Last evening I set out the rolls I had bought at the grocery store for dinner at church. I placed them on a small table near the front door—not because the table is special, but because it is where things go when they are meant to leave the house.

Someone noticed them and asked, with a smile, whether the rolls were going to church.

“Yes,” I replied. “That’s why I put them there.”

We laughed, because the answer was already obvious. The placement itself carried the meaning. The rolls did not need to be labeled, scheduled, or explained. Their destination was legible simply by where they were.

The moment reminded me of something similar a couple of weeks earlier. Someone had cookies for church, and to make sure they weren’t forgotten, I suggested placing them on that same table near the door. Not as a reminder system, and not as a checklist item, but as a way of letting intention become visible through orientation. Cookies on the counter are good intentions. Cookies by the door are already on their way.

In both cases, nothing was enforced. No one followed up. No process existed to verify success. And yet the coordination worked.

Pre-Instrument Coordination

What happened here is an example of pre-instrument coordination: human alignment that occurs before formal systems, procedures, or measurements are introduced. The coordination did not rely on documentation, prompts, or feedback loops. It relied on shared understanding of space, habit, and meaning.

Everyone involved already knew the grammar:

The door is for departures. The table near it is a staging point. Objects placed there are not being stored; they are being sent.

This kind of coordination is not invisible—it is simply unmeasured. It operates through recognition rather than extraction, through participation rather than reporting.

Orientation Cues

The table functioned as an orientation cue. It did not command behavior, and it did not record compliance. It quietly aligned intention with action by making the next step obvious.

Orientation cues are everywhere in functioning human systems:

Shoes by the door. Papers stacked by a briefcase. Tools laid out before a task. Food placed where it will be remembered.

These cues do not replace responsibility; they support it. They reduce friction not by oversight, but by making the world intelligible at a glance.

Why This Matters

In institutions increasingly shaped by surveys, metrics, and post-hoc evaluation, it is easy to forget how much coordination once happened—and still happens—before any instrument is applied. When orientation cues work, they rarely draw attention to themselves. We laugh, pick up the rolls, and leave.

The difficulty begins when institutions attempt to recover, through formal instruments, what used to be handled by shared context and situated understanding. Surveys arrive not because people failed to care, but because systems have lost confidence in these quieter forms of meaning.

The rolls were already going to church.

They just needed to be near the door.