Feature · Deliverable · Task
The three rungs work is decomposed through — what must exist, what is handed over, what someone does — walked only as far as the walking has gone.
A feature is a distinct thing that must exist for a milestone to be true. A deliverable is a piece of it that changes hands: something a person or a Cell finishes and gives to someone who needs it. A task is the doing inside a deliverable, small enough that one person can hold it in mind and say I will. The rungs are not grades of importance; they are grades of resolution, and each is the unit of a different conversation — features with the plan, deliverables with the receiver, tasks at the table.
They are load-bearing because progressive decomposition is what keeps a plan honest. Elaborate only as far as the people who will do the work have walked: the near weeks in tasks, the season in deliverables, the year in features. A plan detailed beyond the walk is a forecast dressed as a commitment, and it will be wrong in ways nobody can see. Every piece of scope lives in exactly one branch of Work Breakdown Structure, so the three rungs partition rather than overlap.
The handoff is where the ladder earns its keep. A deliverable has a receiver, and the receiver writes what makes it acceptable before the work begins — Conditions of satisfaction, not inspection afterwards. Tasks become rows of The activity table and then the WILL line of a Turn. Between groups what crosses the membrane is a request, an offer or a commitment, never a task: a task handed across is an instruction, and instructions are not the currency here.
Also called: the decomposition ladder Stands on: Work Breakdown Structure · Milestone Opens onto: The activity table · Conditions of satisfaction · Commitment · Requests and offers In play: table Sources: The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §6 · Activity and Task (wiki term pages, drafts, unreviewed) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VII — lionsberg.wiki page name: Work Breakdown Structure Open: The delivery literature uses activity and task interchangeably; here an activity is a row in the network and a task is the work inside it.