Below the program (the sequence of targets that carries out a plan) there are two more levels, project and order, and each is narrower than the one above it. A task that never gets broken down to an order, or that nobody follows up, stalls quietly. These levels sit in the middle, which is exactly why they are so easy to skip.
Two levels below the plan
The whole booklet is built around this descent. In its opening it describes a ladder that connects a sentence like I want the business to grow to someone photographing ten products on a Monday morning. This chapter is where the descent lands on the ground.
A project is the series of steps that carries out a single step of the program. An order is the spoken or written instruction to carry out a step, or to apply a policy. It is the smallest unit of action there is.
Read it from the top down: plan, program, project, order. Each level is narrower than the one above, and according to the booklet, the plans that stop usually stop at a level somebody skipped in the middle.
Suppose a gift shop whose program includes setting up a catalogue. The project breaks that into steps: photograph ten products, build a message template, open a page, publish a few posts. The order is already a sentence addressed to one particular person, with a day attached, for the first of those steps.
Or a garage owner who descends from improving vehicle reception to an instruction for a named employee to print the new reception form and put copies on the counter today. The same idea, four levels lower.
At the end of the descent is a sentence a person can carry out without asking questions. It names a person, an action and a day. Everything above the order is still planning.
On paper the descent looks obvious. In practice many owners stop in the middle and hand people something that is still an idea.
When a project is presented as an order
The booklet has a simple rule of thumb, with an exact number, for deciding whether something is an order or a project. It isn't scientifically exact, and it saves a great deal of confusion.
The logic is clear. A task that will take somebody a whole month is a project, and it needs breaking down before you hand it over. According to the booklet, no reason is more common for things standing still than tasks nobody broke down.
Suppose a solo lawyer sets herself the task of moving contract signing over to digital. Split into a project of four steps, it gets done.
The opposite is an owner who asks an employee to sort out the stock. Two months pass with no progress. It was a project presented as an order.
A program needs someone watching it
Two statements from the source are worth pinning to the wall. The first says a program with no follow-up will fail, so it is better not to begin one. The second says a program needs somebody's attention, and the source puts it in a striking way: a program with no parent deteriorates.
This describes how the work is structured. A plan with nobody looking at it every week stops advancing, however good it was, and however disciplined the team is.
Suppose a small-restaurant owner asks the chef for a delivery menu by month end and doesn't look in on it halfway. At month end there is no menu, and the owner finds out only when a customer asks.
The second time round he sets a short check every Sunday. Same chef, same menu, and it launches on time. Notice how little changed: one short check, on the same day every week.
A program that nobody watches is a program that has stopped, and usually nobody knows it yet.
There is a third case, where the breakdown was done, someone is following up, and still nothing happened. Sometimes the order never reached the person who was supposed to carry it out. It stopped on the way. The booklet deals with that in the next chapter.
What the booklet has on this
In the booklet From Goal to Target, this chapter has a diagram of the descent from plan to order, and two exercises, build it and spot it. The next chapter covers the plan for the coming week, and the step almost everyone skips on the way there.
When something isn't moving, check two things: did it come down to an order somebody received, and is anyone looking at it?