Fieldcraft in Change

Small flowering plant growing from a crack in an orange concrete surface.

Source: @nathaliarantes via Unsplash

Beyond the Playbook: Why Change Work Needs Fieldcraft

We talk a lot about managing change, influencing behaviour, shifting culture, driving outcomes.
But in the field, real change rarely unfolds in a neat diagram. And it can’t be wrangled into something manageable.

It hums through conversation, tension, silence, and resistance.
It moves through informal networks, moments of discomfort, sidelong glances, and quiet acts of courage.
And it's only when we're willing to sit with all of that, to be in it, that we can truly meet change where it lives, not where we wish it would.

Some call it intuition. Others call it experience.
But the best change leaders know it as fieldcraft; the quiet, practised art of showing up, sensing, and adjusting with care when the terrain gets messy.

It’s not about following a model or holding the pen at the front of the room.
It’s about listening deeply, noticing what’s unspoken, and making wise moves, even when the clarity is out of reach.

Because real change doesn’t come from certainty.
It comes from presence, not performance.

  • noun

    1. the techniques involved in living, travelling, or making military or scientific observations in the field, especially while remaining undetected.

12min read

Fieldcraft in Change: What It Is, and Why It’s Not in the Playbook

Fieldcraft is the embodied, relational, and often invisible skillset that experienced change leaders draw on to work with complexity, navigate power dynamics, and adapt in real time.

It’s not taught in most change methodologies, and it doesn’t sit neatly in a competency framework, but it’s there, humming beneath the surface in the leaders who move through change with grounded presence and subtle influence.

Where models offer structure, fieldcraft offers sensing. Where plans prescribe steps, fieldcraft asks: “What’s really going on here?”

It’s the ability to operate in the grey:

  • the emotionally charged conversations

  • the unsaid politics behind the meeting

  • the informal networks that move faster than the formal ones ever will.

Fieldcraft means knowing how to move with the system, not just through it. To feel the temperature of a room. To sense hesitation. To know when to push, and when to pause. These aren’t soft skills - they’re survival skills in complex environments.

“The map is not the territory,” said Alfred Korzybski, and the same holds true for change. The plan is not the reality. The model is not the moment.

This is where fieldcraft differs from modelcraft. Modelcraft is about frameworks and design. It’s valuable, but insufficient. Fieldcraft is what you draw on in practice, when the system resists, people go quiet, or something doesn’t feel quite right. It’s your judgement, not just your toolkit. Your attention, not just your training.

And it’s relational. Deeply so. Fieldcraft is built through trust, credibility, and the care you bring to each interaction. It’s about presence, not performance.

As Margaret Wheatley reminds us, “People only support what they help to create.” Fieldcraft is what lets you invite people into the work, not just push change at them.

Why it matters: Why Fieldcraft Is the Hidden Engine of Real Change

In a world that’s increasingly volatile and interdependent, the playbook is rarely enough. Change doesn’t happen in straight lines. It loops, it stalls, it moves through relationships, reactions, and resistance. It unfolds through trust, timing, and relational momentum, not just planning cycles and project gates.

In systems change, pace matters. Strategy unfolds in seasons. Fieldcraft isn’t just about navigating today’s tensions, it’s about holding the integrity of the arc, tending conditions for emergence, and sustaining coherence across time.

From Control to Complexity

We’ve been taught to manage change, to scope, plan, track, and deliver. But complexity doesn’t yield to control. It requires us to listen, learn, and adapt as we go.

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework reminds us that in complex systems, cause and effect can only be understood in retrospect. That means we must probe, sense, and respond, not prescribe.

Fieldcraft enables that. It’s how we:

  • notice emerging patterns before they escalate or disappear

  • hold space for multiple truths and tensions

  • adjust in real time when the context shifts beneath our feet

  • care for the system in motion, without imposing false certainty

Working in Shadow Systems

Every organisation has a shadow system, the informal networks, legacy beliefs, power brokers, and quiet influencers that shape what really happens. Fieldcraft helps us move inside that shadow system with humility and awareness. Not to manipulate, but to navigate, ethically, relationally, and with care.

Adam Kahane's work on power and love (e.g., from Power and Love or Collaborating with the Enemy) speaks directly to this: real change happens when we hold both, the power to move forward and the love to stay connected.

Fieldcraft is what holds that tension. It knows when to push, when to invite, and when to simply sit with what’s unfolding.

Orchestrating, Not Intervening

Traditional change approaches often treat organisations like machines to be tuned. But complex systems are more like living ecosystems, they require orchestration, not intervention.

Fieldcraft is the shift from doing change to people… to moving with the system, sensing where energy is, where the tension lies, where the next step might open.

It’s subtle. But powerful. Because when we work this way, change becomes more natural, more grounded, more enduring.

The Relational and the Rhythmic As Nora Bateson and other systems thinkers suggest, change unfolds in nested, relational contexts. It doesn’t move linearly. It moves with rhythm. It pulses with cycles of energy, resistance, clarity, and confusion.

Fieldcraft helps us work with that rhythm. It helps us return to what Donella Meadows called “leverage points”, not by pushing harder, but by sensing smarter.

What About AI?

We’re now in a moment where generative AI can analyse transcripts, surface themes, suggest engagement strategies. And used well, it can augment our fieldcraft, by helping us see patterns we might miss, or test decisions through different lenses.

But it cannot replace the human work of being in the room. It cannot feel the discomfort. Or sense when trust is thin. Or hold silence with grace.

AI can help us frame. But fieldcraft helps us feel, and that’s what change lives on.

How to develop Fieldcraft in Practice: The Quiet Skills that Matter Most

You don’t learn fieldcraft in a classroom. You grow it in the field, through tension, timing, and deliberate attention in the moments that surprise, unsettle, or shift you.

But it’s not just about experience. It’s about how we reflect, how we choose to listen, and how we show up, again and again.

At its core, fieldcraft is a blend of presence, pattern recognition, and disciplined reflection, in motion. Here’s how to deepen it:

1. Reflect in Action, Not Just After It

As Donald Schön put it, reflective practitioners “think on their feet”, noticing their own reactions and what’s shifting, learning from the moment as it unfolds.

Practice:

  • Ask in the moment: “What’s moving here?” or “What’s my instinct telling me?”

  • Keep a field journal, short entries noting tension, surprise, resistance, or insight.

  • Capture edge notes: what wasn’t said, who held the tension, what emotions were moving?

  • Use voice memos between meetings while your reflections are still warm.

These practices support real-time sensemaking, the ability to stay open to multiple interpretations, hold ambiguity without collapse, and locate meaning while in motion.

Fieldcraft grows every time you choose to notice, instead of rushing on.

2. Use After-Action Questions, Not Just Debriefs

Borrowing from systems and military practice, After Action Reviews (AARs) support shared reflection in motion, without overthinking or blame.

Try asking:

  • What did we intend to happen?

  • What actually happened?

  • What do we learn, about the work, the system, ourselves?

These aren’t post-mortems. They’re living reflections, a way of staying close to what matters.

3. Build Presence, Humility, and Discernment

These aren’t soft skills. They’re the architecture of trust and influence.

Practice:

  • Non-reactive listening: hold space without fixing or defending.

  • Strategic pausing: ask fewer questions, but sharper ones.

  • Read the energy: What’s the tone? Who’s holding power? Where’s the tension?

  • Take cues from the system: What’s needed now, not what was planned last week?

Fieldcraft is not about knowing more. It’s about noticing better. It’s about knowing when to act, and when to wait.

4. Use AI to Support Your Sensing, Not Replace It

AI won’t feel the room. But it can help you see more of it.

Used thoughtfully, AI can augment your fieldcraft, not override it.

Try using AI to:

  • Analyse transcripts or summaries to surface hidden themes or shifts in tone

  • Prompt different stakeholder perspectives

  • Explore blind spots: “What are three alternative interpretations of this resistance?”

  • Surface invisible dynamics: patterns in engagement, emotion, or network tension

AI can surface patterns, but fieldcraft helps you interpret and respond.

How Fieldcraft Evolves with Practice

Fieldcraft doesn’t unfold in tidy steps. It regresses, loops back, and deepens through practice. While there’s no single path, many change leaders experience familiar shifts in how they show up, not as a hierarchy, but as a pattern map.

You might begin by following frameworks… then start noticing the gaps. Over time, presence replaces performance. Judgement deepens. Systems open. And eventually, you find yourself holding the work, not with certainty, but with care.

    • Doing the Work
      You start with what you’ve been taught. Deliverables, timelines, engagement plans. It’s good work, and it creates structure. But something in you starts to notice what’s missing. The model doesn’t explain the tension in the room.

    • Sensing the Gaps
      You begin to feel where the framework runs thin. People are nodding, but not buying in. The plan is sound, but nothing’s moving. You’re drawn to what’s unsaid, and begin tuning in more deeply to what’s not on the slide deck.

    • Learning in Motion
      Now, you’re working in the moment. Watching for cues, adjusting in real time. You journal between meetings. You log a hallway comment that reshapes a workshop. You hold a silence longer than usual, and something important lands.

    • Holding Complexity
      The work stops being about answers. It becomes about holding tensions, power and care, urgency and slowness, visibility and shadow. You’re seen as calm, but it’s not calmness — it’s capacity. You’re learning to host contradiction.

    • Guiding Others
      Now, your presence shapes the room. Not by force, but by resonance. You ask fewer questions, but better ones. Others feel steadier around you. You’re not selling change, you’re walking with it, and others begin to do the same.

    • Stewarding the Long Arc
      Eventually, you’re not just delivering change. You’re tending it. Sensing shifts across time. Reading the season. Knowing when to press, and when to let the system rest. You care more about the coherence of the whole than the win of the moment.

This work is not linear. Some days you’re deep in complexity. Other days, you’re back at square one. But each cycle grows your capacity to lead, with rhythm, with care, and with a steadiness the system can lean into.

5. Stay in DialoguE, Fieldcraft Is Grown, Not Owned

Change leadership can be lonely work. Don’t do it alone. Fieldcraft matures in conversation, slow, grounded, often imperfect conversation.

Build a practice of reflection with others:

  • Host sense-making sessions with no agenda beyond shared understanding

  • Create peer supervision spaces, not to audit, but to hold care and complexity

  • Share what you’re noticing, not as a framework, but as lived learning in motion

Fieldcraft also carries responsibility. When we operate in the informal, sensing, nudging, interpreting, we’re often working in spaces where others aren’t looking. That means acting with integrity matters even more.

As the tools get smarter, especially with AI in the mix, so must our ethics. The real craft lies not just in what we can sense, but what we choose to act on, and how.

The Emotional Cost: The Quiet Weight of Fieldcraft

If you’re doing this work well, you may feel tired in ways that are hard to name. Holding tension. Absorbing emotion. Navigating ambiguity. These take a toll.

That’s why fieldcraft requires restoration, too.

We need rest. We need boundaries. And we need places to lay down the weight.

Let’s name that, so we can design for it. Because the leaders who tend systems with care also need tending themselves.

Because fieldcraft isn’t just intuition, it’s craft. And craft matures through care, feedback, and disciplined attention to detail. In the hands of seasoned leaders, it becomes a form of professional craftsmanship, a quiet pursuit of excellence that shapes not just change, but character.

Where You’ve Seen Fieldcraft, Even If You Didn’t Call It That

  • A senior leader picks up on quiet discomfort before a decision lands, and shifts course without losing momentum.

  • A project lead adapts mid-meeting to draw out the one voice that hasn’t spoken, sensing their influence on others.

  • A change practitioner logs a sharp insight from a hallway comment, and weeks later uses it to reframe an engagement strategy.

  • An experienced advisor holds silence longer than expected, allowing what’s unresolved to surface.

  • These aren’t “soft skills.” They’re the real architecture of change. Quiet. Relational. Context-shaped. And deeply human.

Closing thoughts

Fieldcraft invites us back to the human. It asks us to slow down, listen more deeply, and lead from within the system, not above it. To trade certainty for curiosity. Blueprints for attention. Performance for presence. And it’s not always comfortable work. There’s no checklist. No guaranteed outcome. Just the next conversation. The next signal. The next choice to notice instead of rush on. But that’s what makes it a craft. And in complex systems change, that craft matters more than ever.

Because fieldcraft isn’t just about what happens in the room. It’s about how we stay with the work over time. Holding rhythm. Reading season. Knowing when to press, and when to pause. True fieldcraft paces the system. It protects the conditions for emergence. And it helps leaders act not just for today, but for what might be possible, five years from now. Because the best change leaders I know don’t just manage transformation. They tend it, with long horizon thinking, relational pacing, and craft.

So pause for a moment:

  • Where are you already practising fieldcraft, even if you haven’t named it?

  • What would shift if you treated those quiet moments as the real work?

  • And how might your presence, more than your plan, become the most trusted instrument you bring?

Because the best change leaders I know don’t just manage transformation. They tend it. From the inside. With humility, rhythm, and care.

. . .

For a research-grounded exploration of how fieldcraft intersects with AI, shadow systems, and sense-making, see Fieldcraft in Change Management, a companion article published on Medium.

Next up: We’ll explore what it means to lead with true craftsmanship, and why it’s the invisible force behind enduring, human-centred change.


Written by Rebecca Agent, with credit to the following AI tools for assistance in producing this content:


. . .

 

REFERENCES

 

Further Reading

Recommended to deepen your practice of fieldcraft, systems change, and adaptive leadership. These works offer context, provocation, or perspective beyond the scope of this article.

  • Block, P. (2009). Community: The structure of belonging. Berrett-Koehler.
    Explores the relational roots of change and the importance of holding space for meaning and trust.

  • Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.
    A foundational guide to leading through complexity, especially when the path forward isn’t clear.

  • Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the art of thinking together. Doubleday.
    A deep dive into the practices of generative dialogue, essential for fieldcraft and sensemaking.

  • Scharmer, O. (2009). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges. Berrett-Koehler.
    Blends systems sensing, inner work, and emergence. Perfect for advanced practitioners.

  • Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday.
    Classic systems thinking text introducing learning organisations and the concept of personal mastery.

  • Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2020). Systems convening: A crucial form of leadership for the 21st century. Social Learning Lab.
    Explores how leaders enable cross-boundary learning and engagement, a perfect parallel to fieldcraft.

Core Concepts:

  • Reflexive Attention: The ability to notice your own reactions in real time and adjust your stance or behaviour based on what’s unfolding, not what was planned.

  • Pattern Sensing: Subtle, often intuitive perception of emerging dynamics, from tone and posture to cultural undercurrents and relational tension.

  • Systems Resonance: The instinctive “tuning” to system-level shifts, being able to sense when something is off, even without hard data.

  • Shadow Navigation: Operating ethically and effectively within informal networks, hidden power structures, and unspoken norms.

  • Emotional Containment: Holding space during discomfort, ambiguity, or high-stakes conversations without rushing to resolve or control them.

  • Presence Over Performance: Prioritising attunement and authenticity over scripted facilitation or performative leadership.

  • Micro-Intervention: Making subtle shifts, a question, a pause, a reframe, that alter the emotional or systemic trajectory of a room.

  • Strategic Pausing: Knowing when not to speak or act; allowing emergence to unfold without unnecessary interference.

  • Rhythmic Leadership: Tuning into the pace, pulse, and seasonality of a system, recognising when to push, when to rest, and when to let go.

  • Dialogic Holding: Creating space for multiple truths, contradictions, and slow thinking to co-exist, especially when outcomes are unclear.

  • Sensing-in-Action: Learning through live interaction with the system, rather than retrospective analysis. (Draws on Donald Schön’s “reflection-in-action.”)

  • Ethics of Influence: The quiet accountability of working in spaces of informal power, where your influence isn’t always visible, but still impactful.

  • Coherence Stewardship: A long-horizon responsibility for helping a system stay true to its purpose, even as it adapts, struggles, and evolves.

. . .

See related pieces (on the blog) :


If this content was helpful to you and your work please comment, share, and like !

Bespoke Delivery, Embedded ChangeRebecca AgentComment