Direction of Fit

Direction of Fit describes which side of a funding relationship changes to match the other:

1. the place reshapes its work to fit what a funder will pay for, or
2. the funder’s money fits to work the place has already stated.

Overview

The founding suite assumes the second direction, and it only works when the cohort holds that grounding from the first prompt of the first template. This page sets out the grounding, the two ways a run of the suite loses it, and the check each template applies before a funding relationship is recorded.

The phrase comes from the “philosophy of action.” Anscombe’s example in Intention (1957) is a shopper with a list and a detective following him and writing down what he buys. The two lists may end up identical. When they differ, the detective’s record is at fault, and he corrects it to match what was bought; the shopper’s list stands, and the fault lies in what was recorded about what he bought. The list and the record have opposite directions of fit.

Most development finance runs one way. A grant program or an instrument defines what it will pay for, and the place rewrites its plans to qualify. The Place Mandate Template describes the result: each program brings its own reporting and its own idea of the problem, and a place that depends on many programs ends up with many partial plans and no plan of its own. The wiki calls that posture needy. The suite reverses the direction. The place states the work, outside parties are tested against the place’s terms, and the terms change only through the place’s own process. The Place Mandate Template calls that posture needed.

The reversal is written into the fourth template, in the Terms of Engagement, the plan for proceeding without and the instrument test. Funding relationships appear earlier than that. The first template asks the cohort to choose a patronage architecture and to list existing funding relationships, and the third names counterparties. A cohort that reaches the fourth template having already fitted itself to a funder has little left to reverse. The grounding has to be in place before the suite starts.

Two ways a run loses the grounding

The suite is run as a needy project

The cohort runs the templates to describe a project that needs money, and the outputs read as a case for support. Signs:

• The patronage section of the first template is a list of funders to approach.
• The purpose statement uses the language of a call for proposals.
• The plan for proceeding without funding says the work stops.
• The identity documents are circulated as a fundraising pack, which the templates page says the suite is not.

The suite is run as a funder’s prerequisite

A funder, investor or program asks for BioHub documents as a condition of funding, and the cohort runs the suite to qualify. The vocabulary of the suite survives, and the direction of fit returns to the funder. Signs:

• The pace of the run is set by a funding round.
• The funder’s outcomes appear in the documents as the place’s own strands of work.
• The Terms of Engagement are drafted to accommodate an instrument already chosen.
• Alignment work with an instrument begins before the instrument test has been run.

The second is harder to see than the first, because every document can be written in the needed register while the decisions behind it were made to fit. INCITE!‘s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (2007) documents the mechanism from the funded side: foundations acting as “‘cooling-out’ agencies, delaying and preventing more radical, structural change.”

The grounding

Four conditions hold before a cohort records any funding relationship.

1. The work belongs to the place. What needs doing comes from the people of the place. In the fourth template, which is the Place Knowledge Brief, and it’s gathered without an AI artificially producing evidence. Before the Brief exists, the cohort’s own statement of its work is marked provisional, and no funding relationship is presented as settling what the place needs.
2. The work continues, whether or not there is funding. Declining a funder only has force if the work goes on without that funder. The plan for proceeding without is a real plan: what continues with the place’s own labor, commitment pools, existing buyers, and any local currency, and what delay costs.
3. Money enters the equation on the place’s terms. The Terms of Engagement set the fixed ground and the ways in. A request from an outside party does not by itself open a revision.
4. Capital designed to stay is held in the commons. Where a patron’s capital is meant to remain with the place, it enters a commons form the patron cannot withdraw, as Mycelial Patronage describes. The Three-Feature Test asks whether a patron’s standing depends on the work succeeding.

None of the four conditions rules out grants. A grant that pays for work the place has stated, on the place’s terms, with reporting the place already produces, fits the grounding. The needed trajectory expects enabling money for coordination and monitoring to stay grant-funded throughout.

Checks in the suite

Each check asks a question, and the answer is recorded with the cohort’s decision, so the cohort decides with the direction of fit in view. A relationship that fails a check can still go ahead.

Where	Check	Question
Before the first template	Motive	Would the cohort run the suite if no funder existed? Who asked for it, and has anyone set a deadline?
Every template, every cohort review	Pace	Has a funding deadline shortened a cohort review or skipped a prompt?
BioHub Identity Template, Prompt 1, patronage	Relationship	For each existing or proposed funding relationship: who set its scope, can it be withdrawn and on what notice, what reporting does it require, and would the work continue without it?
BioHub Identity Template, Prompt 3, Founding Compact section 4	Principle before commitment	Does the Compact record principles for holding capital, and leave specific funding commitments to the Terms of Engagement?
Value Proposition Template	Origin	Did each service arise from the place’s work, or from a buyer’s or funder’s program?
Place Mandate Template, Step 0 and Prompt 1	Authority	Does every item of work trace to the Brief? Existing proposals and funder programs may supply evidence and cost; items of work come only from the Brief.
Place Mandate Template, Prompt 2	Proceeding without; needed trajectory; 100-unit trail	Is the plan for proceeding without a real plan? Does each engagement move the place along the trajectory?
Bankable Service Alignment Template	Instrument test	Has the instrument been tested against the Terms before any alignment work?

Where a check fails, the cohort writes down what it found and what it decided. A cohort may still take the money. The record shows that it did so knowingly, and the relationship is reviewed once the Terms of Engagement exist.

Related

• Needed vs. Needy
• Needed Trajectory
• Place Mandate Template
• Terms of Engagement
• Mycelial Patronage
• The Three-Feature Test
• Transvestment
• Running a Template
• From a Bioregion to a BioRegion

Sources

• Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957). Intention
• INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (2007). The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

Provenance

Written 30 September 2026 in the VoG Place Mandate project, during the first run of the founding suite for the Valley of Grace BioHub, when the patronage dimension of the BioHub Identity Template raised the question of how funding relationships should be presented before the Terms of Engagement exist. The page gathers material already stated in the Place Mandate Template (the reversal of the direction of fit, proceeding without, the needed trajectory, the instrument test) and places it ahead of the first template. The two failure modes come from Michael Haupt. The checks for the first three templates are new and have not yet been tested in a run, hence structural-inference. The Valley of Grace case is omitted from this international version.