The research, conducted by Esteve Mogas and Alfred Vernis of ESADE Business School at Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona, together with Cristina Dominguez Soto of Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid, examines the integration of the five Spanish Jesuit provinces—Aragón, Bética, Castilla, Loyola, and Tarraconense—between 2008 and 2014. The context was stark. Following the Second Vatican Council, the Society of Jesus had experienced a 44 percent decline in worldwide membership between 1965 and 2005. In Spain alone, the provinces faced a projected demographic contraction of nearly 600 members, roughly 58 percent of their numbers, driven by falling vocations and rising mortality. General Congregation 35, the order’s supreme governing assembly, had called in 2008 for stronger provincial governance and greater coordination across a broader European framework. Something had to change.

What makes the study unusual is its methodological ambition. Rather than relying on official documents or normative texts about how discernment ought to work, the researchers conducted seventeen in-depth interviews with senior Jesuit leaders who were directly involved in the governance of the integration, gathering nearly a thousand minutes of recorded conversation across two phases of fieldwork between 2021 and 2024. The interviews were transcribed, anonymized, and analyzed using constructivist grounded theory procedures in NVivo software, with iterative and inductive coding that allowed categories to emerge from the data rather than being imposed on it. Triangulation across interviews, archival records, and documentary sources, together with peer debriefing and member checking, strengthened the credibility of the resulting analysis. The researchers then applied temporal bracketing, a process-analysis technique, to reconstruct how the integration moved through three distinct phases: a decision phase culminating in 2008, a design phase from 2008 to 2010, and a transition phase from 2010 to 2014.

The findings challenge a common assumption that spiritual practices in organizations amount to little more than ceremonial window dressing. Participants consistently described Discernment in Common not as a formal method with prescribed steps but as a shared attitude—one that shaped how problems were framed, how alternatives were weighed, and how final decisions gained collective legitimacy. “Discernment is fundamentally an attitude: listening to others; changing my position; what we are deciding is above and beyond us,” one participant told the researchers. Another emphasized that the most important element was not the method but the dispositions it demanded: inner silence, freedom from prejudice, and the willingness not to advance one’s own agenda. In the language of the strategic management literature, this is precisely what scholars describe as the relational infrastructure of decision-making—the deliberative spaces, communication norms, and trust-building practices through which strategic choices are actually formed.

The structural parallel between strategy and discernment lies at the intellectual heart of the paper. Classic strategic management theory, from Igor Ansoff’s analytic approach to Henry Mintzberg’s account of strategy as a pattern in a stream of decisions, describes organizations moving through cycles of thinking, defining, deciding, and implementing. Ignatian discernment, rooted in the Spiritual Exercises of the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuits, unfolds through reflection, decision, experience, and action. Both traditions treat the relationship between reflection and action as iterative and cyclical rather than linear, and both resist reducing decision-making to a purely calculative act. Strategic decisions, as the literature defines them, are characterized by uncertainty, long-term consequences, substantial resource commitments, and few clear precedents—conditions that describe the Spanish integration almost perfectly. One participant recalled that the idea of a single unified province initially seemed “almost impossible,” noting that “there was a diversity of provinces, some of them very weak. The strong, however, did not see the need for integration.”

The empirical details of the integration process reveal how discernment operated in practice. Territorial and cultural tensions were acute, particularly concerning Catalonia and the Basque Country, with their distinct languages, identities, and ecclesial contexts. Rather than suppressing these differences, participants described how they were deliberately placed “on the table” with great clarity, debated extensively, and gradually reconciled within a shared commitment to mission. The provincials of the five provinces met repeatedly in what participants called “the table of provincials,” where “there is debate, discernment, and finally a decision.” Formal approval came from Father General Adolfo Nicolás in 2008, framed explicitly in terms of service to the Church and society, and in 2010 he ratified the structure of the new province, describing how the figure of the Provincial would balance the unity of government with care for individuals and for apostolic works alike.

Execution, the phase where most mergers fail, was handled with unusual care. Participants identified transparency, participation, and socialization as the three keywords of the communication strategy, with high-quality information flowing continuously in both directions—upward to the General Curia in Rome, which received meeting minutes and returned feedback, and downward to Jesuits and lay collaborators across the country. Bilateral, person-to-person dialogues were intensified wherever resistance surfaced. Evaluation was deliberately open-ended: “nothing is closed, treat it as a continuous process of evaluation,” as one leader put it, with annual reviews in every sector to correct deviations. Implementation proceeded through clearly staged phases—design from 2008 to 2010, transition from 2010 to 2014, and a first triennium of the new province from 2014 to 2017—guided by a common Apostolic Project and a single structure of religious and apostolic government. Two commissions, one on the apostolic project and one on provincial government, translated the discerned decision into institutional architecture.

From this empirical material, the authors distill a conceptual contribution they call the Circles of Discernment, Apostolic Planning, and Way of Proceeding—an integrative framework depicted as concentric circles rather than a linear flowchart. The innermost circle represents the Jesuit way of proceeding, encompassing the paired commitments to cura personalis, the care of individual persons, and cura apostolica, responsibility for the mission itself. The middle circle captures apostolic planning, where strategic decisions are formulated, approved, and executed. The outermost circle is discernment itself—not a starting point but an encompassing spiritual environment within which all planning and identity are continuously sustained and renewed. The concentric form, the authors argue, is theoretically grounded in both the Ignatian understanding of discernment as operating across nested personal, communal, and apostolic dimensions, and in processual approaches to strategy that see organizational action as emerging from mutually constitutive layers of practice and meaning.

Perhaps the most striking finding is what sustained the process through moments of genuine difficulty. Participants repeatedly identified the shared mission as the force that held diversity together—”what saved the process was the mission,” allowing leaders to “see together” without erasing their differences. Hope emerged as a tangible organizational resource rather than a vague sentiment. “I lived the process with great hope because I was challenged by what we were seeing and contrasting over ten years,” one participant reflected. “And even though difficulties arose, we nevertheless believed that the Spirit was asking us for something new.” The authors argue that discernment-based governance does not merely accommodate hope as a disposition—it actively generates it, cultivating shared confidence that the chosen direction is larger than any individual will.

The study is candid about its limitations. It examines a single case within one religious order in one country, and it relies on retrospective interviews with senior governance figures, which may smooth over conflict, power dynamics, and dissenting voices that a real-time study would capture. The qualitative design cannot measure the quantitative impact of discernment on strategic outcomes. Yet the authors argue that parts of the framework travel beyond the ecclesial context. The core mechanism of the outermost circle—a disciplined, recurring practice of collective reflection that surfaces and reconciles differing positions before decisions are finalized—does not presuppose a religious frame. Secular mission-driven organizations such as cooperatives, NGOs, and employee-owned firms could adopt analogous practices of structured collective deliberation oriented toward a shared purpose. What is harder to transfer, they acknowledge, is the source of legitimacy: organizations without an equivalent shared ultimate purpose, or a forum with comparable moral authority, may find the model harder to instantiate.

As religious and secular institutions alike confront demographic decline, cultural fragmentation, and accelerating change, the Spanish Jesuit case offers a striking counterpoint to the prevailing playbook of rapid consolidation. It suggests that under the right conditions, slowness can be a strategic asset, that spiritual practice and strategic management are not parallel processes but inseparable ones, and that the way an organization decides may matter as much as what it decides. For Jesuit universities, ecclesial bodies, and mission-driven organizations everywhere, the message is that governance grounded in genuine communal discernment can navigate uncertainty while remaining faithful to identity—and that hope, far from being a feeling, may ultimately be a governance practice.