Every adaptive human system has to manage the same fundamental challenge: where attention goes, what it is spent on, and what becomes possible as a result.
The Six Principles describe six functions within that challenge. They are not techniques or behaviours. They describe whether people can orient themselves, examine what they do not yet understand, keep a sense of direction, bring their attention rather than spend it on self-protection, invest it in work that matters, and extend it into responsible initiative.
Attention here means more than concentration. It is the finite cognitive capacity through which people notice, interpret, evaluate possibilities and decide where to invest mental effort.
Attention can be intense and still be captured by threat, status, uncertainty or the wrong problem. Better thinking does not emerge because people try harder. It emerges when the conditions around attention are designed well.
Attention is the resource.
The six principles at 30,000 ft
Before the classroom, the leadership team or the boardroom, the principles describe two complementary families. The first is how attention is intentionally directed. The second is what becomes possible once attention is no longer consumed elsewhere.
Attention Design
Three deliberate moves. They do not prescribe one teaching strategy, leadership behaviour or governance routine. They name the cognitive work a design has to accomplish.
Inform
Make what matters knowable
Inform is more than passing on information. It is making the relevant context, expectations, knowledge and signals clear enough that people understand where they are, what matters and what deserves attention. The information changes with the situation. The function does not.
Inquire
Make what matters examinable
Inquire is the movement beyond receiving information into questioning, interpreting, connecting and making sense of it. It keeps attention from settling too quickly on the obvious or convenient answer. At this altitude it is not inquiry-based learning, but a human and organisational capacity for sense-making.
Inspire
Make what matters imaginable
Inspire is not enthusiasm or motivational rhetoric. It is making possibility visible: enough purpose, imagination and confidence for people to see alternatives and move towards something that does not yet exist. You cannot pursue a future you cannot picture.
Emergent Conditions
Three responses that cannot be commanded. A teacher cannot order a learner to engage. A leader cannot announce that a team is empowered. The system can only create conditions in which these become more likely.
Enjoy
Make attention available
Enjoy is not making everything fun or comfortable. It describes the conditions of trust, belonging and predictability in which attention is no longer consumed by threat, status monitoring, identity protection or unnecessary friction. Enjoy is not the reward of having fun. It is the availability of attention.
Engage
Make attention invested
Engage moves beyond presence into meaningful participation. Attention is focused, effort is invested, ideas are met seriously, and people become active participants rather than passive recipients. Invested, not merely busy.
Empower
Make attention consequential
Empower develops the capacity, confidence and opportunity to use what people know and can do: to exercise judgement, influence what happens and contribute beyond the immediate task. Authority, capability and boundaries have to be clear enough for agency to be real rather than rhetorical.
Two complementary movements
Underneath the six labels is a cleaner shape. Read the design moves left to right and the conditions as they deepen, and the same abstraction appears twice.
Attention Design — how attention is directed
Emergent Conditions — what attention becomes
| Inform | Make what matters knowable |
| Inquire | Make what matters examinable |
| Inspire | Make what matters possible |
| Enjoy | Make attention available |
| Engage | Make attention invested |
| Empower | Make attention consequential |
Knowable, then examinable, then possible. Available, then invested, then consequential. Those two progressions, crossed with each other, are what the Nine Map is made of.
The Nine Map
Cross one Attention Design principle with one Emergent Condition and a question appears: what does that interaction suggest we need to develop? The nine answers are capacities, not further principles.
These are not nine additional principles. They describe what the interaction between two principles suggests we need to cultivate. Hover a cell for the reasoning.
Every cell reads with the same grammar: we make what matters knowable, examinable or possible, so that attention can become available, invested or consequential; and that develops a capacity. The columns and rows then carry their own progression:
Read each column from the bottom, where the emergent condition is most available, upward to where it becomes most consequential.
Up the Inform column: orientation, then understanding, then judgement. Knowing steadily becomes consequential.
Up the Inquire column: openness, then discernment, then adaptability. Questioning steadily changes behaviour.
Up the Inspire column: possibility, then purpose, then agency. What could be steadily becomes action.
These capacities are provisional and generative, not outcomes to be delivered. A school does not “achieve adaptability” or “hand out agency”. It creates the conditions and practices through which they become more developed.
Changing context
Everything so far has been the view from 30,000 feet: the architecture in the abstract. Come down to ground level and the same principles appear differently in a classroom, a leadership team, a board and a wider system. The function stays constant. Its expression changes with context.
Choose a context. Every principle re-expresses itself while its function holds. Inform still makes what matters knowable, whether that is a learning intention, a set of board papers or a system policy.
Attention Design
A clear learning intention, visible success criteria and a worked example orient students towards the learning rather than towards guessing what the teacher wants.
Priorities, decision boundaries and the purpose of a meeting are clear enough that staff can focus without repeatedly checking what matters or who decides.
Meeting papers distinguish items for decision, discussion and noting. Board members arrive oriented rather than decoding the agenda in real time.
Policies, processes and responsibilities are findable, readable and consistent enough to reduce avoidable uncertainty.
Questions such as “What do you notice?” and “What would happen if...?” redirect attention from answer retrieval towards pattern, relationship and reasoning.
Questions such as “What are we not seeing?” or structured routines such as Silent Start surface thinking that hierarchy or speed would otherwise suppress.
The board examines assumptions, evidence and missing perspectives rather than debating only the recommendation placed in front of it.
Feedback loops and diagnostics reveal recurring patterns rather than treating each event as an isolated incident.
A concrete example of what is possible expands a learner’s sense of what they might achieve without disguising the work still required.
A credible picture of the school’s direction helps people locate today’s effort within a future they can understand and influence.
The board protects strategic direction while remaining honest about uncertainty, trade-offs and the possibility that the current plan may need to change.
Benchmarks, exemplars and visible progress expand the organisation’s sense of what is possible without becoming prescriptions to copy.
Emergent Conditions
Learners can expose uncertainty or mistakes without attention being consumed by embarrassment or guessing what is safe to say.
People can raise concerns, disagree and admit uncertainty without spending attention managing status or political risk.
Trustees can challenge ideas without challenge becoming personal or threatening relationships.
Structures reduce unnecessary friction, ambiguity and defensive work so attention remains available for the work itself.
Learners invest attention in making meaning rather than merely completing the task.
People participate in the thinking behind the work rather than simply receiving decisions.
Trustees engage with the substance and trade-offs of an issue rather than passively receiving reports.
Feedback and participation mechanisms give people meaningful ways to contribute rather than merely be consulted.
Learners have sufficient capability, boundaries and opportunity to exercise meaningful agency.
Decision authority sits close enough to the work for people to act without unnecessary escalation.
The board creates clear delegation so leadership can exercise authority while remaining accountable.
Authority, information and feedback loops enable sound local action without requiring central permission for everything.
The intersection remains generative across contexts. Take Inform × Empower across the same four contexts and each points towards judgement.
Inform makes what matters knowable. Empower makes attention consequential. Their intersection points towards Judgement: the capacity to use what is known to make consequential choices.
Teaching
Learners need knowledge they can use to weigh evidence, make choices and justify conclusions.
Leadership
Leaders make relevant information available alongside authority that is clear enough for others to exercise judgement rather than continually escalate decisions.
Board
Governors need enough information and context to weigh competing considerations and exercise judgement without drifting into operational management.
System
Information, boundaries and feedback are designed so that sound local judgement is possible without requiring central control.
Theory, research, design implications and praxis for developing judgement. The first of the nine intersections to open into depth.
From architecture to practice
The model has depth as well as breadth. Read downward and it descends from purpose towards practice.
30,000 ft
The premise, the six principles and the two movements. Why attention is the resource, and what designing it means.
The Nine Map
What the interaction of two principles suggests we need to cultivate. Nine capacities, generative rather than prescriptive.
Ground level
For each capacity: theory, research, design implications, and the bite-sized practices that make its development more likely, down to what it looks like when you can recognise it. This is where the decks live. The Praxis Deck holds practices for the classroom, the Lead Deck for leadership and the Board Deck for governance, the same architecture expressed as everyday moves.
This last layer is a resource in its own right, and it is being built one capacity at a time rather than claimed all at once.
The descent is only half of it. What becomes recognisable in practice reports back up the model: practice, to recognition, to capacity, to principle, to purpose. If increasingly good judgement never becomes recognisable, the Inform and Empower practices are not yet doing what we think they are. That return journey is what turns a theory of action into a way of learning whether it works.
A shared architecture
These six principles are not a property of one deck or one setting. They are the architecture beneath the whole ecosystem. Learning, leadership, governance, collective thinking and system design are contexts in which the same architecture operates.
The Six Principles
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Different decks, tools and practices operationalise them in each context.
The context changes. The architecture does not.