Learning to See Again: Ordinary Affects and the Future-Ready Leader
Why noticing the ordinary is essential for future-ready leadership
Written by: Adelee Penner
New Series
Leadership by Design: Navigating Complexity and Change in Education
Leadership is no longer about managing what is — it’s about designing what could be.
Leadership by Design is a series of reflective provocations for educational leaders committed to shaping the future of learning. Grounded in research and rooted in lived experience, each piece invites you to pause, think deeply, and reimagine your leadership practice for a world defined by complexity, change, and possibility.
Through stories from the field, insights from scholarship, and questions that linger long after reading, this series explores how we can lead with intention — designing systems where creativity and accountability coexist, where innovation is nurtured, and where educators and students alike thrive in the uncertainty of what’s next.
Abstract:
In a world defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), leadership cannot be reduced to strategic plans and predictable roadmaps. To navigate the future, leaders must learn to attend to the subtleties of daily life — the affective, fleeting, and ordinary forces that shape culture, meaning, and possibility. Drawing on Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007), this reflection explores how paying attention to the texture of the everyday can transform leadership practice, expand language for innovation, and create the conditions for emergence. It argues that noticing — deeply and intentionally — is not a soft skill but a critical capacity for leaders seeking to design futures that do not yet exist.
Leaders seeking a predictable, sustainable, data-informed roadmap to success will not find one in Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007). Superintendents hoping for a familiar analysis grounded in globalization, neoliberalism, or capitalism to explain how economic, political, and social forces shape organizational life will be profoundly disappointed. Managers looking for a tidy leadership model — one that offers quick solutions while numbing itself to the nuance of daily experience — will likely find Stewart’s work perplexing.
But for those willing to engage with the affective dimensions of ordinary life, Ordinary Affects offers something far more profound. Through a series of evocative vignettes, Stewart blends storytelling with ethnographic observation to illuminate how the ordinary — the fleeting, the unnoticed, the felt — shapes human experience. She invites us to pay attention to the affective dimensions of the everyday and the potential that animates what we often overlook. Stewart’s work is not about explanation but about attunement. “Ordinary Affects is an experiment, not a judgment” (Stewart, 2007, p. 1).
Stewart writes in the third person, reflecting on how intimate experiences of emotion, embodiment, and time are entangled with broader cultural and political worlds. Her work begins in the fragmented and inconsequential, showing how the ordinary becomes a powerful site of cultural politics. Ordinary affects are deeply specific, yet they connect people, shaping public sentiment and social movement. Through anecdotal histories and poetic reflections, Stewart shows us how attending to the extremes of the ordinary — to the subtle, the shifting, the emergent — reveals the complex dynamics that structure our world.
For leaders, this is not just an anthropological insight — it is a provocation. In systems work, we are often drawn to the large and the abstract: strategic plans, performance indicators, and organizational change frameworks. But perhaps what most shapes our capacity to lead is hidden in plain sight — in the small, the fleeting, and the everyday. The conversations in hallways, the shifting mood of a staff meeting, the way language circulates in classrooms, the rhythms of arrival and departure — these ordinary affects may hold the key to understanding how systems live, breathe, and change.
The Practice of Noticing
I initially selected Ordinary Affects because I was intrigued by the question of what we are — and are not — noticing in our daily lives. I wondered if Stewart’s ethnography might serve as a provocation for leaders, revealing what we might encounter if we truly paid attention to ordinary affects. Leadership in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) contexts demands this kind of attunement. The capacity to notice — to tune in to the subtleties of daily experience — is a skill that enables leaders to anticipate shifts, understand emerging needs, and respond with sensitivity and creativity.
Stewart (2007) challenges us to stop the noise of our preconceived concepts of culture, structure, leadership, and community. These concepts, while useful shorthand, can become barriers to noticing what is happening right in front of us. They often reduce rich, complex realities to oversimplified categories — “engaged” or “disengaged” learners, “resistant” or “innovative” staff, “strong” or “struggling” schools. These binaries might serve a purpose in a spreadsheet or a report, but they rarely reflect the messy, living complexity of real people in real contexts.
In my work with leaders, I’ve seen how these entrenched conceptual frames can obscure what is actually happening. Leaders miss signals that could help them adapt or innovate because they are too busy fitting what they see into familiar patterns. Stewart calls us instead to “turn off our comfortable, ritual and familiar descriptions of the everyday” (2007, p. 28) and become curious again — to allow ourselves to dwell in ambiguity, notice nuance, and follow singularities as they unfold.
Language, Innovation, and the Limits of Shorthand
This attention to the ordinary also has profound implications for how leaders use language — and how language shapes what leaders can imagine. Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) described a similar challenge when introducing General Systems Theory. He had to develop new terms and metaphors, such as “open systems” and “homeostasis,” to describe processes that did not fit within the linear, mechanistic worldview of his time. Without new language, it was impossible to think differently.
The same is true for leadership today. If leaders do not have the language or conceptual tools to support innovation, new ideas remain abstract and impossible to operationalize. As Stewart observes, “we take our cues so directly from circulating forces that the term hardwired has become shorthand for the state of things” (2007, p. 28). Shorthand like this can become so entrenched that it calcifies our thinking. It can lock leaders into ways of describing the world that no longer reflect its lived reality.
Schools are full of this kind of language — acronyms, slogans, initiatives, “non-negotiables.” Each system, division, and school creates its own lexicon. At best, these words help people coordinate and communicate. At worst, they become disconnected from lived experience, floating free from the very realities they were meant to describe. Stewart’s question — “What affects do our shorthand produce? And what affects do they remain ignorant of?” — is a crucial one for leaders.
Perhaps part of leadership practice is to be actively involved in creating the shorthand of a system — to participate in shaping a living, evolving language that reflects current realities and emerging possibilities. If leaders can co-create this language with their communities, it might open up new ways of thinking, new frameworks for action, and new possibilities for transformation.
Leading in a State of Composition
Affect, as Stewart and others remind us, confronts us with what exceeds language. Innovative leaders often struggle to describe what they imagine because existing frameworks cannot accommodate what does not yet exist. Stewart (2007) describes this as a space of “moving targets” — a realm where “something will snap into sense or drift by untapped” (p. 93). Innovation lives in this space of obscurity and potential. It depends on a leader’s willingness to connect to the “vibrations of possibility” and to craft new language, metaphors, and practices that bring those possibilities into view.
Cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1977) called this ongoing process structures of feeling — the lived, affective currents of social life that signal what is emerging but not yet fully formed. Leadership in complex systems is an act of composition. It is not about implementing static plans but about sensing, shaping, and working with these evolving structures as they arise. It is about attending to the emergent, the sedimented, and the occluded — all the elements in motion — and making meaning with them.
This work requires leaders to stay close to the life of their organizations — to immerse themselves in the everyday teaching and learning that shapes culture and experience. Hallways, classrooms, offices, playgrounds, and community events are not peripheral to leadership work; they are its heart. It is in these spaces that new language, new understandings, and new possibilities are born.
Learning to See Again
Stewart (2007) writes that “the ordinary moves in the articulations of who cares / laissez-faire attitudes with the apartheidesque hardening of the lines of race and class” (p. 93). The ordinary is not neutral — it is saturated with culture, history, bias, and power. Yet within its complexity lies the possibility of something new. Industries, Stewart notes, build their very substance out of “layers of sensory impact” (p. 128). Perhaps the same is true of leadership. Perhaps the ordinary — when attended to with curiosity and openness — is where new beginnings are forged.
Seth Godin (2015) asks, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” It is a deceptively simple question, but one that cuts to the heart of leadership practice. When leaders approach their work with the curiosity of a child naming “robot stairs” or “face grass,” they invite themselves to see familiar things anew. They make space for wonder, for questions that have not yet been asked, and for possibilities that have not yet been named.
Future-ready leadership may not be about mastering the next framework or predicting the next disruption. It may be about learning to see again — to notice the affective dimensions of the ordinary and to recognize their power to shape what is possible. Innovation, after all, is a state of composition. It emerges in the spaces where attention, language, and experience meet — where leaders dare to look beyond what is and imagine what could be.
Stewart’s (2007) work invites leaders to shed the constraints of traditional conceptual frameworks and immerse themselves in the living texture of daily life. It is an invitation to become ethnographers of their own systems — to watch, listen, and learn from the everyday, and to craft new language and new structures of feeling from what they observe. In doing so, leaders may find that the future is not something distant and abstract. It is already here, flickering at the edges of the ordinary, waiting to be noticed.
A Provocation for Your Leadership Practice
- What ordinary moments, interactions, or details might you be overlooking in your daily leadership practice?
- How might attending to the affective dimensions of everyday life change the way you think about innovation?
- What new language might you need to describe possibilities that do not yet exist?
- How could staying close to the lived, sensory texture of your organization make you more adaptable in a VUCA world?
Let’s talk again soon. Take good care of yourself.
Adelee
References
Bertalanffy, L. von. (1968). General system theory: Foundations, development, applications. Braziller.
Brett, T. (2010, October 26). Ordinary affects and the ethnography of everyday experience. WordPress. https://brettworks.com/2010/10/26/ordinary-affects-and-the-ethnography-of-everyday-experience/
Godin, S. (2015). What to do when it’s your turn. Crown House Publishing.
Mackinnon-Little, G. (2019). Kathleen Stewart: Wordling is a register of living with and through things. Tank Magazine (Issue 79). https://magazine.tank.tv/issue-79/talks/kathleen-stewart
Romero, A., & Locke, T. A. (2017, July 20). Words in worlds: An interview with Kathleen Stewart. Supplementals, Fieldsights. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/words-in-worlds-an-interview-with-kathleen-stewart
Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Duke University Press.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press.
Working primarily with the education and business sector, we help organizations improve operational efficiency and realize a culture for change and growth. Through personalized services, we work alongside staff to create a culture of improvement and growth. Our strengths lie in customized services, which can include keynote addresses and targeted in house learning opportunities. Through system analysis we support strategic planning, data analysis for improvement, reporting support, and professional coaching.
Click here to book a Consultation, Coaching Conversation or Meeting.