The look-ahead
Each week, look six weeks out and ask of everything entering the window: what could stop this from being ready?
It is the bridge between the plan and the week. Pull planning says what should happen; the look-ahead asks what can. Every activity crossing into the six-week window is examined for readiness: are the predecessors complete, are the materials and the hands available and competent, is the work defined well enough that a reliable Commitment can be made? Any no is a Constraint, and it gets a line, an owner and a date by which it will be gone. Only constraint-free work is released to the week.
It is load-bearing because it is how a group stops discovering on Monday that the thing it needed on Friday was never coming. A commitment made over an unresolved constraint is a broken commitment waiting to happen, and the number that tells a body the truth about itself — kept as a share of made — rises or falls mostly here, not at the moment of promising. The window is wide enough to clear most obstacles and short enough that the answers are still knowable; six weeks is the working figure, held as a practice rather than a law.
It is run at The Heartbeat, rolled forward one week each time, in the same hour as the check-in and the commitments. Constraints beyond a Cell's reach are carried upward as requests: a home clears what no Cell can, and the same log runs from a kitchen table to the whole programme of a world.
Also called: Look-Ahead Planning · six weeks Stands on: Pull planning · The activity table · The Heartbeat Opens onto: Constraint · Make-Ready Process · SHOULD-CAN-WILL-DID · Commitment · Requests and offers In play: table · Home Sources: The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §7 · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized (Element 11; Look-Ahead Planning named, body not yet written) · Constraint (wiki term page, drafts, unreviewed) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VII — lionsberg.wiki page name: Look-Ahead Planning Open: Look-Ahead Planning is named in the Pattern Language inventory without a page of its own.