The public workbench
How do we craft a profession that answers what calls us, serves what matters, and works with who we are?
P.o.P.ORG is a public workbench for rethinking profession, purpose, identity, and work.
A profession is more than what you are paid, trained, or certified to do. At its root, it is a commitment you profess: a response to a calling, a problem, and people you hope to serve.
This is where ideas can be organized, tested, connected, and reorganized without needing to become products—or even conclusions.
One inquiry, several ways in
The workbench is larger than any one framework or section. These are several current doors into the same evolving inquiry.
Identities at Work
How identity shapes what we notice, attempt, become, and contribute.
Enter through identity Through languageWords at Work
Words for experiences and possibilities that conventional career vocabulary does not adequately capture.
Enter through language Through valuesValues at Work
A light on what matters in practice: the priorities, tensions, and trade-offs our choices reveal.
Enter through values Through hypothesesHypotheses at Work
Provisional explanations—and several flavors for holding, testing, and revising them.
Enter through hypotheses Through creatingCreativities at Work
Enter through creating Through projects and practiceProjects on Purpose
Experiments, publications, conversations, and attempts to put the inquiry to work.
See current workOn the workbench now
- Be × 4: A Framework
- Verbify your identity
- Reorganizing P.o.P.ORG with the help of LLMs, agents, and other forms of AI
How the workbench works
- Dx > Rx
- Diagnose and define before prescribing.
- Works with me
- What works for someone must also work with who they are.
- Experience + experiment
- Learn through lived experience and thoughtful trials, not expertise alone.
- Signal amid noise
- Discern what genuinely calls amid social, institutional, and internal noise.
- Multiple callings
- Explore how callings might be interpreted and harmonized rather than reduced to one answer.