The Field Manual

Abstract

This chapter sets out one year of work, week by week, for an organisation that has decided to see the ground it stands on and to act on what it sees. It is written for the person who will run it: a chief executive, an operations director, the head of a school or a housing association, the owner of a business with forty people in it. It names the roles, the meetings, the decisions and the documents, and it says at each stage what can go wrong and what to do about it. The year has four quarters, and each has a single job. The first quarter is for seeing, and sets no targets at all. The second is for drawing the whole portrait and opening the argument. The third is for trying things. The fourth is for writing down what has been learned so that it outlasts the people who learned it. An organisation that skips the first quarter, which most are tempted to do, will spend the rest of the year defending targets it set before it knew where it stood.