The PLAIT field guide

You do not need the PLAIT app to practice PLAIT. You can practice in your head, in a notebook, through a conversation, with an assistant, inside the tools you already use, or in the PLAIT Context System. The medium can change. The practice is learning to recognize what belongs together, understand where you stand, make a fitting move, and pay attention to what comes back.

This guide is not everything about PLAIT. It is what to remember when something is actually happening. Keep it where you will find it.

Start where you are.
Look at what belongs together.
Two things can be true.
Foreground what matters now.
Respond. Do not just react.
Movement does not always mean doing more.
Notice what comes back.
Your judgment stays yours.

These are reminders. Eventually you will know them without looking. Until then, print these eight lines, cut them to the size of a card, and put them where you will see them: a wallet, a desk, a lock screen.

Underneath the reminders is one move. It has parts, and the parts do not come in a fixed order. Several happen at once. Sometimes the whole thing happens in your head between one breath and the next.

A move is not always action. Sometimes it is act. Sometimes ask. Sometimes say something. Sometimes listen. Sometimes wait. Sometimes protect something. Sometimes stop. Sometimes keep going. Then you are somewhere new, and the move begins again from there.

In the Framework's words, this is the same move: Signal → Insight → Movement → new Signal. A signal is what became observable. Insight is the clearest reading you have, held as current and not final. Movement is the response that fits. What returns is the next signal. The words are here so you recognize them elsewhere. You do not need them to practice.

Questions to come back to, sorted by the moments you will actually be in. Use one. Skip the rest. If you remember only the first question under a heading, that is enough.

• What am I actually dealing with?
• What am I combining that may need separating?
• What am I separating that actually belongs together?

• What has not changed?
• What keeps returning?
• Am I missing information, permission, capacity, relationship, or timing?

• What happened?
• What am I adding to what happened?
• What requires a response now, and what does not?

• What matters most from where I stand?
• Who else is part of this context?
• What becomes easier or harder if I choose this?

• What actually happened?
• What did the result reveal?
• What changes in the context now?

• What is creating this rhythm?
• What should continue?
• What would I risk by trying to improve it?

Three short ways to work the move when there is no notebook, no app, and no time. Two minutes each. Out loud, on paper, or in your head.

Take one thing that has your attention. Write four lines: what I know, what I do not know, what matters now, what I will do from here. Come back after something happens and add one line: what changed. That is it. Four lines are enough to be a PLAIT. The fifth is what returned.

When something hits you hard, ask four questions before you answer. What happened? What am I adding to what happened? Who or what else belongs in the context? What actually requires movement right now? Then respond. Sometimes the answer to the last question is nothing yet.

Take something you are dealing with. Do not classify it. Ask three questions. Is movement the problem? What is happening, changing, recurring, or blocked. Is relationship the problem? Who is involved, what is expected, what is unspoken. Is possibility the problem? Capacity, value, outcome, what would be enough. Then ask which other one changes when you pull on the one you chose.

Those are Flow, Tribe, and Prosper, the three strands of the PLAIT Framework. They are happening together in everything you deal with. One is carrying the weight right now, one is helping, and one is quiet. Watch for one strand being used to avoid another: a schedule fixed to dodge a conversation, a conversation that goes on to avoid a decision.

The same practice with other people in the context. Talk through something. Walk together. Sit at a table. It works between partners, between friends, in a family, on a team. There is no agenda and no one in charge of the thinking.

• Speak from where you stand.
• Do not interpret someone else's context for them.
• Ask before solving.
• Let different truths coexist long enough to understand them.
• Decide together what belongs in the shared context, and what stays with one person.
• Leave with whatever movement actually fits, one move each, and a time to come back to it.

Questions that help: What has your attention in this? What do you see that I might not? What are we assuming someone else has covered? What are we not saying? What would be enough?

In the Framework's words: a shared context is a PLAIT that several people stand in, and the same PLAIT can foreground different strands for different people at the same moment. What is moving for one may be a relationship for another and a question of capacity for a third. This is not facilitation, therapy, or professional care. Where a context involves credible risk, the honest move is toward qualified help.

Scale the practice to the attention you have. One sentence can be enough. A PLAIT should be stable enough to practice and alive enough to revise.

Two things can be true. PLAIT does not require a complex context to collapse into one perspective before you can move within it. The thinking behind that, and the rest of the why, is on the Philosophy shelf.

In the PLAIT Context System the same move runs with the context kept: what belongs together stays together, and what came back sits beside what you wrote before. The practice travels with you. The system lets it persist.