A Delphi command center is a living workspace built around a single question your organization needs to answer continuously — metrics, data, alerts, agents, scenarios, and reports all scoped to one shared purpose. Most organizations need more than one. A CFO runs financial planning out of one command center while operations leads watch incident response out of another, and a chief of staff might roll both up into a third. To make that practical, command centers nest.
The hierarchy model
Each dashboard knows its place in the tree: its immediate parent, the root of the tree it belongs to, and the full chain of ancestors above it. That lineage is what makes cascading permissions and cross-initiative context work — anywhere you stand in the tree, the path back to the root is available to the agent without re-walking the structure.
A dashboard is either a command center (the root of its tree) or an initiative (a child somewhere below). Both behave the same way and render in the same shell; the difference is whether they stand alone or report up to a parent. In conversation, people usually just say “command center” for both — the mental model is the one that matters more than the label.
When to reach for a child
Reach for a child initiative when:
- A recurring question within your main problem deserves its own workspace (quarterly revenue review, a specific product launch, a single active incident).
- You want to delegate ownership of a slice of work without handing over the whole command center.
- You want to scope permissions tighter than the parent — a child initiative can be shared with a narrower audience.
- You want agentic alerts in one initiative to reason about data from sibling initiatives without copy-paste.
Reach for a sibling (another command center at the root) when the work is genuinely a different problem with a different audience and a different decision loop. Siblings don’t share cascade context the way initiatives under the same parent do.
How children get created
The simplest way to create a child initiative is to ask Delphi in chat — “spin up a child initiative for X” — from the parent you want it to live under. Delphi resolves the parent from the dashboard you’re working in, so the child lands in the right place automatically and inherits the parent’s lineage. There’s no way to attach a child to a hierarchy you don’t already have access to.
Composing a child requires at least editor scope on the parent. If you hold analyst or below, the composition is rejected with a clear message and you’ll need to ask the parent’s owner or admin to do it.
Cascade context across siblings
Real-world events rarely stay in one lane. A hurricane alert in a weather initiative should inform the tourism revenue forecast, the hospital capacity dashboard, and the infrastructure risk register in your sibling initiatives — even though each of those lives in its own workspace. Delphi’s agentic alerts can pull cross-initiative data into their fire/suppress/defer decision so the result reflects the full picture, not just the signal that tripped.
Cascade context works across siblings under the same parent. Initiatives beside each other see each other; initiatives in a different command center tree do not.
Permissions across the hierarchy
Permissions cascade downward. When you add someone to a parent command center, they automatically have at least that scope on every child initiative beneath it — no separate invitation required. The ancestor chain is what makes this work: each child knows its full lineage, and access checks walk upward so a parent’s permission set is always the baseline for the entire subtree.
Children can escalate — you can grant someone a higher scope on a child than they hold on the parent, or add users to a child who aren’t on the parent at all. What you cannot do is restrict below the parent’s baseline: if someone holds editor on the parent, they hold at least editor on every child, even if the child’s own permission list doesn’t mention them.
This means the parent’s owner controls the floor for the whole tree. Tighten the parent and you tighten everything below it. Loosen a child for a specific collaborator and the change stays scoped to that child.
If you want broad-tenant visibility instead of one-user-at-a-time invites, each dashboard has a tenant-wide visibility setting (owner-only) that grants viewer scope to any email-verified user in your tenant without adding them individually. See invite your team for the full picture on sharing.
Inspecting the hierarchy
Ask Delphi in chat to show you the tree — “what initiatives hang off this command center?” or “show me the ancestor chain for this initiative” — and the agent will walk the structure for you. The same view is available programmatically through the Agents tab and through tools the agent has access to. When a tree gets large, the hierarchy view is the easiest way to audit who owns what before a sensitive workflow kicks off.