Everything Is A Project
A convention: any work worth doing is framed as work — with an aim, a shape, a time and a way of knowing it is done — however small it is.
The convention asks four things of a piece of work: what it is for, what it consists of, by when, and how anyone will know it was achieved. Small work gets small answers, written in a line. The value is not ceremony; it is that work framed this way can be planned, committed to, aligned and counted, and work that is not framed at all can only be hoped for. A Quest is the same object at the scale of a season, which is why a Quest is planned rather than wished.
It is load-bearing because it is what makes the whole addable. If every piece of work has an aim and something above it that it serves, then the total set of work a distributed body is doing can be seen, and the plan of the whole can be populated from the bottom rather than dictated from the top. Guided from above only by a shared Vision, strategy and values; informed from below by what bodies actually undertake — that is the design, and the convention is what makes it operable.
Held badly it becomes bureaucracy: forms for things that needed a sentence, and a plan for a conversation. Held well it is the lightest possible discipline — an aim, a done-when, a name, a date — and it is what lets somebody far away read what you are doing and offer the thing you were missing.
Also called: Every Quest Is A Project Stands on: The Meta Project · Work Breakdown Structure · Quest Opens onto: The activity table · Conditions of satisfaction · Stacking Up And Aligning · Project Management In play: table · Home · beyond Sources: Everything Is A Project (wiki root page; a long, repetitive articulation of the convention) · Everything Is A Project (card, LIØNSBERG, Earth, and the Cosmos) · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon (Work In Progress) — lionsberg.wiki page name: Everything Is A Project Open: The root page's language — master plan, programme of action, budgets and oversight — reads as an older, more managerial articulation than the rest of the domain; the convention survives the translation, the framing should be re-read.