Process (and the Process List)

The named, repeatable way a function is performed — and the list of them, so a body can see what it actually does.

A process is the how. Not a policy and not an intention: the sequence someone can follow to get a thing done the way this body does it — meeting, onboarding, resolving an issue, tracking commitments, handling a submittal, answering a request for guidance, filling up what is lacking, removing what does not belong. Written down, it can be handed to a newcomer, criticised, improved, and inherited. Unwritten, it lives in whoever has been doing it longest and leaves when they do.

The Process List is the plain index of them. Its value is not the individual entries but the act of enumeration: a body that writes out everything it repeatedly does can see, often for the first time, what it is actually for — and can see what it claims to value and has no process for at all. The canon's own list opens with the Way itself and with the process by which processes are made, which is the right order (Continuous Improvement, Current Best Understanding).

It is load-bearing because it is the third of The three charts. Functions say what must be done; roles say who holds that seat this season; processes say how, so that a seat changing hands does not mean the body forgetting how to do the work. It is also where improvement lands: a defect fixed once is a repair, a defect fixed in the process is a guard, and a lesson written where nobody looks has not been learned (Every Defect Is A Gift).

Two disciplines keep processes from becoming bureaucracy. A process is Current Best Understanding and is revised the moment a better way is found — by whoever found it, not by whoever owns it. And a process exists for its function; when the function goes, the process is retired out loud rather than left running, because a procedure nobody can account for is how every body eventually acquires work that serves nothing (Prune, Waste).

Also called: the Processes · the LIØNSBERG Process List Stands on: The three charts · Current Best Understanding · The Way Opens onto: Continuous Improvement · Every Defect Is A Gift · The guard · Request For Guidance · Submittals · Issue · Orientation and Onboarding Process · Protocol · Prune In play: Home — kept beside the charts, read when a function changes hands Sources: LIØNSBERG Process List.md (wiki root; a list of fifteen named processes, unmarked, most entries linking pages that are thin or absent) · Cell Types.md, Function Chart.md, Role Chart.md (proposals, unreviewed — the Process Chart as the third grain) · lionsberg.wiki: LIØNSBERG Process List Open: The list is fifteen lines and several of its entries point at pages with no body; the enumeration is further along than the writing. · Nothing states who may add a process to the list, or how two bodies with different processes for the same function stay interoperable.