The contribution that replaces the forecast with a reading of the present. It asks which futures the situation, as it is now arranged, makes easy and which it makes hard. Then it asks where a small push would land, and where a large one would be absorbed.
What is this situation already inclined to do?
Forecasting asks what will happen, and under complexity it does poorly. Dispositional analysis asks something else: what is this system inclined to do, given how it is configured now, and what would change that inclination? Its concepts come from ecology and economics. Attractors are the states a system returns to. Slow variables decide when it tips. Early-warning signals show before a shift, and lock-in makes early choices hard to undo. Jullien’s account of shi, the potential in a configuration, is an older version of the same idea. The contribution moves attention from outcomes to the state of the system. It is weakest when asked for dates.
Outside school
Two patients leave hospital with the same blood results. A good clinician does not expect the same from both. One has bounced back from every illness she has had. The other took months to recover from a minor fall last winter, and has been slower to get up after each knock since. The clinician cannot say what will happen to either. She can say which of them is closer to the edge.
That is the judgement this contribution asks for. Dispositional analysis is closer to a clinician’s judgement of a patient’s resilience than to a weather forecast. Forecasting asks what will happen, and Tetlock’s long study of expert political judgement showed how poorly it does once the system is complex. Reading a disposition asks what the situation is inclined to do as it stands, and what would change that.
The slow recovery is the clue. Ecologists have found the same pattern in systems about to tip into a different state. Scheffer and his colleagues call it critical slowing down: near a threshold, a system takes longer to recover from small shocks, and swings more widely while it does. The warning sits in how the system answers a knock. Its average can look fine until the day it does not.
A river shows the other half. A kayaker reads the current and puts in a stroke where the water will do most of the work. Jullien calls the potential in a configuration shi, and sets it against the European habit of choosing a goal and imposing a plan on the situation. The skill is in the timing. The same stroke in the wrong place is wasted against the current.
The term
Every page follows the same Singapore secondary school through the same semester, Term 1 and Term 2. The school is changing how it assesses, both of learning and for it: fewer weighted assessments, more feedback and ratings that are meant to say something. The five people and the events of the semester stay fixed. Only the contribution reading them changes.
All five, interconnected
The five threads interleaved across the twelve weeks, so the hand-offs between them are visible. Pick a person to follow their term on its own. The people are illustrative, and the same five appear on every contribution’s page.
Before Term 1
Mrs Lim, reading the plan again
The plan swaps term-by-term weighted assessments for two checkpoints a year. Mrs Lim knows the school has loosened its testing twice before, and both times the tests came back within two years under new names. She also knows English still remembers the triple marking. Trust in leadership moves slowly in both directions, and this semester it starts low.
Term 1, Week 3
Mdm Rohani, reading the app
Aisyah is Developing in almost everything, and last year’s results slips showed marks. The scale measures against the end of the year, so Developing in January is where most of Secondary 2 should be. Nothing on the screen says that. Mdm Rohani reads it the way the old marks taught her to, as a fall.
Term 1, Week 5
Mr Ravi, in Secondary 2 science
Green-pen responses have already settled into ritual: “I will use more evidence”, a few of them written by a chatbot. Mr Ravi tries whole-class feedback instead, outside the policy, and does not ask. His marking time halves and the next lesson starts from the common mistakes. It is a small move made where the department was already tired.
Term 1, Week 6
Mdm Rohani, at 3am on a break
The class parents’ chat group decides that without weighted assessments nobody knows where their children stand. Families sign up for tuition centres that set practice papers, so the assessments the school removed come back, privately and at a price. Aisyah has no tuition. Mdm Rohani looks up the price before closing the tab.
Term 1, Week 8
Mrs Lim, after the book check
The first book check rates humanities “inconsistent”. Within a week comments get longer and neater, and one department loses a weekend to them. Mrs Lim watches the policy pull teachers back toward the habit it was meant to end, marking for whoever checks the books. Feedback has found the old groove, and it took a fortnight.
Term 1, Week 10
Mr Ravi and Mrs Lim, after the staff meeting
Staff agree three probes, and English agrees only to the quiz. Mrs Lim sees that departments will take a change they grew and refuse one handed to them, however good. Whole-class feedback grew in science, and geography is already copying it. She stops pressing on the other two and lets the copying run.
Term 2, Week 2
Aisyah, in the fortnightly quiz
The quiz finds a misconception about energy across Secondary 2 that the checkpoint would not have shown until the end of the semester. Aisyah likes the quizzes because they do not count. Then her class asks for them to count. Even the students pull the new thing back toward the old shape.
Term 2, Week 2
Mrs Lim, reading the allied educator’s note
The allied educator for learning support notes that students still building their English are rated Emerging in nearly everything, because the ratings judge written explanation. It appears on no dashboard, and Mrs Lim nearly files it. Read alongside the ratings, it looks like something building slowly in plain view, with no measure anyone is watching.
Term 2, Week 4
Aisyah, in the checkpoint
Strong in class all semester, Aisyah freezes in the timed English paper and is rated Emerging. The checkpoint was meant to be one piece of evidence among many. In the week it happens it is the only one anyone talks about, because the school, the parents and the students all know how to read a big test. Mdm Rohani complains through the app, and a teacher quietly rates borderline students up.
Term 2, Week 5
Ms Tay, with the newsletter
The dashboard shows 96 per cent of books compliant, and the cluster newsletter cites the school as an exemplar of “feedback culture”. Ms Tay knows nobody in the school trusts the number. Across her twelve schools the ratings drift the same way, toward whatever brings the fewest complaints. The target got what it asked for, and the habits underneath have barely moved.
Term 2, Week 6
Mrs Lim, at the contract review
The supplier offers a further discount to extend to five years and lock in the five-point scale. The finance committee wants the saving. Mrs Lim takes one year at a higher price, because five years would fix the scale at the least settled moment of the year. She has to defend the cost to the principal, and the first attempt does not go well.
Term 2, Week 8
Mdm Rohani and Mr Ravi, on a Saturday morning
The Meet-the-Parents session has a Saturday morning slot after shift-working parents complained in Term 1, and Mdm Rohani comes for the first time in two years. Mr Ravi shows her Aisyah’s quiz record. She sees learning the Emerging did not show. It is the only account of Aisyah’s semester that does not come from a timed paper.
Term 2, Week 10
Ms Tay and Mrs Lim, at the end of the semester
Whole-class feedback has spread to two more departments, changed on the way. The scale parents see is cut to three points and the one staff see is not. Mrs Lim proposes dropping the format check from book checks, and the cluster superintendent’s office still wants the compliance figure. Ms Tay proposes the cluster stop collecting twice-a-term ratings, and the promised guidance on reporting has still not arrived.
Read for its dispositions, the semester had an attractor, the marked test, and the plan pushed against it without changing what held the school there. Parents rebuilt the tests through tuition, a class asked for its quizzes to count, and the checkpoint became the one result anyone believed. The moves that shifted anything were small and well timed: whole-class feedback in a tired department, a Saturday slot Mdm Rohani could reach. The warnings came from an allied educator’s note and a compliance figure too good to trust, and nobody can yet say whether the school has moved or is circling the old shape more slowly.
Implications
The same five dimensions for all seven contributions. Read them across on the compare page.
From forecasting trajectories to reading propensities. A propensity is the tendency a system has in its current configuration. It makes some futures easier to reach and others harder. The question changes from “what will happen?” to “what is this inclined to do, and what would change that?”
The contribution joins three lines of work. One is Jullien’s account of shi, the potential inherent in a situation. Another is the Cynefin tradition’s attention to a system’s dispositional state. The third is the dynamics of attractors, path dependence and critical transitions. Five concepts carry most of the weight. Attractors are the states a system returns to. Slow variables are the gradual conditions that decide when it tips. Early-warning signals, such as rising variance, come before a transition. Creeping crises develop in plain view and go unaddressed. Lock-in makes early choices hard to reverse.
Forecasting asks what will happen, and performs poorly under complexity. Scenario planning asks what could happen, and anchors its futures mainly in drivers outside the system. Both look forward from the outside. Neither asks what the present arrangement is already leaning toward.
Systems thinking comes closest, because it reads behaviour from structure. But it assumes a structure that holds still long enough to be mapped. Futures thinking imagines futures in advance, where the dispositional view holds that futures grow out of the present, so the most useful futures work starts from what the present is inclined to do. Jullien draws the contrast more sharply. One tradition sets a goal and imposes a plan. The other reads a situation’s tendencies early and works with them.
It moves attention from outcomes to the state of the system, and that changes three judgements. Where a system is near a threshold, small, well-timed actions matter most. Where it is deeply stable, large pushes are absorbed and wasted. Where slow variables are drifting, the time to act is before the fast ones show anything.
The overlay turns this into one check that fits any plan: what is the situation already inclined to do without us, and are we working with or against that propensity? Applied to a dashboard, it adds early-warning indicators for slow variables. Applied to a SWOT, it asks which factors interact, and which way the situation is already leaning.
It asks a school to watch things that move slowly and are rarely counted: how confident students are in timed writing, how far leaders are trusted, how much marking lands on a teacher’s weekend. Dashboards built for compliance reporting flatten exactly these signals. The sensing has to come from people placed to notice, such as an allied educator for learning support, a parent or a teacher reading quiz results, and someone has to be listening when they do.
It also asks for patience about timing. A good move made at the wrong moment is absorbed. The same move made when the situation is unsettled, or when something outside it is already shifting, can travel a long way. That is uncomfortable for a school that plans in academic years and reports every term.
Two ways. The first is fatalism: “the system wants what it wants”, used as a reason to do nothing. That is complexity as alibi, and the guardrail is the usual one. Name the attractor, name the slow variable, commit to a direction and say what would show the reading to be wrong.
The second is metaphor creep. “Attractor” and “tipping point” become words for any situation that feels stuck or sudden, with no mechanism behind them. Weak-signal scanning turns into a list of trends, and Three Horizons into a poster. Early-warning signals are well grounded in ecology. In schools the evidence is mostly case illustration.
Methods
The repertoire for this contribution, with an evidence rating for each method. Strong means tested in more than one field. Emerging means promising, and mostly case studies.
Attractor and pattern mapping
Moderate to strongNames the states a situation keeps returning to and what holds it there. In a school that is usually a habit of assessment or a timetable, not a policy.
Estuarine mapping
Moderate to strongFrom the Cynefin tradition. Maps the constraints shaping a situation and how hard each would be to shift, so effort goes where change is within reach.
Early-warning indicators
Moderate to strongWatches for rising variance and slower recovery from small shocks before a transition. Well evidenced in ecology. In organisations the indicators are proxies and need choosing with care.
Weak-signal scanning
Moderate to strongCollects the small, early signs that the main measures miss, and keeps them long enough for a pattern to show.
Three Horizons
Moderate to strongReads the declining and the emerging patterns already present in a situation, and the moves that sit between them.
Reading
Start with the first on the list.
Jullien, F. (2004). A treatise on efficacy: Between Western and Chinese thinking (J. Lloyd, Trans.). University of Hawai’i Press.
Shi, the potential in a configuration, set against the habit of choosing a goal and imposing a plan.
Scheffer, M., Bascompte, J., Brock, W. A., Brovkin, V., Carpenter, S. R., Dakos, V., Held, H., van Nes, E. H., Rietkerk, M., & Sugihara, G. (2009). Early-warning signals for critical transitions. Nature, 461(7260), 53–59.
The case that critical slowing down and rising variance can signal a transition before it arrives.
Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R., & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 9(2), 5.
Resilience as a property of the system’s state, and the slow variables that decide when it tips.
Arthur, W. B. (1989). Competing technologies, increasing returns, and lock-in by historical events. The Economic Journal, 99(394), 116–131.
How small early events, reinforced by increasing returns, lock in outcomes that are hard to reverse.
Snowden, D., & Rancati, A. (2021). Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis: A field guide for decision makers inspired by the Cynefin framework. Publications Office of the European Union.
The Cynefin tradition’s case for working with what the present could become, instead of closing a gap to an ideal future.
Sharpe, B., Hodgson, A., Leicester, G., Lyon, A., & Fazey, I. (2016). Three horizons: A pathways practice for transformation. Ecology and Society, 21(2), 47.
Three Horizons as a practice for reading the declining and emerging patterns already present.