Do the Work

Move four: discern, plan, act, keep promises, produce results. Say what you will do; do what you said; learn from the gap.

This is the move where the Game stops being a conversation. Each week each person says I will ___ by ___ aloud, to people who will depend on it; the next week each says whether they did, and what the difference taught. The gap is not blame — it is the primary source of learning, and a table that punishes gaps will be told fewer of them and will know less about itself.

It is load-bearing because everything the body later counts, tells, or sends up comes from here. Kept as a share of made is the first number any group should know about itself, and it exists only if commitments were real. A Cell is also a production unit — a node in a wider system of work — so the disciplines of Networks of Commitments, the The look-ahead, Constraint removal, and Conditions of satisfaction belong to this move as much as willingness does.

How it is played. Plan backward from the end, not forward from today. Roll a look-ahead each week and ask of everything entering it: what could stop this from being ready? Release only constraint-free work into the week. Make commitments as a person's word, consciously given, never inferred from silence. Say early when confidence is lost, which is Consciously Breaking Commitments and is an act of honesty, not failure. Record the week in The Record, mark The Circle's Scorecard, and carry the learning into the next line rather than into an apology.

Also called: Doing the work Stands on: Commitment · Quest · Networks of Commitments · Tightly Coupled Learning and Action Opens onto: The Record · The gap · Kept as a share of made · Celebrate, Learn, and Improve · The Turn · Issue · Requests and offers In play: table · beyond Sources: The Seven Moves, move 4 (captured) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System §§11–13 (draft) · The DNA of Heaven, Parts V and VII (Fable synthesis, second draft) · lionsberg.wiki: Networks of Commitments, Consciously Breaking Commitments Open: The five-move form folds this into Learn and grow, which makes the production disciplines easy to lose at a small table; no page yet says which of them a three-person Cell actually needs.