Critical Path

The chain of activities with no slack — the one that sets the date, and the one a body's attention belongs to.

Once a plan has been pulled backward and every row of The activity table carries a duration, a predecessor and a successor, the arithmetic says which chain has no room. Slip any link of it and the end moves; everything off it has Float. Attention is a scarce good, and the critical path is the honest answer to where it should go: helping the chain that has none, rather than the work that is loudest or most enjoyable. Hands lent from a slack chain to the tight one buy days; hands added anywhere else buy nothing.

At the largest scale the same word names the Movement's own tightest chain. By 2017 the reading was that it ran through three things: a superordinate legal and governance system that no one owned, a backbone technology platform, and a collective mind — and the work followed that reading. The Lexicon also calls the vector of Work toward The Goal the critical path, which is the same idea at the altitude of a civilisation: the chain along which force must be applied for the Goal to move.

It is computed, never declared. A body that names its critical path from instinct will protect the wrong chain. It is also recomputed: as durations become actuals and constraints are cleared, the chain moves, and a plan that has not been re-read in a season is describing a world that no longer exists. Where hands and capacity are levelled in and buffers placed where chains join, the same chain is called the critical chain.

Also called: The LIØNSBERG Critical Path · Critical Chain Stands on: The activity table · Pull planning · Predecessor / Successor Opens onto: Float · Milestone · Honesty about time · Theory Of Constraints In play: table · beyond Sources: The LIØNSBERG Critical Path (wiki root page, unmarked, a historical reading from 2017) · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon (Work In Progress) §The System and §Orientation and Navigation · The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §4 · Float and Critical Chain (wiki term pages, drafts, unreviewed) — lionsberg.wiki page name: The LIØNSBERG Critical Path Open: The root page names the Movement's own chain as of 2017 and is not a definition of the term; the definition lives in the term-page drafts.