Somebody needs something; somebody else does it. A little of that gets stated and most of it is assumed, and what comes apart is almost always the part nobody said. 4-loop is a free browser tool for drawing those agreements as promises between named people, and then running them. The acts arrive one at a time, and a work inbox shows whose day it is: what is on each person's plate, who they are waiting on, and when it lands. A process is designed from above and lived from below, and this is the view from below.
Every commitment is one loop with four moments — the request, the agreement, the report that it is done, and the customer declaring themselves satisfied — and a loop is finished only when it gets back to where it started. The notation comes from the language/action perspective and the conversation for action described by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. What a run shows that a board of tasks cannot: who is waiting on whom, which promises were never actually asked for, which moments no person stands behind, and where a date comes from.
It is an instrument for designing systems rather than for running them: you draw how the coordination is meant to go, run it, and take what the design asks of people into the design and into the conversation. Everything around the work already records what happened and agents will record far more, but almost none of that machinery has a theory of what people are doing when they speak — it can tell you a message was sent, not that somebody was asked. This is where the account of what was supposed to happen lives. Nothing you draw leaves your browser, and an annotated example network opens in a click.