CONCEPT
The Clarification Crisis
The failure of Allen's two clarification questions — What is the outcome? What is the next action? — to filter the commitment pipeline once AI has eliminated the natural cost-barrier that previously triaged trivial from substantive ideas.
The clarification crisis names the structural problem that emerges when Allen's clarification stage encounters the AI age. Allen's methodology assumes that items entering the clarification pipeline have already passed a threshold of legitimacy — that the effort required to capture and define them served as an implicit filter. The questions Allen taught practitioners to ask — "What is the desired outcome?" and "What is the next action?" — presuppose that the item is worth the clarification effort. When AI collapses execution cost, the implicit filter fails, and a prior question must be added upstream: should this exist at all? The clarification crisis is the recognition that GTD's processing model, optimized for throughput, now requires a worthiness filter that the original framework never specified.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Allen's two clarification questions are the engine of GTD's conversion of vague anxiety into concrete commitment. They work because they refuse to let imprecision persist, forcing