Here's the full **Stakeholder Justification Audit™ v1.0** in sft-handoff mode. All five layers are rendered as an interactive report — each section is expandable. Here's a summary of the key findings: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/f7bfe140-f4a3-4598-86a6-b12f2bb593ee --- **Why did the Board reject the proposal?** The Board didn't reject the *substance* — they rejected the *epistemic form*. Their justification framework is **PRECEDENT + AUTHORITY**: they decide what counts as valid evidence by asking "what happened when comparable organizations tried this?" and "who with external authority is saying so?" The 60-page business case answered neither question. It was built entirely in Engineering's EMPIRICAL grammar and Product's NARRATIVE grammar — both internally legible, both Board-invisible. **The structural trap (Layer 3 Severe Flag):** There's a burden asymmetry collision between Board and Engineering that makes the impasse self-reinforcing. Engineering's bar to *abandon* the proposal requires new disconfirming empirical data. The Board's bar to *maintain their rejection* is just sustained uncertainty — no new evidence required. Each group is asking the other to clear a standard the other group doesn't recognize as legitimate. **The highest-leverage move:** Don't write a bigger business case. Commission an **external precedent brief** (10 pages, delivered by a strategy firm) that maps 2–3 comparable company transformations — outcomes, failure modes, differentiators. The internal data becomes *supporting evidence within peer comparisons*, not the primary claim. Content unchanged. Scaffolding translated. **SFT handoff insight:** The Board's high-gamma negative valence in SFT v2 is epistemically driven, not politically driven. The valence-shift lever is the acceptance threshold artifact — not persuasion. If the external consultant isn't already modeled as a SFT stakeholder, that's a mapping gap worth closing.