skills/shape-handbook/references/practices.md

# Shape working practices

Practices explain how to understand, organize, approach, and maintain work in the
area. They can establish ownership, useful distinctions, writing conventions,
method selection, and interpretation of evidence. A practice belongs when it
changes a real working decision; generic advice earns no place merely by being true.

Read current guidance and selected area sources before choosing what to preserve.
Separate the current work from the method of doing it. A writing brief records an
article's audience, purpose, and key points; a practice can explain how to develop
and review a brief. For a document mixing meeting guidance with a current task
list, judge each statement: preserve the reusable guidance and leave the task list
with the work. Recommend cleanup of files outside the handbook without changing them.

Explicit owner direction can establish a convention without successful examples.
Applicable existing instructions provide evidence of adopted conventions. Repeated
behavior can motivate a proposal but does not prove adoption, value, or causality.
Keep consequential inferences visibly proposed until adopted. Distinguish observed
behavior, stated intent, and interpretation; preserve useful current rationale
without retaining a discovery history.

Organize `practices/` around coherent concerns or reader questions. Update the
existing owner rather than making a parallel account. Explain applicability, the
considerations that change action, and consequential exceptions. Readers should
not need the original conversation or a prescribed lesson sequence.

A concern may also need an independent check or a useful template. Coordinate those
changes when they serve the requested refinement, linking each artifact's owner
rather than copying its meaning. Do not turn a broad improvement request into
unrequested Playbook creation. For relevant changes, also read
[Checks](checks.md) or [Playbooks](playbooks.md).

Adapt [the practice starter](../assets/practice.md) or an applicable local template
when helpful. Its headings are optional. Add a local template only for a concrete
reuse benefit; do not generalize incidental examples into policy.

Before finishing, check whether a future contributor can make the relevant decision,
whether readers can distinguish proposed from adopted guidance, and whether
related checks, templates, and navigation still agree. Keep the work's requirements
and findings in their authoritative files.