Why is stepping back a normal action?
Stepping back is a normal action because autonomy on ftes.ai is granted per class of action from evidence, and evidence can change. A class that earned auto-approval on a long clean run can start producing send-backs when something changes, and the right response is to gate it again until the cause is understood. It is not a failure of the FTE or the manager; it is the ladder working.
Managers who never step back are trusting yesterday's evidence. The ladder is designed to be climbed and descended as the record warrants.
What signals say step back?
The clearest signal is a send-back in a promoted class: an auto-approved action that a person, on seeing it, would have rejected. One is enough to step the class back and look. The second signal is a change in the inputs the class relies on: a rewritten knowledge base, a migrated tool, a new product line, a new fee schedule. The pattern the class was promoted on may no longer hold.
The third is an incident or detection that touches the class, even indirectly. The fourth is a change of manager, because the new manager has not seen the record the promotion was based on and should re-earn it.
- A send-back or a caught error in a promoted class
- Changed inputs: sources, tools, products, policies
- An incident or detection touching the class
- A new manager who has not seen the record
How do you step back?
Step back by changing the class's level in the Digital FTE's Setup tab. It takes effect immediately: the next action in that class is a proposal that waits for approval. The change is logged with who made it and when, and it appears in the audit trail alongside the original promotion.
Step back only the class affected. A send-back on stage changes in the CRM does not mean field fills need gating; the ladder is per class so that trust is adjusted precisely. If the scope is unclear, step back more than one class, or pause the FTE, and narrow once the cause is found.
What do you do while it is stepped back?
While a class is stepped back, find the cause. Read the send-back reason, trace the action in the audit trail, and check whether the remit, the source, the connection, or the pattern itself was the problem. Fix the cause: a rule in the remit, a corrected article, a narrower credential, a memory item.
Then let the class run gated. Every proposal in it is now approved by a person, and the approval record starts again from that point. This is the same evidence-gathering that justified the first promotion.
How does a class earn its way back?
A class earns its way back the same way it earned promotion the first time: a long run of proposals approved without edits, reviewed at the monthly review, with the cause of the step-back fixed and no recurrence. There is no shortcut and no penalty; the record is the record.
Some managers find it useful to require a slightly longer clean run the second time, because the class has shown it can drift. That is a judgement call, and it is recorded with the promotion like any other. The point of the ladder is that both directions are deliberate, logged, and based on what actually happened.
What does a labelled example of a step-back look like in the record?
As a labelled example: a Customer Support FTE's shipping-status reply category was promoted to auto-send on a stated date by the support lead, on a record of a stated number of unchanged approvals over six weeks. Three weeks later the logistics provider changed its tracking page format, and a reply cited an article whose instructions no longer matched. A customer replied in confusion, the escalation reached the team, and the lead stepped the category back to gated the same morning; the audit trail shows the step-back with the lead's name, the time, and the triggering ticket.
The cause was a changed input, not the FTE's judgement, and the fix was the article, corrected and re-approved that day, with the FTE proposing the correction. The category then ran gated, and its record restarted. At the next monthly review the lead read a clean run and chose to require a longer one than the first time before promoting again, and recorded why. The whole episode is four entries in the trail and one line in the review note, which is what a well-handled step-back looks like: fast, specific, and written down.