Description and Discernment for Your Practice
Description and Discernment for Your Practice · 9 min
This video examines your own creative practice using the inner loop of Description and Discernment: articulating what you do, how you do it, and how you work, and using that articulation to create explicit standards to evaluate work against.
Key takeaways
- AI cannot serve a practice you have not described, and you cannot evaluate output against standards you have not made explicit.
- Each layer of your practice, Product, Process, and Performance, runs its own Description and Discernment loop.
- Process standards live at the step level: that is what lets you judge whether AI at a given step served the work or undermined it.
- Performance here means your behavior as a working creator, and is the layer most affected by AI over time.
Exercises
Practice Articulation Workbook
Put your own practice into words across what you make, how you make it, and how you work, then convert those descriptions into standards a peer could apply to work that is not yours. Finally, calibrate: test your standards against one of your older pieces to make sure they can actually tell adequate work from excellent.
Lesson reflection
- Which layer was hardest to articulate, and why? What surprised you in your honest process map?
What's next
You now have a described practice and explicit standards. The next lesson points that toolkit at an actual decision: for one real piece of work, whether AI belongs, where, and what responsibilities follow.