Retrospective Governance
Governance that operates after the fact — reviewing, auditing, and assessing actions that have already been taken, rather than governing them at the moment of action.
Retrospective governance is the dominant form of governance today. It includes:
- Quarterly board reviews of management actions - Annual audits that assess the previous year's compliance - Post-incident reviews that determine what went wrong - Retrospective risk assessments that evaluate decisions already made
Retrospective governance has a fundamental limitation: by the time it operates, the actions have already occurred. If an AI agent made 10,000 ungoverned decisions before the quarterly review, retrospective governance can identify the problem but cannot prevent the harm.
The alternative is prospective governance — governing at the moment of action. This doesn't eliminate retrospective governance (audits and reviews are still valuable), but it ensures that governance also operates in real time.
How Constellation handles this
Constellation is prospective governance infrastructure. It enforces constraints at the moment of action, not after the fact. Retrospective governance (audits, reviews) can then inspect the governance traces rather than reconstructing what happened.