Maintain a directional objective

Core meaning

Capability purpose: Give current pursuit a durable directional object between broad goals and execution designs.
Meaningful outcome: An objective exists with an owner, statement, lifecycle state, provenance, and optional relationships to goals, targets, and plans.
Boundaries — includes: creation, revision, activation or retirement, owner scope, provenance, and links to broader goals or downstream planning objects.
Boundaries — excludes: maintaining a long-horizon goal, defining measurable success, documenting an execution approach, activating work, and tracking project or task progress.
Terms and concepts: An objective expresses what is being pursued in an actionable planning horizon. It is direction, not a success measure or execution design.

Actor: An authorized owner, planner, or planning agent.
Command / intent: Create or change an objective for current pursuit.
Current state: The intended direction and any existing objective state are known.
Policies / invariants: Objective and goal semantics remain distinguishable; activation does not imply approval of a plan; links are explicit rather than inferred from display order; material revisions retain attribution.
Transition: Validate and persist the objective statement, lifecycle state, provenance, and declared relationships.
Result: A current objective that can guide target definition and plan creation.
Events / effects: May make related planning or review actions available without creating plans or work automatically.
Unknowns: Universal horizon boundaries between a goal and an objective are not established.

An objective must not be represented as a completed outcome merely because it is active.
A plan derived from an objective must preserve the source relationship without replacing the objective.

Keep the objective concise, action-oriented, reviewable, and explicitly linked when it refines a broader goal.

Implementations may use different planning horizons, but they should publish how goal and objective semantics differ.

Statement	Semantic class	Evidence status	Source / note
An objective is a distinct active direction that may inform a plan while remaining separate from goals, targets, and execution.	rule/invariant	sourced	F03–F04.