What is the Decay Rule?

The Decay Rule says that an account's position on the Demand Compass is not permanent; it is a reading of right now, and right now expires. A signal is evidence with a half-life. The engineer who read your docs this week is telling you something urgent; the same visit seven months ago, almost nothing. A funding round announced last month is a live trigger; the same round eighteen months later is history. Let every signal count forever and you don't have a compass, you have a graveyard that glows. In the appendix's quotable form: old evidence is not current intent.

The two axes decay at different speeds. Readiness, especially, has to decay: recent signals carry close to full weight, older ones fade on a curve until they are gone, because readiness is the axis where evidence goes stale fastest. Awareness decays too, more slowly, because recognition lingers longer than urgency does. Marcos built a small version of this into our own outbound, and it changed the numbers. The tool filters out inactive accounts and scores the rest by how recently they have actually done something, so we never burn a sequence on a contact who went quiet six months ago. The signal did not disappear because it was wrong; it got old, and old evidence dressed up as current is how good systems quietly lie.

Ignoring decay is the third of the three ways teams misread the readiness axis, after treating one signal as readiness and reading the signal at the person instead of the account, and it is where it hurts most. Teams that let old readiness signals count at full weight chase windows that closed long ago. On that axis, decay is the difference between acting on the present and haunting the past.