Working with actors: How roles, identities and collectives shape action

When something important is not happening, leaders often ask who has the authority, responsibility or influence to make it happen. Those questions matter, but they can conceal a more difficult one: who or what has the practical capacity to act here, and how is that capacity being shaped?

From “Who is responsible?” to “Who can act here?”

Organisations are full of charts, mandates, delegated authorities and statements of accountability. These tell us who should decide, who should deliver and who should answer for an outcome. They do not always tell us who can act in practice. A senior leader may have formal authority but lack the relationships, information, time or political freedom required to move. Someone with no impressive title may connect several parts of the organisation, carry trusted knowledge or know how to make a formal process work. A team may be responsible for an outcome while the conditions needed to act sit elsewhere.

This can produce familiar but misleading explanations. The leader is not decisive enough. The team needs more accountability. People are resistant. A function lacks influence. Sometimes these judgements are fair. Sometimes they mistake a system of constrained and distributed action for a problem located inside particular people. Actor thinking does not remove personal responsibility. It helps us examine what responsibility can reasonably mean within the situation people actually inhabit.

What is an actor?

Within the Estuarine Framework, an actor is a human-associated element with the potential to act intelligently and intentionally. An actor may be an individual, but it is often more useful to look at a role, identity or collective such as a team or organisation.

Actors are distinguished by their capacity for intention, motivation, desire and goal-directed action. They can interpret a situation, make choices, improvise and pursue an outcome. They may also behave irrationally, misunderstand what is happening or act in ways that produce consequences they did not intend.

This does not mean actors have unlimited freedom. Someone may want something strongly and still be unable to bring it about. Their capacity to act is shaped by relationships, rules, technologies, habits, processes, history and physical conditions. What happens cannot therefore be attributed to an individual’s intention alone.

Actors form one part of the Estuarine actant triad. Constraints shape patterns and possibilities. Constructors produce sufficiently consistent transformations. Actors bring the potential for intelligent and intentional action within that landscape. The same actor may also function as a constraint or constructor in a particular situation.

This guide follows the current Cynefin emphasis on human-associated actors. It offers a practical interpretation for leaders rather than a complete account of Actor-Network Theory, the 3As or the collective Estuarine Mapping process. The distinctions are best used as lenses for inquiry rather than as a settled model of human behaviour.

Actor and actant are not the same thing

Actant is the broader Estuarine term for anyone or anything acting in the system. It deliberately draws attention beyond human agency and intention. A regulation, software platform, building layout, ritual, team and senior leader might all be actants because each makes a difference to what happens. Within the Estuarine triad, however, Actor has a narrower use. It refers to human-associated elements with the capacity for intelligent and intentional action.

This differs from Bruno Latour’s broader use of actor and actant in Actor-Network Theory, where non-human entities can also be described as actors when they modify a state of affairs. We do not need to resolve that theoretical difference to use the practical distinction. We simply need to avoid assuming that everything exerting influence possesses human intention, or that human intention explains everything exerting influence.

The deeper lesson is not simply that objects matter. It is that action cannot always be assigned cleanly to one autonomous source. What happens is mediated through associations among people, objects, rules, technologies and other actants.

Actors are not just named people

It is tempting to write the names of influential individuals on a map. Sometimes that is necessary. More often, focusing on the individual is too personal, too unstable or too coarse. The same person behaves differently as a manager, technical specialist, board member, parent, colleague or representative of a profession. The role or identity may reveal more than the name.

Estuarine guidance therefore focuses mainly on three useful scales:

These lenses prompt attention at different levels. They are not a complete classification, and the same actor may appear at more than one level. An individual can occupy several roles. A role can be shared by many individuals. A collective may contain competing identities and may not act coherently at all. The value lies in finding the level of description that makes the action visible without reducing it to personality.

People act through roles and identities

A person does not bring every aspect of themselves into every situation. Particular roles and identities become active in context. Someone may speak differently as the finance director than as a member of an executive team. A clinician may act differently as a specialist, departmental leader or advocate for a patient. A country manager may protect a local business in one conversation and represent the enterprise in another.

Roles carry expectations about what somebody may decide, what they should notice and whose interests they represent. Identities carry histories, values, loyalties and assumptions about appropriate behaviour. These can reinforce one another or create tension. A leader asked to collaborate across functions may still be measured, rewarded and recognised through their functional identity. Telling them to adopt an enterprise mindset may have little effect if every surrounding signal activates the older role.

Rituals can support transitions between roles and identities. The Cynefin material uses scrubbing up before surgery as an example. The ritual does more than clean hands. It marks a movement into a professional role with particular expectations and relationships. Organisations contain less visible transitions: opening a review in a particular way, putting on protective equipment, taking a seat on a panel, entering a control room or agreeing the rules of a decision forum. The question is not whether rituals control people. It is whether they help make an appropriate role available in the moment.

Agency exists in context

Agency concerns the freedom and capacity to act and the influence an action can have. It is not simply a personal possession. An experienced, motivated and formally powerful person may have very limited room to move in one situation and considerable agency in another. Relationships, permissions, knowledge, credibility, resources, technology, time and surrounding constraints all matter.

This is why formal authority and practical agency should not be treated as identical. A chief executive may be unable to alter a statutory obligation, entrenched professional practice or contractual commitment within the relevant time. A coordinator may have little hierarchical authority but connect the people and information required for action. This is a reasonable organisational inference, not a separate formula for measuring agency.

The Estuarine energy and time grid does not measure an actor’s power. It examines the energy and time required to change an actant. That can still reveal something useful. It may show that changing a particular role, collective or relationship is currently unrealistic, or that a small change in how actors connect could create movement. It should not be turned into a score for how much agency a person possesses.

Agency is distributed, not simply delegated

The Cynefin material describes agency as a distributed property of systems. This does not mean that the system has one mind or intention. It means that action emerges through relationships among people and other actants rather than belonging entirely to an autonomous individual. A decision may depend on someone noticing a signal, another person interpreting it, a role granting permission, a technology making information visible and a constraint defining what can be done.

Delegation often starts with authority held at the centre and passed down. Distribution asks how agency can exist across the system from the outset, within appropriate constraints. This can improve responsiveness and diversity of perspective, but it does not remove accountability. It requires clarity about who may act, the boundaries within which action is possible and how the effects will be noticed.

Intention, authority and outcomes can diverge

A poor outcome does not prove poor intention. A good intention does not guarantee a good outcome. Formal responsibility does not guarantee the capacity to act. Equally, contextual explanations should not be used to excuse every decision. Actors can still choose, conceal, resist, improvise and pursue self-interest.

The useful discipline is to hold personal action and context together. Ask what the actor intended, what they understood, what options they perceived, what they could realistically do and how their action interacted with everything around them. This produces a richer account than either blaming the person or dissolving all responsibility into the system.

Collective actors

Teams, crews, organisations and institutions can sometimes act as collectives. That does not mean everyone shares one intention. Collective action requires enough coherence for the group to make, communicate or sustain action together. Shared practice, roles, relationships, rituals and constraints can all contribute to that coherence.

A conventional team often depends heavily on relationships between particular people. A crew places more emphasis on predefined roles, trained interaction and shared practice. In a flight crew, operating theatre or emergency service, authority can attach to the role needed in the situation. People trained in those roles may be substituted with less disruption than in a group whose effectiveness depends primarily on personal relationships. Crews require preparation and practice. They cannot simply be announced during a crisis.

Entangled Trios provide another example of collective actor design. They bring people from substantially different backgrounds together around a shared purpose. The intention is not to represent every stakeholder or force consensus. It is to connect perspectives that would not normally interact, improve weak-signal detection and create new informal connections. The trio may become a temporary collective actor with possibilities none of its members possessed alone.

Crews and Entangled Trios are examples of actor design, not required stages or universal organisational forms. Their value depends on the context, the purpose and the quality of the supporting practice.

Actors can also act as constraints or constructors

The Estuarine Actors material explicitly notes that actors can act as either of the other two actant types. A professional role may constrain what conduct is acceptable. A collective may contain conflict within a boundary. A mentor may repeatedly transform how newcomers interpret their work. A respected expert’s presence may alter how evidence is considered.

Use this idea carefully. Calling a person “the constraint” because they oppose a proposal can easily become personalised blame. Ask what aspect of the actor is shaping possibilities. Is it their formal authority, specialist role, network position, repeated practice or active identity? Decomposing the description often reveals an intervention that does not require treating the individual as the problem.

Working with actor design

Designing actors almost never means designing individual people. Attempts to engineer personality or mindset are ethically questionable and practically unreliable. More useful intervention points include roles, identities and collectives. This work should be done with the people affected rather than imposed upon them from outside. Together, people might introduce a new role with clearly bounded authority, create conditions in which a relevant professional identity can be consciously adopted, connect roles that rarely work together or form a collective around a shared purpose.

Actor design is not a neat sequence from diagnosis to solution, and the leader is not standing outside the system as a neutral designer. In a fuller Estuarine process, actors are mapped with constraints and constructors by people holding different perspectives. The energy and time required to change them are considered collectively. The options here are prompts for participative inquiry and scaffolding, not a substitute for that wider mapping.

Work at the right level of granularity

Labels such as “senior leadership”, “the customer” or “the organisation” are often too large to help. Break them into roles, identities or collectives that act differently. The board as a governance body may behave differently from board members as investors or professional specialists. “Middle management” may include budget holders, translators, technical authorities and people connecting otherwise separate networks.

When people disagree about an actor, decompose the description rather than arguing over whose account is correct. Stop when the level is specific enough to examine action and broad enough to remain useful.

Start with inquiry rather than redesign

Before creating a new role or collective, ask what action is currently missing and why. A new role may add another layer without increasing agency. A new forum may reproduce the same relationships under a different name. Run small experiments, observe what becomes possible and look for unintended shifts in responsibility, status and workload.

Twelve questions for working with actors

1. What action is needed, and what is happening instead?
2. Who or what can act intentionally in this situation?
3. Am I looking at an individual, a role or identity, or a collective?
4. Which role or identity is currently active?
5. What can each actor actually do, regardless of formal position?
6. Which constraints expand or restrict their agency?
7. Which constructors transform what they attempt to do?
8. Where is agency distributed across relationships rather than held by one person?
9. What intention am I inferring from an outcome without enough evidence?
10. Am I explaining the pattern through personality when context may matter more?
11. Would changing a role, supporting a consciously adopted identity or forming a collective create new possibilities?
12. What small experiment could help us learn where practical agency really lies?

A final shift in language

Instead of “Who is responsible?” ask “Who has the practical capacity to act here?”

Instead of “Why won’t they act?” ask “What makes action possible, difficult or costly for them?”

Instead of “They need a different mindset” ask “Which role or identity is the current context activating?”

Instead of “The senior leader has the power” ask “What can the senior leader actually change in this situation?”

Instead of “That person is the blocker” ask “What aspect of their role, authority or position is shaping the possibilities?”

Instead of “We should delegate this” ask “How could agency be distributed within appropriate constraints?”

The central question remains: Who or what has the practical capacity to act here, and how is that capacity being shaped?