You have done the hard work. You arrested the momentum of the reactive thought before it turned into a reactive decision. You ran the AUDIT and asked the honest question: who gets the glory here? You sat with the discomfort of what you found. Now you are standing at the gate, credential check complete, and the question is still open. Which way? This is where the third A of the Watchman's Protocol begins, and it is where most leaders, even self-aware ones, still get lost.

The failure mode at this stage is subtle. You have already stopped. You have already examined your motives. You feel clearheaded. And because you feel clearheaded, you trust yourself. You reason through the situation using your own judgment, draw a conclusion that feels right, and move forward. But the AUDIT was designed to reveal that your motives are never fully clean, and your judgment, no matter how sharp, is still yours. It is still bent by your history, your fears, your blind spots, your preferences. Clearheaded is not the same as calibrated. ALIGN is the step that closes the gap.

ALIGN means you calibrate to something outside yourself before you act. Not to your gut, which has already been cross-examined. Not to your intuition, which is shaped by the same ego you just audited. To something that was true before you walked up to this gate and will be true after you leave it. The Watchman does not make up the rules of entry on the spot. He operates according to standing orders.

This phrase matters more than it might seem. In military language, standing orders are directives issued in advance that remain in effect until explicitly changed. They govern standard situations so that the person on the ground does not have to figure out the right response under pressure, in the dark, when they are tired and the stakes are high. They are the decisions made when thinking was clear, so that behavior is governed when thinking is not. A Watchman who makes up the rules in the moment is not a Watchman. He is a doorman with a uniform. Standing orders are what separate those two.

This is the deep logic of ALIGN. You do not figure out what you believe in the heat of the decision. You calibrate in the heat of the decision to what you have already decided. If you have not done that work in advance, you will discover what you believe by observing what you do, which is a terrible and often irreversible way to learn. Proverbs 4:26 says to give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. That kind of steadiness is not spontaneous. It is prepared. The person who is unshakeable in a crisis is unshakeable because they settled the foundational questions long before the crisis arrived.

The reason leaders resist this step is that it looks like a constraint. Standing orders feel like they limit your options, slow your response, reduce your flexibility. What they actually do is protect you from yourself. Think about the last time you made a decision you regretted. It is likely that somewhere in that decision, you overrode something you already knew. You knew the meeting was not the right venue for that conversation. You knew the email was too sharp and you sent it anyway. You knew you should sleep on it. You did not need more information in that moment; you needed to be governed by what you already had. ALIGN gives you that governance.

There is a second reason this step is easy to skip: we want a map, not a compass. A map gives you turn-by-turn directions. "In 0.4 miles, turn left. Take the second exit on the roundabout." A compass gives you something less satisfying and more durable: True North. God, in my experience, gives you the compass far more often than the map. He gives you a character that points toward righteousness, a word that establishes truth, a community that can be trusted to tell you hard things. He rarely sends a notification the night before a critical decision with step-by-step instructions. He gives you True North, and he has been pointing you toward it for years, and ALIGN asks: have you been watching? Do you know which way is north?

Tomorrow we will go deep into how the ALIGN step actually works in practice. The three specific tools the Watchman uses to calibrate, what the protocol calls the Three Witnesses, are Scripture, Counsel, and Conscience. Each one checks something different. Together they form a check against the most common failure mode of this step: using one witness to silence the other two. That is important enough to deserve its own article. For today, the goal is simpler. Before you face the next decision that matters, ask yourself whether you have standing orders for it. Not a plan. Not a preferred outcome. Orders. Pre-decided. Already settled. That difference will determine whether ALIGN has any teeth.

What is one decision you are currently sitting with where you do not yet know your standing orders? That is the work.

I write about leadership at the intersection of timeless principles and modern workplaces. Follow for weekly insights on building teams that actually work. For more articles like this consider subscribing to my Substack at: https://christianleadership.now