Parent transition
A parent transition is the bigger change that smaller steps are pieces of. "Grilling a steak" is the parent; salting it, searing the top, and searing the bottom are the smaller transitions inside it, and the steak counts as grilled only when those steps together produce that result. "Parent" is a role rather than a fixed size: grilling a steak is itself one step inside cooking dinner, so the same activity can be a parent to the steps beneath it and a child to the goal above it.
Definition
The containing transition for one or more sub-transitions nested inside it.
The parent role
The parent designation marks a transition's position in the nesting structure. Any transition is a parent of the sub-transitions nested inside it, and itself a sub-transition of whatever transition contains it, all the way up the stack. The same activity named at a higher altitude becomes the parent of activities named at lower altitudes.
At any level on the stack, the transitions nested inside it are its sub-transitions; the transition that contains it is its parent. The parent role is local to the nesting level being examined.
The parent's own structure
The parent transition holds its own starting conditions, completion criteria, critical route, and name at parent scope. "Got paid" is itself a transition with its own resulting state, even though "sent invoice" sits inside it as a sub-transition with its own scope-level structure.
The parent's resulting state holds via scope-translation: IF {sub-transitions' collective outputs satisfy the parent's completion criteria} THEN {parent-scale predicate holds}. The parent's name is the predicate; the sub-transitions' outputs ratify it. Scope fidelity constrains the parent's name to compress what its sub-transitions ratify — no more, no less.
The parent-scale predicate doesn't decompose back to specific sub-conditions automatically. Different sub-condition sets can ratify the same parent-scale claim. What holds at parent scope stays at parent scope on its own terms.
Example
In a self-serve SaaS context, "user becomes a profitable customer" is a parent transition. Its sub-transitions might include signing up, reaching a value milestone, making the first paid conversion, and retaining through CAC payback. Each sub-transition is itself a transition with its own scope-level conditions. The parent's "profitable customer" predicate is what their collective outputs ratify.
"Profitable customer" doesn't decompose back to those four sub-transitions specifically. A different cohort might ratify the same parent-scale claim through different sub-transition paths — different value milestones reached, different retention shapes. The parent operates at its own scope on its own terms.