Work

The transfer of energy, by the application of force, along a vector, toward an aim.

The definition is borrowed from physics on purpose, because it makes four things sayable that ordinary talk of work hides. Energy is what is spent — time, attention, capacity, the life of a body. Force is how it is applied. The Vector is the direction, which may be right or wrong regardless of effort. The aim is what the whole is for. Effort with no vector is motion, not work; effort along a wrong vector is work against the Goal.

It is load-bearing because it is the hinge between the Goal and everything operational. Work that helps All realise the Goal produces Value; work that does not is Waste, and waste is not neutral — it is somebody's life spent on nothing. That single test is what Throughput measures, what Value Stream Mapping looks for, and what makes it fair to ask of any activity what it serves. An activity that serves nothing above it is busyness however hard it is worked.

The canon calls the vector toward the Goal Critical Path — the same word the planning discipline uses for the chain with no slack, at the altitude of a civilisation. So the ladder runs unbroken: a person's hour, an activity in a table, a Quest in a season, a Pillar in the lattice, the whole of The Meta Project. Work at that scale demands a system, which is where the rest of this domain begins.

Also called: the Work equation Stands on: The Goal · Value · Waste Opens onto: Vector · Critical Path · Throughput · The Meta Project · Everything Is A Project In play: table · beyond Sources: The LIØNSBERG Lexicon (Work In Progress) §The System, lines 64–71 · The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §6 · Activity (wiki term page, drafts, unreviewed) — lionsberg.wiki page name: Work Open: none found.