The Next Move — Seven Practices for Understanding a Work Situation
Published by Force For Good Studio, the creator of this resource.
You’ve agreed to another request. Later, looking at the week ahead, you wonder where you thought the time would come from.
Perhaps the difficulty began before that conversation. A responsibility stayed vague. An earlier deadline moved. Someone assumed you would handle the extra work because you usually do.
The Next Move is a self-guided workbook for examining a work situation and developing a considered response.Created by Thomi Sechehaye at Force For Good Studio, it uses seven practices to connect observation, questions, practical action, and review.
You can begin with a request, conversation, or recurring difficulty before knowing exactly what decision needs to be made.
Who the workbook is for
The Next Move is intended for professionals, independent creatives, founders, and employees handling work situations that deserve closer examination.
These may involve conflicting expectations, uncertain responsibilities, additional client work, or commitments that have become difficult to sustain.
A reader can use it within an existing role. The question may be what needs clarifying or changing in the work already underway.
Examine the circumstances as well as your response
The workbook keeps your interpretation alongside the conditions around you.
Workload, authority, resources, expectations, and support can all affect what is possible.
If two managers set conflicting priorities, you may need their agreement about what comes first. If a client adds a deliverable, you may need a conversation about scope, timing, and payment.
Understanding your own response helps you prepare for those conversations. Identifying who can change the conditions helps you direct the request.
Try a ten-minute work-situation review
Choose one recent request or exchange.
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Describe what happened in a few sentences.
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Write what the request would require from you.
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Identify what you can decide and what needs agreement.
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Draft one question or response that makes the situation clearer.
Consider this fictional example.
A client asked for three additional layouts before Friday.
Preparing them would take time already committed to the approved work.
I can estimate the additional time. The client needs to agree to the scope and schedule.
“I can prepare the additional layouts. Shall I revise the delivery date, or would you prefer to reduce the original scope?”
The response makes a dependency visible. What happens next provides information for the next decision.
How the seven practices work together
The sequence begins with observation and interpretation. It then helps you define the question, examine conditions, investigate another perspective, and understand how the situation developed.
Later practices consider feasible responses, establish an action, and review what happened.
A continuing record keeps useful observations, assumptions, actions, and review points together. This allows the work to develop as circumstances change.
The process asks you to return to experience. A request, a response, or an unsuccessful attempt can each reveal something worth carrying forward.
What to do with your result
Look for the smallest useful action that fits your authority and circumstances.
It may be a question, a meeting request, a proposed adjustment, or a deliberate pause until a named event.
Afterward, record what actually happened. Notice where your expectation was supported and where something different occurred.
If the same difficulty returns, your notes can help you describe the pattern through specific examples.
What the download includes
The Next Move includes printable and fillable PDF editions, a quick-start guide, and three optional ChatGPT prompts for each of its seven practices.
Readers can complete the exercises independently. The prompts offer additional questions for examining an account, noticing missing information, and considering action.
The workbook supports observation and preparation. A change requiring another person’s agreement still depends on that conversation and the circumstances around it.
A method you can return to
If you want a reusable way to examine work situations, The Next Move offers guided practice in understanding what is happening and deciding how to respond.
Force For Good Studio
Common-sense tools for a complicated world.