Play

One thing a group does together, written on a card, open to correction by whoever plays it better.

A Play is a small piece of choreography for a complete operational moment in the life of a Cell — a thing a body does: gathers, decides, mends, welcomes, harvests, passes the Flame. Each Play has a name, the context in which it fires, the sequence of what happens, notes on where to improvise, the outcome it aims at, and the adjacent Plays.

It is load-bearing because it is the layer between principle and Tuesday evening. A Pattern says what is true about a kind of situation; a Play says what this group does in the next forty minutes. Without Plays, every table reinvents the running of a meeting, the making of a decision, the release of a member — badly, and alone. With them, a table gets a starting form it can hold before it improvises, which is the discipline Shu-ha-ri names: run it as written until you find a better way.

How it is used. Open the Play for the moment you are in, run it, and note where it did not fit. Each Play is its own continuously improving card: when your Cell finds a better way, improve the card through The LIØNSBERG Workshop, so all Cells rise together rather than each hoarding its own fix. Every Play answers a need in General Needs. Two Plays hold all the others — the weekly Turn and the seasonal turning, the heartbeat and the breath — and if a table learns nothing else, it learns those two.

Also called: Plays · a Play Stands on: Pattern · Pattern Card · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language Opens onto: Plays Are Riffs; Patterns Are The Notes · The Playbook Chart · The LIØNSBERG Workshop · General Needs · The Turn · The LIØNSBERG Circle Guide In play: table · Room · Home Sources: The LIØNSBERG Playbook, §How to Use and the Play form (draft) · the Player+ Modules lexicon, Play · lionsberg.wiki: The LIØNSBERG Playbook Open: The Playbook states that Plays live in a Plays folder with a Play — Title filename convention; the individual Play cards were not opened in this pass, so how many exist as written cards rather than as names in the Chart is unverified.