Resource Leveling

Fitting the work a plan requires to the capacity people actually have — a decision of strategy, informed by the calculation and never set by it.

The logic of a plan says what is required and by when. It says nothing whatever about whether the people can carry it. When what is required exceeds what an Actor has to give, something must give: the sequence, the scope, the marker, or how hard someone is asked to push. Leveling is the name for choosing which, with eyes open, together, rather than discovering it later in someone's exhaustion.

The discipline it borrows the word from treats it as arithmetic over stated availability. Here the availability is not a datum but a person's own word — what they pledged for the season — and the choosing is a conversation at the Heartbeat and at the turning. The engine can show the collision; only people can decide what to do about it (The Pledge, Level Of Commitment, The Game Engine).

It is load-bearing because it is where a plan meets sovereignty. A body that levels by recalculation alone has decided that people are inputs; a body that never levels at all has decided that the plan is a wish and someone will absorb the difference — usually the most willing person, silently, until they stop. Making the weight visible before it is assigned is what lets a Cell move work toward whoever has room and away from whoever is at the edge (Load, Span of Control).

Two things serve it: each person's stated calendar — the hours actually available in a week — and a shared reading of Load said aloud in one of six plain words. Both are stated, never metered. The output is a levelled view set beside the logic view, both dated, with the gap between them named rather than hidden (Honesty about time, Bottleneck).

Also called: levelling · fitting the work to the people Stands on: The Pledge · Capacity · The Game Engine · Sovereignty Opens onto: Load · Bottleneck · Limiting Factor · Level Of Commitment · Buffer · Float · The Heartbeat · Pull planning In play: the table — at the Turn and at the turning, with the register in front of everyone Sources: Projects/the term pages/Resource Leveling.md (draft, unreviewed) · Projects/the term pages/Load.md, The Game Engine.md, Bottleneck.md (drafts) · Level Of Commitment (wiki root; draft) · lionsberg.wiki: Theory Of Constraints Open: Nothing states what a Cell does when levelling has no honest answer — when the work is genuinely necessary, the marker genuinely fixed, and the capacity genuinely absent.