Locate
Choose where it stands and be ready to defend the choice; nothing starts until "here" is decided.
The Situationists' Paris, mapped by mood instead of streets.
Seen in Guy Debord, The Naked City, 1957
Try it on your work
Find the exact physical place where your project lives (where the decisions happen, where the material sits) and mark it. If you couldn't pick one spot, that is the finding.
Ask, of one persistent problem: where is it? Name a location (a meeting, a document, a room, a person's desk) and go to it or open it. Problems with no locatable address are a different species; note which yours is.
Take one property of your project (its quality, its delay, its cost) and locate the single step where most of it is produced. If no step accounts for more than the rest, you've learned it's distributed; write that down.
How it has been used
Make the position the content: where you stand, where it happens, where it's from. Land artists made whole works of coordinates. The move forces you to treat place as a decision, not a given: "here" has to be chosen and defensible, or the work hasn't started.
Where it leads
Grouped under Help me see it from another angle