The National AI Governance Playbook · Part III · Chapter 6
The five design questions
The design phase resolves to five questions: who carries each function, in what order the regime arrives, where the evaluation capability lives and how it is funded, which instrument binds the design, and what keeps sectoral rules coherent. This chapter defines the five, treats the two that have no later chapter of their own, and shows how the answers interlock.
Evidence basis: MindXO design recommendation. A MindXO decision sequence for national program design.
By Myriam Ayada · MindXO · Version 1.1 · Updated 21 July 2026
In brief
Parts I and II supplied four functions, two regimes, two assurance layers and a six-link chain. The design phase resolves five questions: who evaluates, accredits, assures and enforces; in what order the regime arrives; where the horizontal technical engine lives and how it connects to sectors; which instrument binds; and what common baseline and contextual additions keep rules aligned. Answered together and on the record, the five produce the designed policy.
From architecture to decisions
Part II closed with a complete architecture: the four functions of Chapter 3, the two regimes of Chapter 4 with their interface, and the six links of Chapter 5 running from principle to control. An architecture describes what a finished system contains. It leaves open every decision about a particular country: which institutions carry the functions, in what order the machinery arrives, with what money, and under which law. Those decisions are the design phase, the stage Chapter 2 identified as the second state of a national program, and they form the subject of Part III.
The agenda of that stage is shorter than it appears. Everything the design phase must decide compresses into five questions, and each of them acts on named links of the Chapter 5 chain. Allocation assigns the owners of links three to six. Sequencing sets the timing of links three and four. Capability builds links five and six. Legal anchoring selects the instrument at link three. Coherence governs the citations that join links four and five. A design stage that has answered all five, in writing, has produced the designed policy at link two. A design stage that has answered them separately, or left them implicit, has produced the overlaps and gaps that Chapter 2 catalogued.
The five questions
The five questions are set out below in the order in which they tend to arise. Each entry records what the question decides, the option space, the failure that follows when it is skipped, and where the playbook develops it. Two of the five, allocation and coherence, have no dedicated chapter of their own; the two sections that follow treat them in this chapter.
Q1. Allocation: who carries which function
Decides: which entities evaluate systems, accredit schemes and providers, deliver independent assurance, set contextual requirements, make regulatory decisions and enforce them. Options: shared administrative homes with separated decision rights, distinct bodies, hosted units or accredited external providers; sector regulators retain context and enforcement.
Q2. Sequencing: in what order the regime arrives
Decides: the order in which the parts of the regime take effect: what binds first, what waits on capability, which sectors move early. Options: capability before obligations, obligations phased by sector risk, or general obligations with deferred application dates. If skipped: everything arrives at once, and obligations bind before the capability that evidences them exists. Developed in: Chapter 7.
Q3. Capability: where the engine lives, and on what budget
Decides: the home of common evaluation methods, security testing and accreditation, its funding, and its evidence interface with sector regulators. Options: a national institute, hosted unit or procured external capacity; contextual assurance remains sector-led. Developed in: Chapter 10.
Q4. Legal anchoring: which instrument binds
Decides: the binding vehicle at link three of the chain, the point at which the design acquires legal force. Options: a dedicated statute, a decree, targeted amendments to existing law, or an existing statutory plan. If skipped: anchoring defaults to a future comprehensive law, and every obligation waits on its passage. Developed in: Chapter 8.
Q5. Coherence: how sectoral rules stay aligned
Decides: shared definitions, thresholds, formats and minimum technical evidence, plus the contextual additions each sectoral rulebook must state. If skipped: technical work is duplicated or shared certificates are accepted without deployment context. The Regime Interface Agreement connects Chapters 4 and 5.
Sheet 06 of 13, the five questions and the policy they produce: five cards, allocation, sequencing, capability, legal anchoring and coherence, each recording what it decides and the failure that follows when it is skipped, feed a single output, the designed policy, the second state of Chapter 2. Tags map each question onto the links of the Chapter 5 chain it acts on: allocation names the owners of links three to six, sequencing times links three and four, capability builds links five and six, anchoring selects the instrument at link three, and coherence governs the citations between links four and five.
Allocation, the first among the five
Allocation comes first because every other answer presupposes it. A sequencing decision needs to know whose readiness is being sequenced. A capability decision needs a home to fund. An anchoring decision needs to know whose powers the instrument must create. The unit of allocation is the function, and the working rule is symmetry: an owner per function, and a function per owner. A function with two owners produces the duplicated programs of Chapter 2; a function with no owner produces a gap that becomes visible only when its output is first needed.
Standards, evaluation methods and accreditation can share administrative machinery, but their decision rights still need separation. Evaluation capability produces technical evidence; an accreditation authority qualifies schemes and providers; an assurance provider forms an independent opinion; the sector regulator sets contextual requirements, decides and enforces. No actor should approve its own work.
Mature designs on the public record allocate by name. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 assigns the oversight of general-purpose models to an AI Office, the supervision of deployed systems to national market surveillance authorities, and conformity assessment to notified bodies, an explicit owner for each function the regulation creates. The United Kingdom's white paper allocates with the opposite instrument: existing regulators apply five cross-cutting principles within their remits, and a central function inside government monitors coverage and coherence. The two designs differ in almost every choice except the discipline itself: each function has a named carrier, recorded in a public document that can be produced when ownership is contested.
Coherence, the quiet question
Coherence is a shared frame of definitions, thresholds, reporting formats, standards and minimum technical evidence, paired with a rule that every sectoral rulebook names its contextual additions. It says what evidence may be reused and which local data, oversight, workflow, outcome and monitoring evidence must still be supplied.
The frame needs a named holder. The natural candidates are a standing coordination body, where one exists, or the design authority of Chapter 9 for the duration of the design phase, with custody passing to a permanent home when the phase closes. Which body holds the frame matters less than that exactly one does: a frame held by nobody is maintained by nobody, and each rulebook then fixes its own vocabulary at the moment of drafting.
Without the frame, sectoral rules drift and common technical work is duplicated. The opposite error is equally costly: a shared certificate is accepted as a complete judgment and deployment context disappears. Credible assurance needs both the common baseline and the sector's stated additions.
How the questions interlock
The five questions are answered together or they are answered badly, because each constrains the others. Capability constrains sequencing: an obligation that binds before the capability able to evidence it exists cannot be supervised, which is why Chapter 7 places the engine early in every workable order. Allocation and sequencing together size the anchoring: the instrument at link three must create exactly the powers the allocation assigns and carry exactly the application dates the sequencing sets, and an instrument drafted before those answers exist either exceeds what the design needs or returns for amendment. Coherence depends on allocation twice, once for the body that holds the frame and once for the supervisors directed to cite it.
A useful early step is to open a one-page decision record for each question at the start of the design phase: the decision, its owner, the instrument that carries it, and the date it takes effect. Blank fields are informative, since a blank names work that remains while a missing record hides it. Five pages then form the auditable core of the design phase, the readiness assessment of Chapter 13 checks little more than their existence and their consistency, and the record protects the design against the alternative described below, in which the questions are answered without anyone deciding anything.
Common failure mode. Five questions, answered by default. A design stage that never asks the questions still answers them. Allocation defaults to whoever moved first, sequencing to everything at once, capability to nobody, anchoring to a future law, and coherence to none. Each default is an answer chosen without a decision record, and an answer without a record is discovered rather than reviewed, typically at implementation, when the overlaps and gaps of Chapter 2 present themselves as institutional facts.
The five questions set the agenda for the rest of Part III. Chapter 7 takes up the one with an order inside it, sequencing the rollout: which parts of the regime arrive first, which wait on capability, and how a timetable is written so that it can be kept.
Three questions for every government
- For each of the five questions, does a dated decision record exist naming the decision, its owner and its instrument?
- Are evaluation, accreditation, assurance delivery and enforcement assigned to named actors with conflicts controlled?
- Does every sectoral rulebook state both reused technical evidence and added contextual evidence?
Selected public sources
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act), European Union, 2024
- A pro-innovation approach to AI regulation, white paper and government response, United Kingdom, 2023 and 2024
- Consultation Paper on Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence Risk Management, Monetary Authority of Singapore, 2025
- ISO/IEC 42001, AI management systems, ISO/IEC, 2023
- AI Risk Management Framework and Generative AI Profile, NIST, 2023 and 2024