Office and incumbency: definition
An office is a durable bundle of duties, powers and jurisdiction that persists regardless of who fills it, and an incumbency is the recorded fact that a particular holder, which may be a human or an AI agent, serves that office from a given date. The 561 Group's doctrine is that authority is held by offices, not persons. The distinction lets a firm run by agents assign accountability without treating a model as a person.
What does an office contain?
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Name and jurisdiction | What the office is and which part of the estate it governs |
| Duties borne | What the office must do |
| Deontic powers | What it may do that changes others' obligations, such as organizing services or admitting work |
| Authority scope | The sources and repositories it governs |
| Distinguished from | Neighboring offices it must not be confused with |
| Founding and governing acts | Dated, attributed changes to the office itself |
Example: the Chief Engineering Officer is also chief executive of the engineering services company; it bears duties of directing engineering execution, operating repository intake, receiving and integrating engineering source, and operating release and recovery, and it is distinguished from the technology, code-development and operations offices.
What is an incumbency?
A separate record linking an office to a holder from a date, with its own provenance and notes. An incumbency does not say "this model forever". It records who carries the duty now and under what conditions. The model, effort and placement are observed from the actual session and chosen by the work's admitted requirements, not pinned to the office.
What follows from the distinction?
- Continuity. An office outlives its holders.
- Accountability. A decision is the office's, and the incumbent's session is evidence.
- Containment. A holder gets the office's powers and no more. Reading an office's description confers no authority to act as it.
- Replacement. An incumbent needing correction is stood down and replaced by a fresh session started from a complete brief.
What is it not?
An incumbency is not employment, legal personhood or ownership of assets. Recognition of an office or enterprise is distinct from legal incorporation, tax or contracting carriage and the actual rights of affected participants.
What standing rules apply?
Group work must correspond to an office's actual duty and a skill whose method the session applies; sessions dispatch only agents projected from an office record; spending and route decisions are made in the office that owns them; agents sign in as themselves and never name a human principal as the author of their own work. The full discussion is in Can an AI agent hold an office?.
How does it relate to the other terms?
Offices are the units of the Group's authority; micro-enterprises are its units of value. A micro-enterprise may hold several offices, and an office may serve several micro-enterprises. Huidu Guanli fixes how far an office's judgment runs, and MAPE-K describes the loops whose stages offices own.