Field Guide

Whether you lead from the boardroom, sit in a strategy session, manage a team, serve on a church council, run a business, or simply find yourself wondering why an institution keeps behaving the way it does, you’re already encountering the forces described here.

Institutions rarely announce what’s happening to them. Their movement shows up in ordinary things: what gets attention, what gets measured, which opportunities get pursued, how decisions get made, what stories get repeated, what practices quietly disappear, who acquires standing, what a new technology makes easier, and what people slowly learn to want.

Ordered Agency gives names to some of these distinctions. The Field Guide helps you learn to see them.

The grammar is distinctly Christian, but most of the work of attentiveness begins before a theological conclusion is spoken aloud: noticing what is actually there, distinguishing what we know from how we have interpreted it, asking what good is pulling the institution, and testing whether the agency we exercise remains a fitting participation in that good.

Read one entry before a meeting. Carry the Watch for and the closing question into the conversation.