Orientation
We do not meet the world from nowhere.
We enter situations as particular people — shaped by history, temperament, values, experience, assumptions and expectations. We meet others who arrive in the same condition.
Those encounters take place inside wider systems: organisations, cultures, structures and institutions that quietly influence what becomes possible.
Orientation is the practice of becoming more aware of these layers, how they shape us, and where meaningful agency remains.
Three perspectives on the same living field: the person entering the situation, the field between us, and the wider system around us.
The field shapes which parts of us become salient — and orientation returns some freedom in how we take part in what follows.
Three perspectives
Me → Between us → Around us
One field
Three perspectives, continuously shaping one another
These are not separate worlds, or three isolated models. The person shapes the relationship. The relationship shapes the person. The organisation shapes both.
And through everyday participation — what is said, tolerated, rewarded, repeated or left alone — people and relationships continuously reinforce, alter or challenge the organisation in return.
- MePersonal Orientation — the person entering the situation.
- Between usRelational Orientation — the field between us.
- Around usOrganisational Orientation — the wider system around us.
One situation
The same problem, read three ways
A senior leadership team is individually strong but works in silos. Cross-functional decisions are slow. Issues repeatedly escalate upward. The strategy is clear; execution is uneven. The CEO is beginning to wonder whether some of the leaders need replacing.
Nothing about that description is disputed. What differs is where attention is placed — and each placement makes a different action look obvious.
How am I meeting this situation, and how might that shape what I see?
The CEO has already formed an explanation, and it is beginning to feel settled: this is a calibre problem. The discomfort is real — slow decisions, escalations landing on one desk — and discomfort creates pressure to act decisively. Replacement is the response most available to someone in that position. Worth noticing: what does sitting at the top of the escalation chain make easier to see, and what does it hide?
What is happening between us that helps reproduce the situation?
Between the leaders, decisions are rarely refused — they are deferred. Two functions depend on each other and neither says so plainly. Disagreement is handled upward rather than across, which keeps relationships civil and leaves the issue unresolved. Escalation is not a failure of the group; it is the move the group has learned is safe.
What around us is making this behaviour more likely?
Each leader is measured on their own function's results. No decision right covers the space between them, so cross-functional choices have no owner and legitimately travel up. Interfaces are informal; formal authority and informal authority sit in different places. In those conditions, protecting your own remit is not a defect of character. It is a rational response to how the organisation is arranged.
Same situation. Three readings. Different possible actions.
A reading confined to the individual level arrives quickly at one conclusion: replace people. A wider reading may instead point to decision rights that were never settled, incentives pulling against one another, an unresolved relationship pattern nobody names, or accountability that is shared in language and unowned in practice.
It may still conclude that a leader should be replaced — but on better evidence, and without expecting the same behaviour to disappear when the next person inherits the same conditions. Conditions explain a great deal; they do not dissolve individual responsibility.
The practical discipline is narrow: before replacing people, check whether the system is rewarding the behaviour you want to remove.
A CURRENT reading
The field becomes wider. The movement remains the same.
- Staycreate enough space to notice what is happening.
- Senseunderstand what matters and what may be shaping it.
- Shapeidentify where meaningful agency remains, and participate deliberately.
Back to CURRENT
We are shaped by the circumstances we enter.
Through participation, we also help shape what they become.