A direction to steer by – not a destination to predict.
An Alternative HeadingAlternative Heading: A better direction an intervention seeks to support, revised as it learns. It is not a fixed blueprint for a final state. is the nearer, revisable bearing an intervention uses to influence a landscape’s present trajectory in a more integrated social-ecological direction.
A vision and an Alternative Heading can do different jobs.
The Playbook’s practical concern is not with aspiration itself, but with treating a distant imagined future as if it were a predictable programme destination.
An Alternative Heading as operational bearing
A nearer, revisable direction based on the best current reading of the landscape. It can be wrong, tested against evidence and corrected as the system responds.
Use: Use it to decide what movement to seek now, which opportunity points matter and whether current effects remain aligned.
New evidence should be able to move the arrow.
Click through common moments that may require the team to revise its route, sequence or bearing.
Initial bearing
The first formulation is a baseline built from incomplete knowledge. It should be plausible, directional and explicit about uncertainty.
Make the direction clear enough to guide the next decision.
What patterns, power relations and practices are currently dominating the landscape’s trajectory?
What should become more or less possible, rewarded, connected or mutually regulated?
How would the direction improve social-ecological integration rather than benefit one strandStrand: An actor group and the practices through which it shapes the landscape over time. alone?
What evidence suggests movement is possible, and where does the system currently have giveGive: Room for movement: a condition in which the system may be shifted.?
What early changes in practices, relationships, power or feedback would suggest the headingHeading: The direction in which the landscape is currently moving, produced by many actors and their interactions. is shifting?
What evidence, harm or system response would make the team reconsider the bearing?
Evidence-based course correction is part of adaptive delivery.
Schedule explicit review moments within the programme’s governance arrangements, and use accumulated learning from fomentsFoment: A small, deliberate, time-bound intervention designed to test and influence how the system responds., monitoring and landscape conversations to assess whether the bearing should be refined.
Does the initial heading still match the regulatoryRegulation: Any way actors shape what others can or cannot do, including rules, money, prices, custom and persuasion. It is broader than government regulation. architecture the team has mapped?
Are responses revealing a more plausible or less harmful route?
Have new actors, crises or decisions changed what is possible or legitimate?
Is the promising effect genuinely aligned, or are costs and exclusions being hidden?
Continue through connected concepts
Read the full Alternative Heading chapter.
The full reading provides the conceptual foundations, examples, sources and methodological detail behind this page.
Terms used on this page
- Strand
- An actor group and the practices through which it shapes the landscape over time.
- Heading
- The direction in which the landscape is currently moving, produced by many actors and their interactions.
- Alternative Heading
- A better direction an intervention seeks to support, revised as it learns. It is not a fixed blueprint for a final state.
- Regulation
- Any way actors shape what others can or cannot do, including rules, money, prices, custom and persuasion. It is broader than government regulation.
- Give
- Room for movement: a condition in which the system may be shifted.
- Foment
- A small, deliberate, time-bound intervention designed to test and influence how the system responds.
