The Practice — The Brief Experiment
For Institutions
The Shift

The Practice

BUILD is not a concept to understand. It is a skill to develop. These exercises build professional judgment through repeated cycles of questioning, experimenting, and learning.

Why Practice Matters

Understanding the FIND vs. BUILD distinction intellectually is a start, but it is not enough. The shift from FIND to BUILD happens through practice, not through comprehension. You develop the BUILD orientation by repeatedly asking the question, extracting your capabilities, seeing arrangements, and designing experiments.

The exercises that follow are not tests to pass. They are practices to repeat. Each time you work through them, you strengthen your ability to see options, to separate your capabilities from your current job, and to design small experiments that generate real information.

Practice 1: Capability Extraction

The first practice is learning to see your capabilities as separate from your job title. Most people describe themselves by their job. "I'm an accountant," "I'm a marketing manager." This practice trains you to see underneath the title to what you actually bring.

1
The Extraction

Take your current or most recent job title. Now list everything you actually do in that role, being as specific as possible. The goal is to separate what you ARE called from what you actually DO.

Step One
Write down your job title. This is your current arrangement.
Step Two
List every skill you use regularly. Be specific. "Communication" is too vague. "Explaining technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders" is a capability.
Step Three
List every type of knowledge you apply. Domain knowledge, process knowledge, industry knowledge, relationship knowledge.
Step Four
List the problems you solve. What do people come to you for? What breaks when you are not there?
What you now have is a list of capabilities. The job title was one arrangement of them. These capabilities could be arranged in many other ways. Keep this list.

Practice 2: Arrangement Mapping

Once you can see your capabilities as separate from your job, the next practice is seeing other arrangements those capabilities could take. This is where the question "What else could I be?" becomes concrete.

2
The Map

Using the capability list from Practice 1, design three different arrangements. Each arrangement uses your capabilities differently to serve different purposes in different contexts.

Arrangement A
Inside an organization, but in a different role than your current one. What other positions could use your capabilities? What adjacent roles exist that you have not considered?
Arrangement B
Independent of any organization. If you offered your capabilities directly to clients or customers, what would that look like? What problems would you solve? Who would pay for the solution?
Arrangement C
Building something new. If you used your capabilities to create a product, service, or venture, what would it be? What do you understand that others do not?
Notice what happens when you design arrangements. The same capabilities, arranged differently, create entirely different professional lives. You are not any single arrangement. You are the person who could occupy any of them.

Practice 3: The Question Habit

The anchor question only works if you actually use it. This practice trains you to ask "What else could this be?" at decision points until it becomes automatic.

3
The Habit

For the next seven days, every time you face a professional decision or opportunity, pause and ask the question before responding.

When you see a job posting
Ask "What else could this role become if I took it?"
When someone asks you to take on a project
Ask "What else could I do with this experience afterward?"
When you feel stuck
Ask "What else could I be with what I already have?"
When you learn a new skill
Ask "What else could this enable?"
Keep a record of what you notice when you ask the question. What options appeared that you would not have seen otherwise? What assumptions did the question reveal?
Quick Practice

The Envy Index

Think of three people whose professional lives you envy, even slightly. For each one, identify exactly what you envy. Is it their income, autonomy, recognition, impact, or schedule? Envy is information. It reveals what you want but have not admitted. Ask yourself what experiment you could run to test whether you actually want what they have.

Practice 4: Experiment Design

The BUILD orientation produces options. Experiments test them. This practice trains you to design experiments that generate real information without requiring permanent commitment.

4
The Experiment

Choose one arrangement from Practice 2 that interests you. Design an experiment to test whether that arrangement fits without committing to it permanently.

Small
What is the smallest version of this arrangement you could try? Not the full commitment, but a taste that would teach you something real.
Time-Bound
How long will you run the experiment? Set a specific end date when you will evaluate what you learned. Two weeks, thirty days, one quarter.
Reversible
How would you exit if it does not work? What would you need to preserve to return to your current arrangement if necessary?
Observable
What will you pay attention to? What would success look like? What would failure look like? How will you know which one happened?
The experiment is not the goal. The goal is the information the experiment produces. Design experiments to learn, not to succeed. A failed experiment that teaches you something is more valuable than a successful experiment that teaches you nothing.

The Ongoing Practice

These exercises are not something you complete once. They are practices you return to as your capabilities grow, as conditions change, as you become someone new.

The capability extraction reveals different things at different points in your career. The arrangement map expands as you learn more about what exists. The question habit deepens with use. The experiment designs improve as you learn from previous experiments.

The goal is not to complete these practices. The goal is to internalize them so deeply that asking "What else could I be?" becomes your default response to uncertainty. When that happens, you have made the shift from FIND to BUILD.