Reading the disposition

Every school has things it does whatever the policy says. This move finds them before anyone designs an intervention. It maps the relationships that carry the plan, names the states the school keeps returning to and the slow changes underneath, and judges where a small move would travel and where a large one would be absorbed.

Complexity: the four moves

Move 2 of 4 · Finds what the situation is already inclined to do

Find out what the situation will do without you, then decide what to push

Time: 2 hours
People: 5–10, across roles. Include someone who has been at the school a long time and someone who has not.
You need: A3 sheets or a whiteboard, three colours of pen, the ties grid and the reading sheet, the profile from the first move
You leave with: A map of the ties that matter, one or two named tendencies, the slow variables to watch, and where small moves would land

Needs some practice

The idea

What the move is, and why it works

What the move is

Before asking what you want a situation to do, ask what it is already inclined to do. The move reads the present as a set of tendencies. Some outcomes are easy from here and some are hard. A plan that works with the easy ones needs little force. A plan that works against them needs a great deal, and usually loses.

It has two halves. The first maps relations: who is tied to whom, what flows along each tie, and how much trust is in it. The second reads tendencies: where the school settles, what is drifting slowly, and what is already emerging at the edges.

The idea behind it

A list of stakeholders with columns for interest and influence treats people as separate things. The same people in a different arrangement give a different result, so the arrangement is what you map. A tie of spent trust between a department and its senior leaders will bend any plan that runs along it.

Situations also have states they return to, called attractors, and slow variables that decide when they tip. In schools the attractors are usually habits of checking and grading, not policies. The slow variables are things such as trust, workload and how well students write without help. They are rarely counted, and they decide most outcomes.

Why it works

It changes timing and scale. Near a threshold, a small, well-timed move can travel a long way. Where the school is deeply settled, a large push gets absorbed and the plan reports success anyway. Knowing which is which saves effort and goodwill.

It also finds the work already happening. Most schools have someone doing what the plan wants, outside the plan. Reading the disposition finds that person before the plan runs over them.

When

When to reach for it, and when not to

Use it when

Before designing any intervention on a part of the plan that passed the three-condition test.
When the same change worked in one department and failed in another with the same ingredients.
When a plan is meeting resistance nobody can quite name.
When the figures look good and staff do not believe them.

Skip it when

The part is complicated. Relationships matter less when an expert can solve it.
The group cannot speak honestly about trust with this many people in the room. Run a smaller version first.
A reading was done recently and nothing in the profile has moved since.

Before

Before anyone is in the room

Bring the profile and the complex cards from the first move.
Gather what people have said, not only what they have reported: emails, complaints, remarks at meetings, what students say in the canteen.
Find out what happened the last time the school changed something like this, and who remembers it.
Agree that the map stays in the room. A relations map names tensions, and people will not draw it honestly if it goes on a wall.
Print the ties grid and the reading sheet.

Steps

How to run it

6 steps, about 2 hours in all. The questions in quotation marks are meant to be read out as they are.

01
Map the ties, not the people
25 min
Write the people and groups the plan touches around the edge of a large sheet. Then draw the ties between them. For each tie, note what flows along it, whether information, pressure, work or trust, and whether it is tight or loose. Use a third colour for ties where trust has been spent.
Ask the room
- Who hears about this first, and from whom?
- Where does pressure travel when something goes wrong?
- Which of these ties was damaged the last time we changed something like this?
- Who talks to whom about this outside meetings?
Watch for The hairball. If every tie is drawn, nothing can be prioritised. Most ties are weak most of the time. Ask which three could change the result, and thicken those.
02
Find what happens whatever the policy says
20 min
Ask the group for the states the school keeps returning to, whatever is written. These are the attractors. They are usually habits: how marking is checked, what a grade means to parents, what gets done when someone comes to check. Name one or two, and what holds each in place.
Ask the room
- Whatever policy we write, what do we end up doing?
- What does every new initiative here turn into by its second term?
- What holds that in place: a person, a measure, a habit or a fear?
Watch for Fatalism. “That’s just how it is here” is a reason to understand the attractor, not a reason to stop.
03
Name one or two slow variables
15 min
Ask what is changing gradually underneath, too slowly for the dashboard: trust, workload, a skill, a habit. Pick one or two that would decide whether the plan holds. Say how you would watch each without turning it into a target.
Ask the room
- What is changing so slowly here that we would only notice it at the end of the year?
- If this drifted a little further, what would break?
- Who is placed to notice it first, and do they have anyone to tell?
Watch for Slow variables turned into new indicators. Once trust is a number on a dashboard, people will manage the number.
04
Look for thresholds and early warnings
15 min
Look for signs that something is close to tipping. Rising variance, such as the same student rated very differently in different places. Slower recovery from small shocks. A pattern everyone can see and nobody owns. Mark each one on the map.
Ask the room
- Where are things more uneven than they were a term ago?
- What used to settle down in a week and now takes a month?
- What has everyone noticed and nobody been asked to deal with?
Watch for Crisis language without a mechanism. “We’re at breaking point” needs a named tie or variable behind it.
05
Draw the three horizons
25 min
Draw three lines across a sheet. The first is the way things are done now, which is declining. The third is what is already emerging at the margins, often outside the plan. The second is the change in between, including the plan itself. Place what you have found on the lines.
Ask the room
- What are we doing now that will not last, whatever we decide?
- Who is already doing something like the future we want, without being asked?
- Is our plan helping the third horizon grow, or will it be pulled back into the first?
Watch for Three Horizons as a poster. If it does not change what the plan does next, it was decoration.
06
Judge where small moves would travel
20 min
Go back to the complex cards. For each one, say whether the school is near a threshold there or deeply settled. Near a threshold, look for a small, well-timed move. Where it is settled, ask whether the push is worth making at all. Write one sentence per card.
Ask the room
- Which of these cards is the school already leaning towards?
- Where would a small change travel without us pushing it?
- Where would a large push be absorbed and reported as success anyway?
Watch for A reading that ends without a judgement. The output is a decision about where to put effort, not a richer description.

Worksheets

Two sheets to print and fill in

Each one prints on its own sheet of A4. The grey line under each is an example from the worked situation.

Complexity · Reading the disposition · Worksheet

The ties that matter

Records the few relationships that could change the result, and what state each one is in.

Plan or part

Date

Mapped by

From	To	What flows along itInformation, pressure, work, trust	Tight or loose	State of trustGood, thin or spent	Could it change the result?How

geraldajam.com/work/toolkit

Complexity · Reading the disposition · Worksheet

Reading the disposition

Turns the map into a judgement about where to put effort and where to hold back.

Part of the plan

Date

Review on

What happens here whatever the policy says

The states the school keeps returning to

What holds each one in place

Slow variables to watch, and who will notice them

Early warnings we can already see

Declining, and already emerging at the margins

The first and third horizons

Where a small move would travel. Where a large push would be absorbed.

Example Whatever the policy asks, the school produces proof that it was done. Green pen, longer book-check comments and the compliance figure all settle there.

geraldajam.com/work/toolkit

Worked example

What the school was already inclined to do, read in Term 1, Week 8

One school changes how it assesses

Mrs Lim ran the reading at the end of Term 1, Week 8, after the first book check rated humanities “inconsistent”. Mr Ravi, two HODs, a Secondary 2 form teacher and the allied educator for learning support came. The Term 1, Week 3 profile had said the book check would change what teachers wrote. It had, and the group wanted to know what else was already moving.

The tie that carried the plan The map showed that the decisive tie ran between heads of department and senior leaders, and it was thin. Staff had heard “every piece of work” and remembered the triple-marking years. So when humanities was rated “inconsistent”, heads of department read it as blame, and the blame travelled down to teachers within a week. A second tie surprised the group. Students in different subjects were tied to each other through the canteen, where they compared ratings and worked out which subjects were “harsh”. Departments were loosely coupled. Their students were not.
The attractor: proof that it was done Asked what the school ends up doing whatever the policy says, the group agreed quickly. It produces evidence of compliance. Green-pen responses had become ritual by Term 1, Week 5: “I will use more evidence.” Some were written by a chatbot. After the book check, teachers wrote longer comments for the book check, not the student, and one department lost a weekend to it. The ratings were going the same way. Parents read them as grades, and students treated them as a league table.
Two slow variables, and a third nobody took up Staff trust in senior leaders, which the book check was spending. And teacher workload, which was drifting back towards where it had been before two teachers left English. Nobody wanted either on a dashboard. The allied educator offered a third: how well students who struggle with written explanation could show what they knew. The group noted it and moved on. In Term 2, Week 2 she found the evidence for it.
Early warnings Rising variance was easy to see. The same student was Developing in science and Secure in English, because the departments read the scale differently. Comments were getting longer. A class parents’ chat group had decided in Term 1, Week 6 that without weighted assessments “nobody knows where our children stand”, and some families were signing their children up for tuition centres that set practice papers. Nobody owned that pattern. It sat between the school and home.
The third horizon was already in a Secondary 2 science class Mr Ravi had been running whole-class feedback since Term 1, Week 5, outside the policy. His marking time had halved, and his next lessons started from the common mistakes. It produced no green pen and would not pass the book check. It was also the clearest sign in the school of what the plan said it wanted. The group placed it on the third horizon and the green-pen format on the first.

What came out of it

The reading said: this school is disposed to produce proof, so any new measure will be met with proof, and a large push on compliance will be absorbed and reported as success. Small moves were likely to travel where they cut work and did not count, which is where Mr Ravi already was. That shaped the three probes agreed in Term 1, Week 10. The awkward part came later. In Term 2, Week 5 the dashboard showed 96 per cent of books compliant, as the reading predicted, and the cluster newsletter praised the school for it. Knowing the attractor did not stop the school being rewarded for it.

Signs

How to tell it is working, and when it has gone hollow

Working

Someone names a tie that is on no organisation chart, and the group agrees it matters.
The attractor is named in a plain sentence that people recognise and slightly wince at.
The group finds a person already doing what the plan wants, outside the plan.
At least one push in the plan is dropped because the school would absorb it.

Gone hollow

The map has every tie drawn and none thicker than the rest.
“Attractor” and “tipping point” become words for anything that feels stuck or sudden.
“The system wants what it wants” closes the discussion.
The Three Horizons sheet goes on a wall and nothing in the plan changes.

Variations

Other ways to run it

In 45 minutes

Skip the full map. Ask the three questions that carry most of the move: what do we end up doing whatever the policy says, who is already doing what we want outside the plan, and which one relationship would break this plan if it went wrong? Write one sentence for each.

On your own

Draw the ties you can see from where you sit. Then show the map to one person who sits somewhere else, such as a form teacher, a parent volunteer or a student, and ask what is missing. The gaps are the reading.

With students

Ask a Secondary 2 class what students actually do with a policy, as against what it says. Ask which subjects they think are “harsh” and how they know. Students see the ties between subjects that staff cannot, because they are the tie.

What to do with what you made

Take the reading into the next move. Design probes that go with what the school is already inclined to do, and start from the person already doing it. Give each slow variable to someone placed to notice it, and agree how they will say so without turning it into a number.

Probing with options open The next move: act on what the reading found, cheaply and with criteria.Relations before things The idea behind the first half of the move, followed through the whole semester.Dispositions before predictions Attractors, slow variables and early warnings, in more depth.

Tools

Tools, templates and guides worth having

Published elsewhere, and worth the time.

Book
Sharpe, Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope (2013)
The short book behind step 5. Reads the declining, the transitional and the emerging patterns already present.
Routine
Ecocycle Planning, from Liberating Structures (Lipmanowicz & McCandless, 2013)
Places a school’s activities on a cycle of birth, maturity, creative destruction and renewal. A quick group way to see what is ending and what is starting.
Book
Cross & Parker, The Hidden Power of Social Networks (2004)
How to map the informal ties that carry work in an organisation, and what to do with the map once you have it.
Book
Meadows, Thinking in Systems (2008)
Stocks, flows and feedback in plain language. Useful for slow variables, with the caution that it assumes a structure that holds still.

Reading

Where it comes from

Start with the first on the list.

Jullien, F. (2004). A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking. University of Hawai‘i Press.
Shi, the potential inherent in a situation. The deepest account of reading a disposition.
Scheffer, M. (2009). Critical Transitions in Nature and Society. Princeton University Press.
Thresholds, alternative stable states and early-warning signals.
Sharpe, B., Hodgson, A., Leicester, G., Lyon, A., & Fazey, I. (2016). Three Horizons: a pathways practice for transformation. Ecology and Society, 21(2), 47.
The most usable tool for reading what is declining and what is emerging.
Boin, A., Ekengren, M., & Rhinard, M. (2020). Hiding in plain sight: conceptualizing the creeping crisis. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, 11(2), 116–138.
The threat that develops slowly, in plain sight, and belongs to nobody.
Simon, H. A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106(6), 467–482.
Near-decomposability: most things are weakly connected most of the time. The guard against the hairball.

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