This is one of the system pieces. If you’re new here, the more grounded pieces are usually a better place to begin.
The Problem of Direction
A system can work hard without moving anywhere. Activity alone does not produce coherence. In practice, systems drift when the day begins without a clear starting point. The issue is not effort. It is orientation. Shops show this each morning. If the first tasks are scattered, the room settles into a scattered pattern. If the day begins with one stabilising action, that action shapes what follows.
Meadows noted that early conditions set the trajectory. Once a pattern appears, later behaviour aligns with it. The shop behaves the same way. Repair can steady a system and attention can highlight imbalance, but neither establishes the line the system will follow. Direction needs to come first.
Small actions set this orientation. If the counter is cleared early, volunteers use it as the baseline. Customers approach with less hesitation. Queues form cleanly. Tasks settle more easily because the room already has somewhere to land. If the counter begins cluttered, volunteers work around the mess instead of correcting it. Each transaction slows. Slower transactions create queues. Queues increase pressure. Under pressure, accuracy drops. Mistakes spread. The clutter that seemed trivial becomes the pattern the whole day ends up repeating. It happens faster than you expect.
Kinetic Humanism treats direction as the system’s first act of coherence. It is not force. It is a stable pattern early enough for the rest of the day to recognise and follow.
How Direction Forms Inside a System
Direction appears before most people notice it forming. Systems look for the first stable pattern available to them. Once they find it, they organise around it. Behaviour becomes consistent because the mind prefers the path of least resistance, a point Kahneman makes clear in his work on effort. The shop mirrors this logic.
A clean counter sets a low friction pattern. Transactions move smoothly. Volunteers shift between tasks without resistance. Customers settle into the flow of the room. One anchor reduces uncertainty. The direction of the day begins there.
Ignore that anchor and the opposite pattern takes hold. A cluttered counter slows each interaction. Slow interactions increase pressure. Pressure reduces accuracy. Corrections multiply. Momentum shifts towards reactivity rather than coordination.
A straight rail sets a reference point. Volunteers copy what they see without thinking about it, which keeps the next rail close to the same standard. If the first rail leans, the standard drops and the rest of the layout follows that lower expectation. People take their cues from whatever pattern is in front of them. The shop does the same.
Displays work this way as well. If the first one has clear spacing and a steady theme, volunteers reuse that structure when building the next. It saves effort. If the first display is improvised, every later display becomes a separate guess. Coherence thins because nobody has a reliable template to follow.
Directional coherence forms because early clarity reduces the number of decisions people need to make. When effort falls, accuracy rises. With higher accuracy, fewer corrections are required. Once corrections fall, drift slows. The system stabilises around the point that made work easier. If the first stable point is disorder, the same loop runs in reverse.
Direction as a Practice of Small Anchors
Systems do not need dramatic steering. They need small anchors placed early enough to matter. One action that clarifies the next. One correction that stops the wrong pattern from taking hold. In the shop, this might be setting the float before opening, aligning the first rail before the room fills, or putting the first bag of donations in the right place instead of the nearest one. These gestures feel minor, yet they give the day something to lean on.
Lewin framed behaviour as a response to environmental vectors. Modern behavioural work extends that logic. Small anchors create those vectors. They steady one part of the system so the rest can organise around it. A single task completed with care reduces the uncertainty that would otherwise spread. Once the first anchor holds, drift has less space to move. Momentum follows the easiest available path. If that path is coherent, the day tends to follow it.
The same pattern appears beyond the shop. A morning started with one focused action holds its alignment longer. A conversation opened with calm often keeps that tone. Direction is rarely a single decision. It is a sequence shaped by the earliest actions that reduced friction.
Systems follow what they recognise. The anchors you place become the ones you end up moving with.
Have you ever seen a day follow the first decision you made without noticing it happen?
Further Reading
Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (2008).
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).
Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (1995).
Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (1998).
Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, Nudge (2008).
Amy C. Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (2012).
Note
Header Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash