Work serves a purpose.
Before deciding how to do something, ask what it needs to achieve, and whether it needs to happen at all.
The question it requires
What result is needed? What work can we remove?
Euler Center · Work Composition
A description language for work.
It asks what a task is actually made of: the decisions inside it, the judgment each decision requires, the evidence it produces, and which parts can be delegated to a machine without losing the ability to answer for the outcome.
Published by The Euler Center under CC BY 4.0. Free to use, teach, translate, and adapt, with attribution.
I / Start here
Six things true of work before any method
These describe work, not this site. They would hold if you never filled in a canvas or named a pattern. Each one forces a question, and the rest of this site is those six questions asked of one workflow.
Different work needs different capabilities.
Tasks that take the same time may need different knowledge, judgment, skills, or authority.
The question it requires
What does each remaining task require?
People, agents, and systems have different capabilities and limits.
What can do one task well may be unsuitable for another.
The question it requires
Who or what can meet those requirements?
How work fits together affects the result.
Dividing work changes the handoffs, dependencies, and checks needed to finish it.
The question it requires
How will the pieces come together?
Conditions affect what works.
An arrangement that succeeds in one setting may fail in another.
The question it requires
What must be in place for this to work?
Capability must be demonstrated.
A claim that something can do the work needs evidence from the conditions in which it will be used.
The question it requires
How will we know it works?
II / What the canvas does
The working surface of the method
The canvas is the working surface of the method. A team fills it in for a piece of real work and comes away with a description precise enough to argue about: where the judgment sits, what evidence would show the work was done well, and which parts are candidates for delegation.
It is designed to be filled in on paper. Its fields are also specified as structured data, so a completed canvas can be held in a system rather than a drawer, and so descriptions across an organization can be compared rather than merely collected.
Version1, published
Field structureSpecified as structured data
Runs inNinety minutes, one workflow
ImplementationsIn progress
LicenseCC BY 4.0
The twelve cells · four bands · one surfaceWhat the literature coversOpen the canvas
From the method
A description you can disagree with
is worth more than a diagram everyone nods at.
III / Three ways in
The method is free. What it makes possible is not.
Understand
Score twelve cells against one real workflow in ninety minutes. Blank, thin, or solid. The output is a list of blank cells with names against them, not a maturity grade.
Free · the canvas and the protocolRun the assessment
Design
Deconstruct the work, place each task by problem type, set the loop boundaries, and design the escalation that fires by itself. Six techniques, each with its failure mode.
Free · facilitation is notSee the patterns
Govern
Six cells solid before an agent ships, the Evidence cell mapped to the regimes you live under, and an assessment that names who may overrule the machine.
The gate is free · the credential is notOpen the gate
IV / The gate
Six cells solid, or it does not ship
No agent reaches production touching regulated work until six cells are solid. Deliberately shorter than the canvas, because a gate people can hold in their head is a gate that gets used. Run it per deployment, not per program.
01Authority is written, not assumedA named list of what this agent may decide alone, what it must route to a person, and who can halt it mid-run. If the halt is theoretical because the process finishes in eight seconds, the cell is blank. Required by the human oversight duty.
02Composition matched to problem typeEvery task the agent touches has been placed by problem type. Nothing agent-led sits in a complex or chaotic domain.
03The escalation trigger fires by itselfA machine-detectable condition surfaces the exception before a person notices. An andon cord nobody can see is decoration.
04Evidence is produced unpromptedTrail, reasoning log, and input lineage generated as a byproduct of running. Reconstructed evidence is not evidence.
05A named person is qualified and availableNot a role in a policy. A person, assessed on this workflow against something like a defensible judgment taxonomy, rostered while the agent runs, and empowered to override without asking first.
06Rollback is rehearsedSomebody has actually stopped this agent outside production and restored the prior state. A documented rollback never executed is a hypothesis.
Six boxes. All must be ticked before the agent ships. Free, no signup, forward it to whoever needs it.Open the gate
V / Why it is published openly
A method that requires a license is not a language
It exists because organizing has to come before mechanizing, and organizing needs a vocabulary. Process maps describe sequence. Job descriptions describe people. Neither describes composition, which is the thing that changes when agents enter the work.
A description language is only useful if it is shared, and a method that requires a license is not a language. Work Composition is published under CC BY 4.0. Anyone may use, adapt, and implement it, including commercially and including in competing products.
The canvas belongs to everybody, including the consultancies that will compete with us using it. That is the point. A method nobody else will teach is not a standard, it is a sales deck.
Read the thesis: shapes, not beliefsv1
Version 1 published · Field structure specified · Implementations in progress
The lab is collecting completed canvases from teaching cohorts and applied engagements. Aggregate findings will be published as working papers; individual descriptions remain the property of the organizations that made them.
Questions people ask first
Is this a certification?
Not yet. Everything on this site is rung 0 of the ladder: free, permanently. The assessed credential is rung 4. The substrate exists; the assessor cohort and the pass mark do not. Nothing here certifies anyone today.
Can I use it commercially?
Yes. It is published under CC BY 4.0. Use it, teach it, translate it, adapt it, and sell services around it, including in competition with us. Name the source.
What does v1 mean?
The twelve cells and the six-item gate are stable enough to build on. The scale ships uncalibrated on purpose; you set the anchors for your own workflows. Two of the seven patterns are drafts, and every case is secondhand.
Why one workflow and not the company?
A canvas filled at the level of the enterprise is a poster. A canvas filled at the level of a workflow is a decision. Pick one flow that already has an agent in it, or is about to.
Open call
Twelve cells. Seven shapes. Forty-nine entries. Come argue with any of them.
If you want in, the fastest route is to send one thing rather than an introduction: a pattern, a failure, or a correction. That is the whole application.
Send one thing