Add Exit and Suppression Rules

A workflow with one exit is a workflow nobody has thought about.

That one exit is always the same: the steps ran out. It is the exit the tool gives you for free, it requires no decision, and it is the least likely of all the exits to be the one that actually fires in production.

The set a working cadence needs

Every step completed or was skipped, which ends it. The reason they were eligible stopped being true, so they should not still be receiving follow-up for a state they left. They replied, which means a human is now in a conversation and the automation stops. They replied and the reply was flagged as interested, which is a stronger version worth separating because it routes differently. And an automatic out-of-office reply came back.

That last one is not an exit.

Pause is not stop

An out-of-office reply means “not right now.” Treating it as an exit means the person who was on holiday for a fortnight never hears from you again, and nobody will ever find out that happened, because from the inside it looks like a completed workflow. So it pauses. The cadence suspends, and it resumes when the window passes.

This is the same mistake as collapsing unknown into no, which the previous pillar spent a chapter on. Two states that look similar from the system's side, because nothing is happening in either, mean opposite things from the business side. Every workflow specification needs at least one pause state, and needs it kept visibly distinct from its exits.

Suppression is the third category

Exits end this workflow. Pauses suspend it. Suppressions say something about the person that outlives any particular workflow.

Someone who says “remove me” is not exiting a cadence, they are declining contact. That has to be recorded on the person, not on their membership in a workflow, or the next workflow will pick them up next week and the fact that they asked will have evaporated. Practically: exits are workflow state, suppressions are record state. Getting this wrong is the most common way an organization sends a message it has already promised not to send.

Re-entry is a decision

Can somebody who has already been through this workflow go through it again? If yes, you need a rule for when: how much time has to pass, what has to have changed, and whether they resume or restart. If no, the exclusion is permanent and belongs in the eligibility set from Chapter 2, which is why that chapter's excluded list carried the already-finished case and deferred the argument to here.

Both answers are fine. Not answering is not, because the default your tool picked is now your policy and nobody chose it. Whichever you pick, the two chapters have to agree: a permanent bar in the excluded set alongside a permitted re-entry is a specification that contradicts itself, and the capstone checks for exactly that.