Show-Before-Doing Protocol

Show the work you are about to do before you do it, so that the correction costs a minute rather than a week.

The cheapest moment to catch a misunderstanding is before the work. A proposed outline, a sample page, the first card written in full — anything concrete enough to be judged — put in front of the person who will live with the result, and judged in minutes. What comes back is either yes, like that or a correction that would otherwise have been discovered at the end, after everything downstream had been built on it.

It is the same discipline that defines quality at the handoff: the one who will receive the work says what makes it acceptable before the work starts. Showing first is that rule applied by the doer rather than waited for by the receiver, and it works in the direction where most effort is actually wasted — long confident work aimed slightly wrong.

The protocol was adopted as a working decision during the great re-weaving of the canon, where the risk was obvious: a sweep applied to hundreds of pages in one pass, in a voice nobody had agreed to, is not correctable afterward at any sane cost. Show one page, agree the shape, then run the sweep.

The cost of it is a pause, and the pause is the point. A body that cannot bear to show before doing is usually a body moving fast in order not to be corrected.

Also called: show first Stands on: Conditions of satisfaction · Quality · Every Defect Is A Gift Opens onto: Phase-Gated Architecture · Disposition Categories · Second reader · Proposal · Soak · The look-ahead In play: table · Room Sources: the Wiki Turn's working decisions, Show-Before-Doing Protocol (draft; named in the working-decisions list) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System, quality at the handoff (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The Great Weaving — Concept Ledger Open: named as a working decision of one project; whether it is meant as a general convention for any body doing work at scale, or only for the editing of the canon, is not said.