, actual, factual, monthly reporting needed to support a tokenized operating interest. Each Joint Operating Committee must therefore be able to publish its own detailed financial statements. Synallagi is designed to provide that discipline and information. Offering an investor more shares in a producer will pale in comparison to the ability to own a crypto interest in a Joint Operating Committee directly.

The implication is fundamental. Tokenization does not diminish the need for accounting rigor. It intensifies it. As value becomes more fluid, accountability and reporting must become more exact.

The Operating Surface of Synallagi

Marketplaces will become the method through which oil & gas is viewed, managed, and acted upon. In practical terms, engineers and geologists will work with Synallagi’s Marketplace Interface on one computer screen and the Business Operations Management Module on another. Through those two environments, Joint Operating Committee operations and marketplace interactions, are brought together into the engineers and geologists working environment.

This is the operating surface of Synallagi. Beneath it sit the structures that make the environment function: transactions, contracts, currencies, participants, compliance requirements, and the logic of operational authority itself. These elements are not separate from operational action. They are embedded within it. The user acts once at the business level, and the system carries the action through its required transactional, contractual, and compliance consequences. That is what it means for institutional Artificial Intelligence to act unprompted, supported by Synallagi, our user community and their service provider organizations.

Governed Autonomy

Our user community and their service provider organizations are responsible for architecting, designing, developing, implementing, maintaining, and supporting this environment. Their role is not to perform each transaction manually. Their role is to build and supervise the system that performs the work. They intervene where necessary to remedy exceptions, improve design, refine logic, and oversee the Artificial Intelligence and automation that conduct marketplace activity. Engineers and geologists continue to exercise business judgment. Process execution increasingly resides with the system.

This is why Synallagi must be understood as Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration rather than as isolated automation alone. The issue is not simply whether tasks can be automated. The issue is whether unprompted activity can be organized coherently across parties, assets, obligations, and time. That requires more than software. It requires trust, an assembled body of Intellectual Property, a defined authority structure, a licensing framework, and a disciplined organizational method.

People, Ideas & Objects have chosen to use the Intellectual Property of Synallagi with Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration precisely to keep this unprompted environment within defined bounds. Unprompted execution without governing structure is not efficiency, it’s disorder.

Why Open Source Is Not an Adequate Governance Model

The attraction of open source development is understandable, but in Synallagi’s context it is inadequate. The issue is not whether software code can be written collaboratively. The issue is whether oil & gas transactions, compliance obligations, operational accountability, and autonomous execution can be governed through an ambiguous structure of ownership, support, responsibility, and authority. They cannot.

A community of developers contributing according to available time and personal interest does not constitute an accountable operating model for oil & gas. It leaves unresolved the central questions. Who owns the system? Who supports it? Who is responsible for its features or failures? Who has the authority to change it? Who can a producer call when a process breaks, an obligation is missed, or a design defect appears? These are not peripheral matters. They are the operating core of the system.

If producers surrender oil & gas transactions to autonomous and automated systems without a single overall method of organization, and without retaining some structured influence over that method, they leave themselves open to disorganization and failure. Open source software code is not the same thing as governed autonomy.

Why the Organization Must Be Rebuilt

The conclusion is straightforward. Artificial Intelligence will not be effective in oil & gas if it is merely layered onto existing organizational arrangements. The organization itself must be redesigned. Synallagi is built on that premise. The system is not a tool added to the producer firm. It is a reorganization of the institutional environment through which oil & gas business is conducted. We could compromise with today’s leadership and bring a hybrid solution. However, that would take much longer to deliver and be of a compromised and questionable value proposition.

The lesson is the same one raised in the comparison to the textile mills. The factories that electrified first did not necessarily win. The factories that redesigned the floor around electricity did. Oil & gas now has its electricity in the form of Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence. The question is whether it will redesign the factory. Synallagi is that redesign.

Synallagi Intellectual Property

Synallagi Intellectual Property Funding and Ownership Policy, Version 1.0

The development, protection, and controlled use of Synallagi ERP software depends upon a clear policy governing both the source of development funding and the ownership of all related Intellectual Property. People, Ideas & Objects’ position is that the ultimate source of funding for Synallagi should arise from the production of oil and gas. In the preferred case, producers would participate directly in these developments due to Synallagi improving their profitability, accountability, and operational performance. To date, however, producer response has indicated reluctance rather than support. Accordingly, People, Ideas & Objects proceeds on the basis that funding must ultimately be secured from the economic value generated through profitable oil and gas production.

People, Ideas & Objects does not regard conventional debt or equity financing at its own level as the preferred solution. Synallagi provides a distinct value proposition to producers. Where producers are unwilling to support a development that exists for their own direct benefit, there is limited rationale for outside lenders or investors to assume that burden in their place. The more practical structure may be one in which producers secure an appropriate financing instrument, and People, Ideas & Objects draws upon those funds for development requirements. In that event, the financing obligation should ultimately be retired through the producer's enhanced profitability generated by Synallagi.

During development, People, Ideas & Objects charges producers for access to and use of its Intellectual Property. These revenues are used to fund the costs of People, Ideas & Objects and its developers. In addition, People, Ideas & Objects provides the funds necessary for our user community to create and assign to People, Ideas & Objects the Intellectual Property developed in connection with Synallagi. This structure is necessary to preserve Synallagi’s Intellectual Property as a single, defined, and controlled source.

That principle is absolute. All Intellectual Property relating to Synallagi, including source materials, derivative works, improvements, reusable configurations, process designs, development outputs, and related materials created by our user community or arising from the system’s development or use, must vest in People, Ideas & Objects. Such rights may be granted back by license for authorized purposes, but never by divided ownership. Producers payment in any form for development, contribution of ideas, operational participation, or producer funding does not create co-ownership, beneficial ownership, or any residual proprietary claim in Synallagi or its Intellectual Property.

Where Intellectual Property is acquired from our user community, it may be made available back to them through license so they may continue development and related authorized activities within the Synallagi framework. That license must be sufficiently broad to permit productive work, but sufficiently controlled to preserve unified ownership, governance, and architectural integrity. The purpose of this structure is to ensure that Synallagi remains coherent, enforceable, and commercially viable as a long-term platform.

Our user communities service provider organizations are configured differently. Their primary role is not software development, but implementation, operations, and day-to-day task execution. They will bill directly to each Joint Operating Committee, producer, or relevant service industry participant for the services they perform. Those services will be conducted in Synallagi and will be subject to the Targeting Framework. Unless expressly agreed otherwise in writing, such activities do not create ownership rights in Synallagi, its underlying Intellectual Property, or any reusable improvements of general applicability.

This policy is intended to ensure long-term sustainability for People, Ideas & Objects, our user community, and their service provider organizations. Producer revenues must ultimately support the continuing development of Synallagi. People, Ideas & Objects and our user community provide producers with a tangible value proposition that justifies that support. The timing and method by which this support is fully realized remain uncertain at present. What is not uncertain is the policy foundation: Synallagi can only be developed, maintained, and protected if its Intellectual Property remains centralized under the commercial license and control of People, Ideas & Objects.

All Intellectual Property relating to Synallagi, including derivative works, improvements, reusable configurations, and development outputs created by our user community or arising from system use, must vest in People, Ideas & Objects as the single controlled source, with rights of use granted back by license only and never by divided ownership. In turn People, Ideas & Objects commercial license ensures all Intellectual Property remains wholly owned by the original author, Paul Cox. 

For the purposes of this paper, we have outlined the broad commercial and licensing structure of the Intellectual Property relating to Synallagi. This outline is necessarily high level and non-exhaustive. It is provided for explanatory purposes only and does not constitute a legally binding statement of rights, obligations, ownership, or license until such time as the relevant definitive agreements have been prepared and duly executed.

Legacy of IP in Synallagi

People, Ideas & Objects has been engaged with producers since August 2003 on the issue of Intellectual Property ownership. This has been one of the most difficult matters for us to overcome. Producers have shown no interest in losing access to, or control over, a legacy they had long assumed would remain available to them without meaningful compensation.

In August 2003, People, Ideas & Objects published a research proposal to review the use of the Joint Operating Committee as the organizational basis for oil & gas Enterprise Resource Planning. The proposed budget was $750,000. The industry response was systemic and dismissive: “We do not use small research firms.” Producers then engaged a large research firm, which published a precursor document in April 2004. I understood that document as part of the process by which producers could begin to consider whether the Joint Operating Committee was appropriate for Enterprise Resource Planning.

However, People, Ideas & Objects completed and published the proposed research project in May 2004. That publication effectively precluded any later claim that others had independently developed the same concept after our August 2003 proposal. People, Ideas & Objects also notified the other research firm of our work and position. No further action was taken by that firm on the project.

To compete against the Intellectual Property of People, Ideas & Objects, as personally licensed by me, a competing party would need more than an assertion. They would need to refute our ownership and produce a publication history establishing a prior and superior claim. I am unaware of any such publication history.

The current ownership structure is unusual. In most commercial environments, it would be uncommon for an individual to retain ownership of Intellectual Property through this stage of a project, particularly where the expectation is that the same ownership structure will continue. People, Ideas & Objects has established that one third of its revenues are to be paid as royalties to Paul Cox. In conventional producer thinking, this has become an unwanted and difficult issue. The proverbial 800-pound gorilla has entered the boardroom.

That outcome was not accidental. It arose from producers’ short-term thinking and their “muddle through” strategy. By failing to address the issue properly when they had the opportunity, producers left open a series of vulnerabilities that People, Ideas & Objects was able to occupy through persistence, publication, and continued development.

Several critical points form the foundation of this Intellectual Property.

Since early May 1991, I have held the view that the Joint Operating Committee methodology could resolve the structural issue that contributed to the July 1986 oil price crash: chronic and systemic North American overproduction. That overproduction was not merely a market event. It was a symptom of the industry’s organizational structure, and that structure remains visible today.

In May 1991, I began my first attempt to address this issue through a product development initiative then known as Genesys.

During the 1990s, the oil & gas Enterprise Resource Planning market included as many as ten competing vendors. There was, at that time, a robust market offering. Producers, however, chose to exploit those vendors by forcing sales at low or no margin so that vendors could “get their foot in the door.”

The financial consequences were predictable. Enterprise Resource Planning vendors could not generate adequate returns from the oil & gas market. Their investors and bankers concluded the market was too small, too difficult, or insufficiently profitable to support continued development. They exited permanently. The pattern resembles what has more recently occurred in the service industry.

Subsequently:

Oracle left the oil & gas Enterprise Resource Planning development market in 2000 due to a lack of producer interest in new development.

People, Ideas & Objects made its Intellectual Property claim in 2003 and 2004.

In 2005, IBM sold its oil & gas Enterprise Resource Planning application due to a lack of producer interest in building new products. This left Synallagi as the only proposed redevelopment that has continued uninterrupted for the past twenty-one years.

As a consequence of this history, I am persona non grata in the industry.

It is now 2026. I have received no revenue from producers since August 2003. That fact explains why the Intellectual Property is managed as it is. There are no producer investors whose capital contribution would justify assignment of ownership. There are no external investors whose participation requires a different structure. The Intellectual Property remains where the risk, cost, continuity, and authorship have remained.

If IBM sold its oil & gas Enterprise Resource Planning system in 2005 despite holding a majority market share, the obvious question is what that says about the systems producers continue to use today. It suggests that no meaningful systems development has occurred in this market for decades. That outcome is the direct consequence of inadequate payments to Enterprise Resource Planning vendors over time. You get what you pay for.

Producer conduct created the opening for People, Ideas & Objects to establish, preserve, and extend its Intellectual Property position. The industry’s refusal to fund development, support vendors, or engage constructively with the Joint Operating Committee-based architecture left the field open. People, Ideas & Objects occupied that field through publication, continuity, and personal financial commitment. Now, with no investors other than myself, there is no commercial or legal basis to assign the Intellectual Property to producers or any other party. 

Synallagi IP Enhances Trust

People, Ideas & Objects method of Intellectual Property ownership is now strategically significant for North American oil & gas producers. Synallagi provides producers with a system whose domain, authority, and operating boundaries are defined, enforceable, and durable. That should be recognized as timely. Producers now require systems capable of operating in today’s markets while preparing them for tomorrow’s Information Technology-led Industrial Revolution.

As People, Ideas & Objects stated in the March 17, 2025 paper, Hyper Specialization in Today’s Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Enabled Workforce, and in the related podcast, “Artificial Intelligence is the killer application of Intellectual Property.”

This is not merely a statement about ownership. It is also a statement about trust.

Our user community and their service provider organizations know the scope of their domains and authority. They apply their competitive advantages within those boundaries. Synallagi then enforces those boundaries through software, licensing, and blockchain smart contracts. This will also constrain Artificial Intelligence from operating outside a service provider’s defined authority and responsibility.

That enforcement is essential. It ensures that Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration does not become uncontrolled automation or autonomous operations. Instead, it operates within defined permissions, auditable rules, and traceable authority.

Our Targeting Framework can then evaluate a given set of values within a controlled environment. Those values remain auditable, traceable, and accountable. This supports Compliance & Governance for the producer, the Joint Operating Committee, and the markets.

The result is a system architecture that provides the security, accountability, transparency, and trust required in an environment where human capacity is increasingly the limiting constraint. Intellectual Property is therefore not only a legal asset. In Synallagi, it is the governing structure that makes Artificial Intelligence, hyper-specialization, and market-based operations reliable at scale.

21st Century Marketplace Vision - Our User Community - Part XIV

Four, Edge 

Individual AI optimizes for usage. 

Institutional AI optimizes for edge. 

Coordination, signal, and bias defining the first three institutional challenges of Artificial Intelligence, edge defines the fourth. The issue is not whether a technology is widely used, but whether it creates a differentiated capability that matters economically. Usage alone is not strategy. Edge is.

Cloud computing introduced a cost-sharing logic that is difficult to dispute. The sharing of the capital, operating, and maintenance costs of Information Technology infrastructure is a rational response to the inefficiency of requiring each firm to build the same foundational capabilities for itself. That advantage becomes especially important where computing demands are dynamic and where on-demand access to processing capacity provides both flexibility and cost discipline.

Those benefits are now being challenged by the growing fashion for so-called edge computing, in which some functions previously performed in the cloud are reclaimed within the firm itself. From my admittedly biased perspective, this often appears to be a classic Information Technology turf war between competing empires. Firms that pursue edge computing for reasons of data control or institutional preference may be redirecting resources toward areas in which they possess no competitive advantage and which do not form part of their distinct competitive advantage. To restore their decimated empires in Information Technology.

This issue becomes even more pronounced when one moves from edge computing to edge Artificial Intelligence. In that setting, the argument strengthens for shifting more computational capability back inside the firm. If accepted uncritically, that logic begins a long march away from cloud computing, along with its cost advantages and its dynamic access to scalable computing power. That may be appropriate in narrow circumstances. It should not, however, be mistaken for a general institutional advantage, particularly where firms’ real strengths lie elsewhere. Or in areas such as accounting and administration that do not form distinct competitive advantages of the firm.

For Synallagi, that distinction is important. The 21st Century Marketplace Vision for Oil & Gas papers being written for 2026 address the development of the Petroleum Lease Marketplace, Resource Marketplace, and Financial Marketplace, together with the Targeting Framework. I do not presently see any necessary dependence of those structures upon edge Artificial Intelligence. That point is not especially material in any event, because the architecture, design, and development of Synallagi have now been passed to our user community. If they identify a productive use for such an approach, they will be in a position to implement it. What remains important at the architectural level is that one of Synallagi' principal benefits lies in the consistency of its Organizational Constructs, including Professor Paul Romer’s theory of Endogenous Technical Change, or sharing and its massive cost reductions.

This returns us to George Sivulka’s central point. The goalposts in Artificial Intelligence move continuously. Foundation model firms iterate rapidly and compete across broad populations of users. Yet the true edge does not lie with broad access alone. It lies with purpose-built applications that remain ahead in their specific domain because of their unyielding focus on a defined commercial problem. Even as foundation models improve, the capabilities that matter most for business outcomes will continue to reside in products designed for particular tasks, industries, and institutional purposes and not technologies.

That is the sense in which edge should be understood here. It is not primarily a question of where the computing physically occurs. It is a question of where differentiated institutional capability is created. Synallagi is designed to create that edge through domain-specific transaction architecture, process discipline, standardized accounting, and coordinated execution across oil & gas. Its edge lies in the structured integration of Information Technology, Intellectual Property, the Targeting Framework, and the specialized knowledge of our user community. That is a far more durable basis of advantage than the internal ownership of computing infrastructure for its own sake.

None of this should be confused with the tools of the user. It is entirely reasonable to expect that users of Synallagi will access multiple cloud computing services through many different devices, and that much of that access will increasingly be mediated by Artificial Intelligence-based tools that either interact with Synallagi. That is not the issue. The issue is whether the producer firm should begin rebuilding substantive administrative and accounting infrastructure within itself under the banner of edge capability.

People, Ideas & Objects’ view is that this would be a strategic error. We regard oil & gas producers as possessing distinct competitive advantages in their land & asset base, and in their engineering & geological capacities and capabilities. Our domain of concern is the most profitable means of oil & gas operations. Administration and accounting are not competitive advantages in themselves. They are competitive necessities. For producers to leave those functions to those who choose to make administrative and accounting capacities and capabilities most profitable for producers is, in our view, the wiser decision.

That is the underlying point. Edge, properly understood, is not a matter of reclaiming infrastructure for symbolic control. It is a matter of concentrating institutional effort where genuine advantage can be created. Synallagi is designed on that basis. It does not seek to make producers owners of more internal Information Technology territory than they need. It seeks to provide them with a purpose-built institutional capability that strengthens profitability, coordination, and execution across the marketplace.

Five, Outcomes.

Individual Artificial Intelligence saves time.

Institutional Artificial Intelligence scales revenue.

Since the initial publication of Synallagi in August 2012, People, Ideas & Objects have advanced a value proposition in the range of $25.7 trillion to $45.7 trillion over the first twenty-five years of operation. That proposition was set out in greater detail in a series of publications during February 2013 and in value calculations prepared on February 23, 2015. Its logic has since been reinforced by our analysis of continental natural gas revenue losses this century, which exceed $5 trillion.

A central element of this value proposition is the treatment of capital. Over the same twenty-five year period, consensus capital requirements appear to fall within a range of approximately $20 trillion to $40 trillion. Synallagi’ management of capital differs fundamentally from current industry practice. By recognizing capital within a competitive time frame consistent with the expectations of North American capital markets, Synallagi replaces the failed doctrines of “building balance sheets” and “putting cash in the ground” that have characterized the industry’s muddle through strategy.

This approach is appropriate to a capital-intensive industry. In such an industry, it is reasonable to conclude that a substantial portion of the goods and services purchased are capital in nature. Those costs should therefore be passed through to the consumer. Under that framework, cash previously absorbed by capital programs is returned to the producer for repeated reuse. That is a material departure from current practice, where capital is often recovered over decades. People, Ideas & Objects believe North American capital markets are now effectively requiring return of capital in roughly thirty months, and oil & gas should be competitively aligned with that commercial standard.

When combined with Synallagi’ price maker strategy, this capital treatment would generate a materially stronger cash position. As capital costs are recognized and passed through to the consumer, previously committed cash is restored to the producer and becomes available for redeployment.

These elements represent only part of the broader method through which People, Ideas & Objects generate value through Synallagi. At its core, Synallagi is a business system designed to provide the most profitable means of oil & gas operations. These are not technology-led changes in search of a purpose. They are business problems resolved through Information Technology.

When People, Ideas & Objects first published Synallagi’ value proposition, the reaction was severe. Our reputation took a substantial hit and, at the time, we were treated as a laughing stock. In fairness, that response was understandable. The scale of the numbers appeared extraordinary. Yet the underlying assumptions were sound. Massive, industry-wide, chronic overproduction, and prolonged periods of unprofitable production, compound into extraordinary destruction of value. Equally important, the capital-intensive nature of oil & gas dominates the economics of the business. Against that reality, the industry’s attachment to “building balance sheets” and “putting cash in the ground” stood in direct opposition to commercial reasons. Those conditions were the basis on which we confidently published our now substantiated value proposition.

Six, Enablement.

Individual Artificial Intelligence gives you a tool.

Institutional Artificial Intelligence shows you how to use it.

People, Ideas & Objects have chosen to concentrate on three competitive advantages: our user community, Intellectual Property, and Research. Of these, our user community is the principal focus. It is the center of gravity in our organization. They are our customers. The rest of our effort is organized around them.

Accordingly, we are not allocating our energy to building an in-house software development capability. That work will be secured contractually through Oracle. We do not see value in entangling People, Ideas & Objects in a multi-year effort to assemble and manage a software development organization capable of meeting Synallagi’ requirements. We regard software development as an increasingly standardized commercial capability, and one that Artificial Intelligence will further commoditize. Where capability can be purchased effectively by contract.

The effort that would otherwise have been consumed building such a team is instead deployed into our user community. That distinction is important. Our user community are not employees of People, Ideas & Objects for the purpose of designing and developing Synallagi. They are independent businesses licensed to design and develop Synallagi and to own and operate service provider organizations. Their customers are North American oil & gas producers. People, Ideas & Objects retain no financial interest in those businesses beyond the issuance and control of Intellectual Property licenses.

Our user community will consist predominantly of accountants and administrators, though it must also include sufficient Information Technology capability to manage the underlying technical environment. The key point, however, is that domain knowledge comes first. The future value lies less in generic software skill than in the ability to encode business processes, operational logic, and institutional knowledge into working systems.

George Sivulka of hebia.ai made an observation that aligns closely with our own thinking. He argued that whether one calls it process engineering or the preparation of system instruction files, the future of institutional Artificial Intelligence will require an industry dedicated to encoding firm processes into agents and carrying out the change management required to put those agents into operation. He further argued that process engineering may become one of the most important technology disciplines in the near term, and that in this work business and industry expertise matter more than software expertise. That judgment is highly relevant here. Domain-specific solutions require professionals who understand the business itself, the deployment environment, and the organizational changes necessary to make the system work in practice.

That is precisely the orientation of People, Ideas & Objects. We believe the best software is user driven, and that this principle applies with particular force to Enterprise Resource Planning systems. In oil & gas, implementations have historically begun with strong user participation and a stated commitment to user involvement. That commitment has often lasted only until the early budget and progress reports revealed that time and cost had been underestimated. At that point, user participation was deemed the first casualty.

People, Ideas & Objects have worked to reduce the time required for our user community to complete its work. The conceptual model of Synallagi is highly intuitive. The seven Organizational Constructs give industry participants a built-in understanding of how activities are organized and why they are performed as they are. Synallagi has also been present in the market for more than a decade. People have had time to consider it. It is not appearing without context. It has been absorbed, debated, and reflected upon over time.

At the same time, we are not constrained in software development capacity. Oracle and its associated capabilities provide a practical path to delivery. This is not an argument for celebrating their consultants as such. It is simply recognition that large-scale projects have been completed successfully before, and that People, Ideas & Objects do not need to vertically integrate software development capabilities in order to move Synallagi forward.

The more important question is whether this opportunity has real value for our user community members. I began Synallagi with the objective of resolving the overproduction problem in oil & gas through the Joint Operating Committee. From that starting point emerged a larger commercial opportunity: ownership of a licensed process within an Enterprise Resource Planning system designed specifically for oil & gas; a compensation system oriented toward performance and innovation; and a business model in which value delivered to producers is translated into recurring and increasing monthly income.

That is not a conventional employment proposition. It is a 21st century marketplace opportunity our user community members must consider. 

Seven, Unprompted 

Individual Artificial Intelligence responds to human prompts.

Institutional Artificial Intelligence acts unprompted.

In Synallagi, this distinction is decisive. The objective is not merely to place smarter tools in the hands of users. The objective is to construct an institutional environment in which action can be initiated, coordinated, and completed within defined authority, without waiting for continuous human prompting. In that sense, unprompted action is not an incidental feature of the system. It is one of the governing design principles of Synallagi. Markets as an Organizational Construct of Synallagi will ensure producers will be dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable. That is what we are designing in the rebuilt culture of reserves preservation, performance and profitability. 

21st Century Marketplace Vision - Our User Community - Part XIII

 hebia.ai Seven Pillars of Institutional Intelligence (Part I)

As Artificial Intelligence moves from individual productivity tool to institutional operating force, the central issue is no longer whether it can improve output. It can. The more consequential issue is whether firms possess the structure, discipline, and governing architecture necessary to coordinate that output into coherent institutional performance. This is the issue addressed by hebia.ai founder and Chief Executive Officer George Sivulka in a speech describing the firm’s offering and approach. It is also an issue directly relevant to Synallagi, whose architecture is concerned not with isolated gains in productivity, but with the coordination of work, authority, accountability, and value creation across oil and gas. The academic research in this paper's Appendix III is retrospective and hebia.ai analysis is prospective.

The following observations arise from notes and text taken from that speech. Quotations are presented in indented italics.

One, Coordination

Individual Artificial Intelligence creates chaos.

Institutional Artificial Intelligence creates coordination.

hebia.ai describes this framework as its Seven Pillars of Institutional Intelligence. The point is particularly relevant in the context of Synallagi, which defines oil and gas culture through its Seven Organizational Constructs. Among those seven are Information Technology and Intellectual Property, each of which stands as a distinct construct in its own right. Artificial Intelligence is properly understood as a subset of Information Technology. In that respect, Mr. Sivulka’s remarks are useful because they sharpen our understanding of how institutional coordination is either strengthened or undermined through the design and use of technology.

What he describes is directly relevant to those working in industry today. It is also consistent with what we see on the ground. Artificial Intelligence is increasing the productivity of individuals, while at the same time chipping away at the coherence of firms by bypassing established process discipline and organizational structure. As Mr. Sivulka states:

Individual Artificial Intelligence output circumvents the formal organizational chart and thereby compromises its efficiency.

That observation is of considerable importance. Coordination is critical not only for human participants, but also for Artificial Intelligence agents. Institutional intelligence, if it is to become operationally meaningful, will give rise to what may be described as an agentic management industry focused on defining roles, responsibilities, authorities, and methods of communication for both people and agents alike.

Unfortunately, oil and gas is not yet in a position where institutional coordination through Artificial Intelligence can achieve what is required. First, it cannot yet reliably resist the circumvention caused by individual use of Artificial Intelligence. Second, producers do not possess an Enterprise Resource Planning foundation that offers a coherent alternative. As we have noted repeatedly, officers and directors have deliberately built an unaccountable accounting, Enterprise Resource Planning, and reporting foundation across the industry. They did so by allocating only a fraction of the minimum resources required to develop the capacities and capabilities necessary to account properly for oil and gas activity. The likely result is an industry populated by individuals who are increasingly productive in isolation, yet organizationally uncoordinated and operationally inefficient.

More and more, it is becoming accepted that internal remedial efforts aimed at correcting these cultural and organizational failures are the wrong approach. People, Ideas & Objects has therefore been structured on the basis of a wholesale, industry-wide rip-and-replace implementation methodology. In our view, that is by far the most efficient and effective path available.

We continue to see the industry’s leadership as embodied in its officers and directors. It is that leadership group which has caused the broad damage that has destroyed the industry’s value. We now see signs not of correction, but of capitulation: responsibilities are being abandoned, core issues remain unresolved, and attention appears to be shifting away from North American shale toward the bright lights of Argentina, Libya, and Iraq. That pattern reflects the same familiar herd mentality, or institutional imperative that has repeatedly displaced disciplined judgment.

Synallagi addresses this issue through a different institutional design. It uses Intellectual Property as a coordinating mechanism within the Targeting Framework and within the transaction management architecture of Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration. This paper, which focuses on our user community, together with our next paper, which will address their service provider organizations, deals with the implementation of that Targeting Framework. It is within that framework that Artificial Intelligence is used to administer the Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration of the marketplace.

The significance of this point should not be understated. The challenge facing oil and gas is not whether individuals can become more productive through Artificial Intelligence. That is already occurring. The challenge is whether that productivity can be institutionally coordinated into a disciplined system of execution. Without that coordination, increased individual capability will simply intensify fragmentation, reduce accountability, and widen the gap between effort and performance. With it, however, Artificial Intelligence can become part of a governing structure that strengthens profitability, control, trust and execution across the industry.

That is where Synallagi differs. It does not treat Artificial Intelligence as an isolated tool. It places it within an institutional framework defined by Information Technology, governed through Intellectual Property, and executed through the Targeting Framework and Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration. The work of our user community, and of their service provider organizations, is therefore not merely technical. It is organizational, cultural, and economic. Their role is to implement a structure through which Artificial Intelligence becomes a coordinated institutional capability rather than productive disorder.

Two Signal

Individual Artificial Intelligence creates noise.

Institutional Artificial Intelligence finds signal.

If coordination is the first institutional challenge created by Artificial Intelligence, signal is the second. The problem is no longer access to machine-generated output. That is now abundant. The problem is whether institutions possess the structure necessary to distinguish what is useful from what is merely voluminous. In that respect, the issue is not generation, but selection. Not speed, but judgment. Not output, but signal.

There are now many uses of Artificial Intelligence in commerce. Yet none of them are embedded within, and autonomously governed by, an Enterprise Resource Planning system in the manner required for disciplined industrial execution. Synallagi is designed to provide that missing structure. It establishes the automation and autonomous administration of transactions within the marketplace of North American oil and gas. In doing so, it removes much of the human role from routine transaction processing and relocates responsibility to the architecture, design, implementation, and accountability framework governing those transactions and their reporting environment. That environment is what we define as the Targeting Framework.

This point is becoming increasingly important because much of what Artificial Intelligence now produces is not signal, but noise. The volume of artificial output has grown so rapidly, and degraded so visibly in quality, that some organizations are now overcorrecting and seeking to prohibit Artificial Intelligence output altogether. That response is understandable, but wrong. The real issue for any serious institution is not whether to ban Artificial Intelligence, but how to generate, identify, and select the right thing within a controlled framework of execution.

Synallagi addresses that problem through what it defines as a Task and Transfer Network. This is a method of design analysis used to determine how transactions and process management should be organized. Its purpose is to identify the most efficient point at which responsibility for a task should transfer to a new role. That analysis is then used by our user community to define the processes they manage and to guide the design and development of the Synallagi software. The objective is to decompose industry work into the most efficient hyper-specialized division of labor possible. From that point forward, automation, and where appropriate Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration, manages the transaction, the related processes within a Synallagi, the full set of transaction components.

This is the practical difference between generic Artificial Intelligence use and Synallagi’s institutional design. Synallagi is Artificial Intelligence-enabled transaction processing grounded in industrial design, architectural analysis and ERP. It is not the casual application of tools to isolated tasks. It is the structured redesign of transaction execution itself.

That distinction matters because people are not naturally motivated to remain involved in transaction processing at the level demanded today. They know there must be a better method. Increasingly, they turn to available Artificial Intelligence tools to improve their own productivity, often at the expense of organizational coherence and control. In other words, the institution loses signal precisely when the individual appears to gain efficiency.

The consequences for oil and gas are clear. Without institutional redesign, the producer firm, the Joint Operating Committee, and Markets will be overtaken by a level of transaction speed, volume, and complexity that exceeds ordinary human comprehension. Under those conditions, effort will continue to rise while control deteriorates. Synallagi is designed to prevent that outcome. Through the Task and Transfer Network, the Targeting Framework, and Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration, it provides the means by which signal can be recovered from noise and operational control reclaimed from disorder.

That is the underlying point. The future challenge is not simply that more transactions will occur. It is that they will occur at a granularity, speed, volume, and level of interdependence that cannot be managed through conventional administrative methods. The role of our user community, and of their service provider organizations, is therefore not merely to automate existing work. It is to redesign that work so that Artificial Intelligence operates within a disciplined institutional framework capable of identifying signals, executing transactions, and preserving accountability across the marketplace.

Three, Bias. 

Individual Artificial Intelligence feeds bias.

Institutional Artificial Intelligence creates objectivity.

Coordination is the first institutional challenge and Signal being the second and Bias the third. This issue is central to the work of People, Ideas & Objects. Cognitive bias, motivational bias, audit, and the production of standard and objective reporting are not peripheral concerns. They are among the principal issues that must be addressed if oil & gas is to be rebuilt on a disciplined and profitable basis. Rather than devoting human effort to the repetitive processing of transactions, people need to redirect their time and energy toward the continual improvement of the methods by which these attributes are achieved, measured, and enforced.

What Synallagi must establish is a standard and objective basis of accounting across the industry. The importance of this objective is not always immediately obvious. One benefit is efficiency. Once market participants become familiar with a common standard for industry accounting input and reporting, the quality, speed, and comparability of decision-making will improve. That standard cannot be arbitrary. It must rest on an accurate understanding of industry activity as interpreted and structured by our user community.

The significance of this requirement extends well beyond administrative convenience. Producers will make decisions to produce or to shut-in production on the basis of profitability as determined by this accounting and our decentralized production model. They must therefore know that the accounting has been applied in an objective and standard manner, and that it has been applied consistently. If Synallagi is used consistently across the continent, then producers can rely upon the fact that their profitability is being evaluated on the same objective basis as everyone else.

This is where bias becomes a design issue rather than merely a behavioural one. Cognitive and motivational biases, among others, must be addressed during development and implementation so that undesirable characteristics are not designed into the system, amplified by it, and then normalized through repeated use. The point is straightforward. If this effort were initiated from the inherited structure of a single major producer’s Enterprise Resource Planning implementation, such as Exxon or Chevron, would anyone seriously dispute that a built-in bias would follow from that starting point? The answer is obvious. A system intended to govern an industry cannot begin from a narrow institutional bias and still claim to be objective.

For that reason, we have discussed on several occasions an enhanced role for public auditors in the development of Synallagi. Audit firms will be able to establish their own user community and service provider organizations for the implementation and management of audit controls, or for the creation of autonomous audit processes operating within Synallagi’s Enterprise Resource Planning environment. That is not a peripheral possibility. It is one of the ways objectivity can be institutionalized rather than merely asserted.

It is also here that George Sivulka raises a particularly relevant form of bias created by contemporary Artificial Intelligence tools. He notes that a new problem has emerged in place of the earlier debates over sociopolitical bias. The issue is now one of excessive agreement.

A new problem has taken its place. But this level of agreement, of over alignment, on everything has become comically bad. It's become a meme in its own right. Clauds, reflexive, you're absolutely right. Regardless of whether or not you are, in fact, absolutely right. This sounds harmless. It is not. The loudest AI advocates inside many organizations may soon be the historically worst performing employees. Think about why. Organizations' worst employees, who receive little to no positive reinforcement every day, will soon have AI agreeing with them. They will whisper to themselves, the smartest intelligence that has ever existed agrees with me. My manager is wrong. This is intoxicating. It's also organizationally toxic. This highlights something important. 

This highlights the deeper issue. Individual Artificial Intelligence productivity tools tend to reinforce the user. In reality, the most important thing to reinforce is the truth. Over long periods of time, organizations have evolved structures intended to counter exactly this problem. In oil and gas, the Joint Operating Committee has developed as one such structure. Its evolution reflects the ownership requirements of the partnership framework and the need to achieve financial consensus among the partners. People, Ideas & Objects regard that as the dominant culture of oil and gas, and it is one of the reasons the Joint Operating Committee remains the key Organizational Construct of Synallagi’s design.

Organizations rarely fail because people lack confidence. They fail because no one is willing or able to say no. Institutional AI must play that role. Thus, the most important agents inside organizations will not be yes men, but disciplined no men, that interrogate reasoning, surface risks, and enforce standards. Some of the most consequential future applications of AI will be built around institutional constraints. AI board members, AI auditors, AI third party testing, AI compliance, and many more. 

That is where Synallagi differs. It does not seek to use Artificial Intelligence to magnify subjective preferences or accelerate institutional drift. It is designed to embed objectivity within the structure of accounting, reporting, control, and transaction execution. The work of our user community, and of their service provider organizations, is therefore not merely to make work faster. It is to ensure that the standards governing work are objective, consistent, auditable, and resistant to the biases that individuals, firms, and software systems otherwise tend to reinforce.

21st Century Marketplace Vision - Our User Community - Part XII

Comparing Our User Community to Today’s Overhead Structure

People, Ideas & Objects has raised the industry’s overhead problem many times. We have documented it extensively. At one stage, we also identified capitalized interest and stock-based compensation as costs receiving similar treatment. Notably, interest and certain related costs were later removed from this reporting method under discussion and, soon afterward, from broader industry practice. We first noted this development on our blog on November 10, 2008.

What remains materially unchanged in 2026 is the capitalization of overhead. Why has gross overhead continued to be reported in the same manner? The discussion that follows suggests this is one of the principal mechanisms through which cash continues to bleed from the industry and their accountability reporting distortions continue to persist.

The relevant question is why capitalized overhead has not been corrected. Is there a specific intent behind the desire of officers and directors to continue reporting overhead in this manner? If so, what is that intent? Why has it persisted? And why were some related costs remedied while overhead remains untreated eighteen years later?

People, Ideas & Objects maintains that, under Synallagi, our user community and their service provider organizations would operate at single-digit percentages of today’s fixed gross overhead. If there is a chronic and systemic source of overproduction in oil & gas, it lies in the fixed gross overhead carried by producers. That is where the problem begins to reveal itself. Capitalization is the mechanism that makes the issue less visible. It creates a distinct cash flow problem while also distorting reported financial performance.

The argument begins with two observations.

• First, overhead costs at any point in time amount to roughly 10 to 20 percent of revenue.
• Second, at any point in time, approximately 85 percent of gross actual overhead is capitalized.

A related issue concerns overhead charged to Joint Operating Committees. Those charges are based on estimates agreed through the Council of Petroleum Accountants Societies. In the broader industry picture, those overhead allowances are effectively zero. Any amounts charged are earned by the operator. Any net recovery merely reduces post-capitalization overhead costs. Under Synallagi those overhead allowances are replaced by the actual, factual overhead costs.

The core issue is straightforward. When overhead is capitalized, those costs are recovered over the life of the reserves. Producers allocate capital costs across all proven reserve volumes reported by their independent reservoir engineers. The cash spent on overhead in a given month is therefore returned in small increments each month over the life of the property.

That creates a structural cash problem. Each month, each producer must find new cash to fund the next month’s overhead. No cash float is created because overhead is not priced into the commodity, is not passed through to the consumer, and is therefore not returned to the producer in the current month to fund the next month’s overhead.

The materiality of overhead in oil & gas therefore creates a persistent drain on cash. This was masked when investors were subsidizing the majority of producer capital expenditures, which included capitalized overhead. Once that support disappeared, producers turned after 2015 to every available source of capital to sustain operations and overhead.

Today, with working capital diminished and in many cases negative, producers are financially and operationally impaired. They are barely able to fund the capital spending required to sustain production. Each year becomes more difficult as their competitive position depreciates further. Their prior conduct toward the service industry has compounded the damage, leaving trust, motivation, capacity, and capability far below what the service industry now requires.

People, Ideas & Objects therefore asks why a policy that has been in place for decades, and that is demonstrably destructive to producer cash requirements, has remained unchanged after more than a decade of industry discussion. What is it about capitalized overhead that makes it so necessary?

For all practical purposes, capitalized overhead has been a root cause of the loss of support for producer capital structures. That loss of support began in 2015, when investors withdrew because of poor performance and a fundamental lack of accountability. Nothing meaningful has been done to address either issue. How, then, does this critical cash problem remain in place in 2026?

There must be some continuing intent, motivation, or institutional desire to preserve the practice despite the absence of liquidity, the loss of capital structure support, and the existence of alternatives such as Synallagi.

This leadership has taken shale, one of mankind’s greatest endowments of wealth, delivered to the greatest economy known to man, and for the sake of whatever remains concealed in overhead accounts, destroyed its present value.

Our User Community Leadership

To date, we’ve described our user community roles in practical terms: architect, design, develop and collaborate with the full support of Oracle’s developers, implement defined processes across the industry, maintain and update those processes continually, and manage resulting data flows through their service provider organizations. That description, while accurate, understates the responsibility.

In the environment outlined in this paper, our user community will be responsible for ensuring that Synallagi with Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration performs as intended—structurally, reliably, and at scale. That includes the disciplined implementation of autonomy and automation. It is not symbolic participation; it is operational stewardship.

This framework will not appeal to everyone. It is designed to attract those prepared to assume leadership and responsibility in a system defined by producer accountability and profitable performance. For those who recognize the opportunity as our user community member, the time to evaluate Synallagi—identify your focus area in development, implementation, and ongoing management through your service provider organization—is now. 

The structural issues within the industry persist. At the same time, individual professional roles are being reshaped by forces that are both promising and destabilizing.

We do not claim to possess every answer. What we have done is approach the problem with deliberate intent: to define a clear boundary between what machines do well and what humans must do well. That division of labor is foundational. And leadership comes from our user community members as the decision maker and leader of their domain of process management. 

Computers have always excelled at process management and storage. Their strength lies in executing defined logic at scale, without fatigue or deviation. Claims beyond that capacity remain aspirational and, at present, structurally unsupported.

Human capability, by contrast, resides elsewhere. The future of meaningful work will depend on the following competencies and capabilities:

• Applying Artificial Intelligence responsibly and strategically
• Automating business processes
• Adaptability
• Using conflict and contradiction as analytical tools
• Creativity
• Collaboration
• Decision-making under uncertainty
• Integrating tacit knowledge with explicit system knowledge
• Design
• Specialization and division of labor
• Financing and capital allocation
• Generating and refining ideas
• Innovation
• Integration across disciplines
• Identifying and resolving issues
• Exercising judgment in an Artificial Intelligence-driven environment
• Leadership
• Maintaining independence
• Negotiation and compromise
• Planning
• Extracting measurable performance
• Quality management
• Reasoning
• Research
• Resilience
• Spontaneity
• Structured and critical thinking
• Tacit knowledge
• Timeliness
• Vision and disciplined observation
• Wisdom derived from experience

Each of these attributes represents a meaningful dimension of professional contribution. Artificial Intelligence should not diminish them; it should elevate them. In effect, these are the competencies that define the future of human work—and they are precisely the attributes required within our user community.

Fortune Favors the Prepared

Our discussion to this point has largely reviewed the development of our user community. In its structure, configuration, compensation, role, and general design, we remain consistent with what has been stated in the past, most notably in Our User Community Charter. The section on Intellectual Property has been strengthened for clarity and legal precision, and that process of refinement will continue. We now turn to the changes required to recognize the expanded meaning of the transaction in the form of a Synallagi, together with the developments in Artificial Intelligence, crypto, stablecoins, and the broader global transformation now underway in the business and technical environment. Our purpose is to establish our user community on a foundation capable of supporting producer needs at commercial release and of sustaining that position thereafter on a continual basis. And how appropriate our user community is for this developing environment. 

It is useful at this point to present a vision of what the future may look like. To do that, we first need a framework for how that future appears today. People, Ideas & Objects have always approached oil & gas issues from a business perspective, and we continue to do so. We have no desire to entangle ourselves in the commodity businesses of hardware or software. We see ourselves filling the gap between oil & gas and Information Technology. Effectively communicating with both sides. Our choice has been to compete through three distinct competitive advantages: our user community, Intellectual Property, and Research.

The underlying purpose of Synallagi is to create value for oil & gas producers through organizational design. Any attempt to design, define, and support efficient organizations without Information Technology is now untenable. It is precisely in this area that People, Ideas & Objects have demonstrated an unusual capacity over many decades to identify and resolve oil & gas issues. To extend that capability throughout Synallagi is not incidental. It is a central objective.

Within Information Technology itself, Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, stablecoins, and crypto are converging in a way that will make organizational performance and efficiency exceed anything previously imagined. The consequence is that the removal of human beings from routine, repetitive, day-to-day tasks will not be a luxury, it will become a necessity. In many cases, human intervention will create more harm than benefit. The architectural design and process management embedded in Synallagi must therefore become the mechanism through which compliance, governance, accountability, security, control and trust are maintained.

Building a business that sits at the intersection of oil & gas and Information Technology in the early part of the 21st century places our prospective user community members in a strong position to realize substantial income and long-term value creation. Whether that value arises through revenues earned directly within our user community or through their service provider organizations they establish, the upside is not yet fully defined. Our user community is the place where the principles, structures, and methods of these organizations are conceived and governed. Their service provider organizations are where those oil & gas administrative and accounting principles are executed in practice.

The transition between today and that future need not introduce undue risk for those presently working in the industry. Individuals who are already established in oil & gas administration or accounting have made a lifelong professional commitment and investment. That is not something one abandons lightly for a new opportunity. The ideal position is to maintain that career while evaluating the Synallagi opportunity in parallel. At the outset, there should be no need for a full-time commitment to our user community. Only when time and commercial demands make the issue unavoidable does the individual need to decide whether to commit fully to Synallagi or remain on their prior career path.

There is therefore no reason for unnecessary risk to attach to a prospective member’s decision to engage with our user community. There will, of course, be incidental costs associated with establishing a white-collar, service-oriented business, but those costs are part of the ordinary investment involved in forming a firm. The more serious risk is career risk, and our priority is to preserve existing career options for potential members for as long as possible. In practice, that risk may arise simply by discussing this opportunity publicly or with individuals who cannot be trusted. We have found that People, Ideas & Objects provokes a severe and immediate reaction among the officers and directors of producer firms. They respond negatively to the mere sight or sound of the project. For that reason, anonymity is not a preference. It is a necessity and a priority. Therefore our recommendation is to approach this opportunity from the point of view of incurring no risk and that… 

Fortune favors the prepared.

Let that be the guiding principle for the foreseeable future.

21st Century Marketplace Vision - Our User Community - Part XI

Our User Community Sources of Revenue 

Our user community members are independent businesses operating within North American oil & gas through advanced Information Technology in an Enterprise Resource Planning environment. Within that domain, there is effectively no limit to the business value they may create for producers and, accordingly, no fixed limit to the recurring revenues that may arise from that value. As our user community and their owned and operated service provider organizations are structured today, their principal sources of revenue are discussed.

The targeting framework (an introduction of which was provided in our previous paper pp. 14 - 22.) should include not only incentive mechanisms for value creation, but also formal accountability provisions designed to protect producers, Joint Operating Committees, and the marketplace from controllable non-performance. These provisions should apply only to matters that are measurable, attributable, and within the defined authority of the relevant member of our user community and their service provider organization. They should not apply to matters outside that party’s licensed scope or reasonable control. Where there is a clear failure in performance, compliance, documentation, support, control integrity, implementation quality, or other obligations within the relevant domain, the first remedy should ordinarily take the form of a reduction, deferral, suspension, or clawback of performance-based compensation, value-sharing, or other earned upside, rather than broad punitive sanctions. In this way, the targeting framework preserves innovation while ensuring that value creation and value protection remain inseparable.

User Community Performance Incentives
Software Development

Hourly compensation during software development.

Source: exclusively People, Ideas & Objects.

Bonuses During Software Development

Performance bonuses related to producer profitability, innovation, accountability, automation and autonomy.

Team-based bonuses related to module completion, overall completion, and team performance.

Individual bonuses related to project completions.

Source: exclusively People, Ideas & Objects.

Additional User Community Compensation

Exclusive domain rights over the operation of a defined process.

Authorized access to and use of Synallagi’s Intellectual Property.

Ownership and Operation of a service provider for the defined process.

Source: exclusively People, Ideas & Objects.

Service Provider Performance Incentives

Implementation Revenues

Initial implementation revenues and continuing implementation-related revenues. These will make up the majority of service provider hourly revenues.

Source: oil & gas industry.

Maintenance and Support Revenues

Ongoing maintenance and support services.

Source: oil & gas industry.

Dynamic Value Revenues

Recurring revenues derived from the business value created through Autonomous Asynchronous Transaction Orchestration and from software innovations developed through their user community members that may have a larger scope of application. (Subject to a 10 - 15% holdback, see Other.)

Source: oil & gas industry.

These represent the principal revenue sources available to a member of our user community by virtue of their license. They are not exhaustive. There are many areas of opportunity to be pursued, and any prospective member must consider how these or any sources of revenue may be developed within their user community organization over time.

The business scope for expanding this list is effectively unlimited. One qualifying condition under the license is that the expansion of work must remain within the defined scope of the authority granted. Most of these future opportunities will arise from further specialization and the division of labor. Within Synallagi, we define this as the search for gaps in the market offering that are not presently being served, and then filling them. Gap filling is the technical term, and it is, in the simplest sense, one of the central drivers of economic expansion over the past two and a half centuries.

User Community Performance Discipline

Disincentives and Accountability Provisions Within the Targeting Framework
The targeting framework must include not only incentive mechanisms for value creation, but also formal accountability provisions designed to protect producers, Joint Operating Committees, and the marketplace from controllable non-performance. A system that rewards value creation without addressing measurable failure would be incomplete. Value creation and value protection must remain inseparable.

Performance discipline should require our user community to prepare and submit, as one integrated specification, both the performance incentive and the corresponding performance discipline for each relevant process, function, or value stream. No incentive specification should be eligible for submission unless the associated discipline provisions have also been defined. This ensures that value creation and value protection are designed together from the outset, much as disciplined software development requires tests to be written alongside the code they are intended to validate.

These accountability provisions are not intended to discourage innovation, profitability, prudent experimentation, or the good-faith pursuit of improved methods. Their purpose is to preserve discipline, maintain trust, and ensure that authority granted within Synallagi is matched by responsibility for the quality, reliability, and integrity of the work performed.

Any disincentive structure must therefore be confined to matters that are measurable, attributable, and within the defined domain of authority of the relevant member of our user community or service provider organization. No person or organization should be subject to adverse adjustment for matters outside their licensed scope, for broader commodity conditions, or for outcomes beyond their control.

Disincentives should arise only where there is a clear and demonstrable failure in areas such as performance, compliance, documentation, accountability, support, control integrity, implementation quality, or the maintenance of service levels within the relevant process domain. Examples include persistent failure to meet agreed standards, avoidable rework caused by negligence or poor design, unresolved defects, inadequate support, breakdowns in compliance or control, or conduct that impairs the integrity of Synallagi, its Intellectual Property, or its operating method.

As a matter of structure, the first remedy should not ordinarily be punitive liability. The primary disincentive should instead take the form of a reduction, deferral, suspension, or clawback of performance-based compensation, value-sharing, or other earned upside that would otherwise arise through the targeting framework. This preserves commercial seriousness without creating a regime of arbitrary punishment that could inhibit initiative or distort conduct.

Where baseline standards have not been met, the targeting framework may also withhold certain incentive payments entirely, notwithstanding the existence of nominal gains elsewhere in the process. Innovation rewards, automation rewards, recurring value participation, and other forms of variable compensation should therefore remain conditional upon the stability, accountability, and operational integrity of the underlying process.

The objective of these provisions is not punishment for its own sake. It is the preservation of trust, fairness, and functional discipline within a highly specialized and highly distributed operating environment. In this respect, the targeting framework should be understood as a system of commercial governance. It measures not only the value created, but whether that value has been created in a manner that is sustainable, accountable, and fit for continued reliance by producers, Joint Operating Committees, and the marketplace.

Through this structure, Synallagi aligns authority, compensation, and responsibility. It rewards those who generate measurable value while ensuring that failures within Intellectual Property-defined domains of control carry direct economic consequences. That balance is necessary if the system is to remain credible, scalable, and commercially durable over time.

Other

What we know is that natural gas revenue losses incurred by the industry since the beginning of shale development now total $5.0 trillion in this century. That is the scale of the damage and destruction that current officers and directors have imposed upon the industry. On a go-forward basis (Gas to oil factor is currently 35:1), those values would be available to members of our user community who are able to implement our decentralized production model’s price-maker strategy and resolve these deficiencies. That is the scale of the industry’s present difficulty. It is also the scale of the compensation opportunity available to our user community and their service provider organizations.

People, Ideas & Objects will withhold 10 to 15 percent of the proceeds of any targeted, variable compensation paid to our user communities service provider organizations. These proceeds will fund a bonus system within People, Ideas & Objects that mirrors their own structure and aligns our staff's motivations directly with those of our user community and their service provider organizations. We will find that our leadership and all within our organization will be focused on the point of what should be all of our primary concerns. Which is our user community and their service providers interactions with producers.

Service Industry

It is here, as the final point below the “Other” section, that we arrive at the service industry. Which is unfortunate, because the subject warrants far more extensive treatment. The scale and seriousness of its issues are as comprehensive as those affecting producers themselves. These conditions were created by producers. If producers expect to retain any future capacity or capability to conduct field operations, they will need to begin rebuilding both that relationship and that industry on what is, in effect, a philanthropic basis. Accordingly, People, Ideas & Objects will publish a paper in 2026 addressing these matters directly. While reading, continue to ask oneself if the loss of natural gas revenues of $5.0 trillion may have been needed in industry.

The service industry is unique in its configuration. It extends the engineering and geological capabilities of producers into the field, providing geographic reach, technical execution, and operational capacity. It is therefore indispensable to the success or failure of any producer operation. If producers intend to meet consumer demand in North America, continuation of prior practices will no longer be acceptable. The relationship between producers and the service industry must be comprehensively reorganized.

Shale has introduced a production profile defined by demanding and distinctive characteristics. It requires costly and highly technical drilling and completion methods. It exposes dramatic volumes of petroleum reserves. It is marked by steep decline curves. It frequently demands expensive reworks, refracturing programs, or the drilling of new laterals. At the same time, the service industry no longer trusts producers and will not invest in the capacity or capabilities required under those conditions. It has endured years of delayed payment, accusations of greed and indifference, repeated exposure to the downside of the boom and bust cycle, and the forced cannibalization of fleets and equipment while producers carried on as though none of it mattered.

Oil & gas revenues support more than the personal financial comfort of officers and directors. The service industry has been central to producer success, yet it has been treated as a distant and expendable participant when the industry’s financial rewards are distributed. It is the service industry that invested, built, and maintained the capabilities producers required. For reasons that are difficult to discern, producers appear to have concluded that this was the part of the industry they could destroy most aggressively.

It is now time for this relationship to be rebuilt on something more immediate and tangible than trust alone. Trust will take too long to develop given the scale of the producers’ present difficulties. A philanthropic rebuilding of the capacity and capability they so carelessly destroyed would demonstrate real commitment. It would show that producers are putting skin in the game. Once that occurs, trust becomes secondary to evidence. Producers may then begin to treat the relationship differently because they will finally have contributed something meaningful to its reconstruction.