One of the core ideas behind Daml workflows is that multi-party applications are not just about data and state, but about people, decisions and consequences.

In a centralized system, many of these details can stay hidden inside one organization, because the same system usually controls the process, validates the decision and applies the result.

In a distributed workflow, this is no longer enough, because decisions can cross several organizations, roles and trust boundaries, while still needing to remain coordinated, verified and authorized.

This means that design of distributed application needs to answer several basic questions very clearly:

• what was the decision?

• who made it?

• what role they had?

• who authorized them to make it?

• what consequences followed from it?

• who was informed about those consequences?

• who needed to be notified afterwards?

In Daml, this logic is represented through contracts, choices and parties, where a decision becomes a choice exercised on an active contract, the party making that decision is represented as a controller, and authorization is tied to the parties and roles defined on the contract.

This makes workflow design in Canton Network not only about modelling assets or records, but also about modelling the real structure of authority between organizations.