Research · Glossary
Explore the different concepts, frameworks and theories of change we encountered across fields and traditions. You can filter by the field each comes from, and by its role – how it relates to the questions we’ve been exploring: whether it helps explain them, suggests a strategy, is another name for something similar, or is an example. This list isn’t exhaustive and will keep growing.
198 terms
Most, she argues, are ‘zombie’ futures: expectations that the shocks of 2008, 2016, 2020 and after should have killed off, but which “still keep lurching doggedly on”. Institutions stay trapped in them, and so do the changemakers who work with those…
So the target is far wider than the prison. In a 2022 interview she said that “what abolition is about is changing everything”, meaning the whole web of relations around anyone who “eventually gets plucked out of their life”. Rationale Our articles don’t name…
Nobody knows who coined it. Quote Investigator traces the earliest form to a 1930 Sunday School convention in Nebraska. The missionary E. Stanley Jones popularised it in the 1930s, and the psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer quoted this wording in 1959. A 1979 book…
This entry follows complexity thinker Dave Snowden, for whom an actant is “any entity that can act to influence a network”. He sorts them into three: actors (people, including the roles they hold), constraints, which “either connect or contain”, and…
The writer Steven Johnson carried it over to ideas and technology in his book ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’. His example: nobody could have invented a microwave oven in 1650, however clever they were. He calls the adjacent possible “a kind of shadow future,…
It belongs neither to the object alone nor to the mind; in Gibson’s words it “points both ways, to the environment and to the observer”. Complexity practitioners use it to ask what a setting makes easier or harder. Rationale Part 1 calls cognition “embodied,…
In Christian teaching it is first of all God’s love, which people receive before they return it; the theologian Anders Nygren called it “spontaneous and unmotivated”. Some later writers have carried the word into non-religious settings, where that grounding…
The concept belongs to a path of liberation: it explains karma and rebirth, and practice aims to transform the store. In our time Thích Nhất Hạnh has taught it widely. Rationale Named in Part 1, with a warning: “Simply naming them here doesn’t convey the…
His point is about timing. A finished narrative looks back. Boje wants attention on “the living story material that traditional narrative analysis, arriving after the fact, always misses”. Rationale Boje looks before the story in time; we look beneath it.…
A rhizome is their image for one kind of assemblage, set out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (1980): a root-like network that, in their words, “connects any point to any other point”, with no trunk, centre or single way in. They contrast it with the tree, which…
Applied to societies and cultures, the word is a metaphor. The mathematician John Milnor cautions against the image it suggests: “there is no associated attractive force”. Rationale Systems thinkers might call the pull we describe an attractor: people begin…
The idea isn’t his alone. Escobar ties its principles to the decolonial struggles of Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples in Latin America, whose practice of autonomy holds far more than a design method. Rationale A check on our own ambitions. If contexts…
Its deepest layer is ‘meta-norms’, which Petit defines as “underlying ideologies and unwritten rules, deeply entrenched in people’s culture and identity”, with patriarchy as his example. He offers the model as a tool and warns it is not “a blueprint of how…
Believing doesn’t require thinking about it. Philosophers separate occurrent beliefs, the few in mind at any moment, from dispositional ones held unattended, like the belief that you have a head. Some accounts go further and define belief by what it disposes…
Its use is in locating yourself. The land restoration organisation Commonland reads three roles from it: pioneers trying alternatives at the fringes, protectors sheltering them from inside the old system, and hospice workers helping the old decline…
Behind it is a view of language as how people build a shared reality together. When that breaks down, more information doesn’t bring agreement, and other people’s realities start to feel threatening. Rationale A phrase we’d use with a caveat. ‘Bespoke’…
The organisation Nordic Bildung, which promotes the idea today, defines it as two kinds of knowledge combined. One is the easily passed-on kind, academic or practical. The other is the “almost impossible to transfer kind of knowledge, which comes from life…
The three pull against each other, and Roig doesn’t try to settle that. Groups can move between them or keep to one, provided they stay in relationship: “not everyone has to do everything within an ecosystem of change-making”. Each has failure modes; bridging…
Its use is diagnostic. Groups tend to dismiss approaches unlike their own; seeing the whole helps them work as complements. Rationale Part 1 warns that a field disposed to “individualistic competition” reproduces fragmentation “rather than webs of mutually…
The authors say it helps explain how human groups grew into chiefdoms and nation states. With their claim that “status striving is a fundamental human motive”, they also use it to explain in part anti-gay bias, cultural signalling, conceptions of god and…
Hutchins names three earlier projects of this kind: James Gibson’s ecological psychology, Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind and Soviet activity theory. Bateson’s example is a blind man with a stick: where does his ‘self’ stop – brain, hand, or the tip of the…
Their case compares two US climate proposals that look alike. Cap and Dividend, which pays every citizen, teaches that “We all own the air!”; Lieberman-Warner, they argue, teaches that polluters deserve their profits. Rationale A caveat comes with this one.…
It has no politics. Durkheim saw it in revolutions and the Crusades, where the most inoffensive person might become “either a hero or a butcher”. Randall Collins later traced smaller versions through everyday encounters in ‘Interaction Ritual Chains’ (2004).…
Hübl says unintegrated history acts “like the sand in the engine in how we respond to the current crisis”, showing up as hyperactivity or numbness. His group process tries to build enough coherence to face what was suppressed; it began with the Holocaust…
It builds on Art of Hosting’s circle practice, Theory U’s kinds of listening and the Quaker habit of speaking only when moved. Baeck describes two phases: learning to be present to oneself and the group, then widening awareness to “the wider context of soul,…
Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, first used the term in 1916 and kept returning to it. In a 1936 London lecture he said it “does not develop individually but is inherited”. Critics have called the idea unscientific and hard to test. Rationale Part…
Dave Snowden offers a working distinction. Something complicated can be unfolded and stay much the same; something complex is entangled, and untangling it makes something different. Such systems can be influenced but not precisely controlled. Rationale Part 1…
So knowing the rules isn’t enough. Wolfram writes that “there can be no way to predict how the system will behave except by going through almost as many steps of computation as the evolution of the system itself”. Rationale Wolfram’s claim concerns…
For Paul Gilroy, a cultural theorist who grew up in London’s East End, it names ordinary multi-ethnic city life, where “one set of habits flows into others and all of them are altered by that encounter”. He doubts any government programme could engineer it:…
That is why two people in the same situation can think, feel and act quite differently. A core belief can be inaccurate and still shape what someone sees, so in therapy it is brought into the open and tested against the evidence. Rationale A neighbour, not a…
Indra Adnan, co-initiator of The Alternative UK, carries the word into politics: her platform builds what it calls cosmolocal ‘community agency networks’. Rationale Not a term our articles use. Its pattern does resemble our imagined portfolio: experiments…
Fairclough’s premise is that discourse helps make social life as well as describing it. His method, set out in 1992, treats any instance of language as “simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice, and an instance of social practice”:…
Berlant’s main case is that picture: the post-war promise of upward mobility, job security and lasting intimacy, which people cling to as it frays. Losing it can seem worse than being worn down by it. Rationale Part 1 explains why deep dispositions persist by…
The lesson this entry draws is that confrontation entrenches. People tend to leave when doubt meets a relationship kept warm and somewhere else to belong, and many leave with no intervention at all. Rationale We use it as an analogy for what Part 2 calls…
The effect is small but steady. A 2021 meta-analysis by Hermann, Morgan and Shanahan put it at .107 across five decades, implying “an enduring relationship between television’s message system and viewers’ conceptions of social reality”. Rationale Same word,…
The two explanations can combine; it “may not be an either/or question”. Reviewing the book, Ron Johnston judged its statistical evidence unconvincing. Rationale Their surveys find every generation’s values tightening in insecure times and easing afterwards.…
Its boldest claim is that culture and biology shape each other. Joseph Henrich argues that the products of cultural evolution “have driven our genetic evolution”. Rationale Culture as content handed from mind to mind is too thin a picture for us: Part 2…
The activist and scholar Stephen Duncombe puts it this way: “culture is a politics that doesn’t look like politics”. No culture is completely hegemonic, though, and Gramsci never thought cultural power alone would be enough. Rationale Part 1’s line on power,…
The name is also used for Raymond Williams’s approach in cultural studies, which ties culture to class and power. Rationale A Part 2 footnote lists ‘infrastructure, social structure, superstructure’, close to Harris’s three levels, among the models behind its…
In a later essay the image shifts to people, who “might think of ourselves as mitochondria for a more life-affirming culture in the future”. Rationale His list of traits reads like dispositions we’d hope to see grow. But he begins with the individuals who…
It becomes ideology, in her account, when those meanings hold injustice in place. Privately rejecting it isn’t enough, she argues: everyday coordination depends on it. Rationale Part 1 names ‘cultural technē’ among concepts that look beneath conscious belief.…
Crompton argues that such values work “beyond conscious awareness” and are “shaped in important part as a result of collective decisions about how society is organised”: by policies and institutions as well as messages. Rationale Part 2’s footnote lists ‘core…
In its place: culture and structure make each other. Indy Johar writes that culture, law, property, accounting and capital “co-produced and reinforced” the order behind climate breakdown. ‘Upstream’ survives as advice on where to invest, and for whoever…
Researchers in the field also stress that leaving tends to hinge on a relationship, with a mentor or friend who supports the change, more than on winning an argument. Rationale We use this field with a caveat. That people leave violence without first changing…
We began with ‘deep narrative’ and moved because what we’re pointing towards is “more like an orientation than a story”. We think of them as cultural habits: formed through repeated experience, held in place by many parts of our lives, and largely invisible…
Greenpeace’s handout ‘Hierarchy of Frames’ turns this into three levels. Surface message frames carry facts, data and policies and, it says, reach only people who already agree. Issue-based frames are narrower. Deep frames work “Across Political Lines”: “When…
In the UK, Ruth Taylor’s 2021 report ‘Transforming Narrative Waters’ found practitioners agreed that they “sit beneath other more specific narratives”. Rationale Our starting term, and the subject of that 2021 report by one of us. Part 1 now wonders whether…
Meeting those costs, they argue, needs a Second Deep Transition that changes the meta-rules themselves as well as the systems. The framework combines the Multi-Level Perspective with Carlota Perez’s techno-economic paradigms. Rationale Meta-rules do for…
Its defining contrast is with mastery education. In the words of the course description, “depth education does not predetermine what learners should think or do”; it aims to widen the ability to hold “a multiplicity of perspectives, paradoxical claims, and…
These rules aren’t grammar or logic, and nobody chose them: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has them operating “beneath the consciousness of individual subjects”. Nor are they fixed; a discursive formation, Foucault wrote, “is not an atemporal form”.…
Hutchins’s complaint was that looking for knowledge ‘inside’ the individual “encourages us to overlook the fact that human cognition is always situated in a complex sociocultural world and cannot be unaffected by it”. Rationale Part 1’s second coordinate…
One current, the Seven Mountains Mandate, names seven spheres for Christians to control: government, education, media, arts and entertainment, religion, family and business. The label is mostly applied by critics; those it describes rarely use it. Rationale…
The microsystem is the immediate setting: family, school, peers. The mesosystem is the links between those settings; the exosystem, places the child never enters but is affected by, such as a parent’s workplace; the macrosystem, the wider culture. He later…
On this view we aren’t filled up with culture; we’re tuned to our surroundings by practising alongside the skilled. Ingold’s experienced woodsman “consults the world, not a picture in his head”. Rationale A challenge to our own vocabulary: Ingold wants…
Recent commentary on the ‘metacrisis’, associated with Daniel Schmachtenberger, borrows the term for self-organising cultural tribes that act in a coordinated way without being institutions or following a leader. Rationale Named in a Part 2 footnote as the…
Each element works in two directions: something funders need to grow in themselves, and something to fund in others. The authors stress “the feedback loops between inner and outer realities”, and ask readers to attend to “where shadows live in the work”.…
Its sources include J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s argument that basic concepts such as ‘up’ come from having an upright body. Critics reply that the body may influence thought…
For social change, this implies that outcomes can’t be assembled to order. In ‘Emergent Strategy’ (2017), adrienne maree brown defines emergent strategies as “ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions”.…
That paper names four positions for decoding: the dominant or hegemonic code; the broadcasters’ professional code; a negotiated code, which accepts the big picture while making local exceptions; and an oppositional code. The version usually taught, from…
Reading, writing and mathematics are his worked examples: capacities built as long practice with symbols and tools redeploys older neural circuitry. Such tools become working parts of thinking, more than aids. Rationale Part 2 is built around enculturation;…
In Getting Deep we use it broadly. Culture is learned through explicit teaching, through watching and imitating others, through rituals and built surroundings, and through art and media – and people remake it as they go. Rationale The term Part 2 is built…
EPIC-A is taught on the collective’s course ‘Facing Human Wrongs’ as a tool for spotting modern/colonial imprints in everyday behaviour. Its five letters gather habits such as exceptionalism (E), progress (P), innocence (I), control (C) and moral authority…
In the episodic frame, he wrote, “poverty is covered in terms of personal experience”. Most of the 191 US network news stories on poverty he analysed from 1981–86 took that form. In his experiments the frame changed who viewers held responsible: thematic…
In Williams’s account the first response is to deny that the unsettling claim counts as knowledge at all. Sustained long enough, the challenge can deepen into ‘ontological shock’, a shaken sense of what is real. Rationale One account of why deep dispositions…
The name comes from tidal water: in an estuary, he writes, there are things “you can do only at the turn of the tide”. Rationale Mapping what resists change, Snowden’s first step, echoes our prompt “What holds the current contexts in place”; his last gathers…
His examples include housing co-ops forming regional syndicates, community-supported farms joining producer networks, and the federated social network Mastodon. One image for it: forest, not skyscraper. Rationale Federation suggests how the contexts we care…
Systems resist change, they argue, because power, relationships and resources lock together around the current purpose; so “Purpose is the master key”. Their example is Karyn McCluskey, who asked how young men in Glasgow could grow up outside a culture of…
Her argument is that most efforts to improve things stop short of the fourth, which judges value by whether a living system grows more vital and more able to evolve. Rationale Sanford’s paradigms resemble deep dispositions: stances that settle what counts as…
Its argument is that today’s crises come from a habit of being, not a shortage of knowledge. As Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti puts it, “Education that addresses denial is very different from education that addresses ignorance.” Rationale We interviewed GTDF’s…
‘Surprisal’ is the measure of how unexpected an input is. A system can lower it two ways: by revising its predictions, or by acting until the world matches them. Friston says it “cannot be falsified”: it’s a principle, not a testable hypothesis. Rationale The…
They name nine needs – subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity and freedom – with no ranking beyond staying alive. Food and schooling are ‘satisfiers’, not needs. An unmet need is a poverty, so there are…
Tönnies linked Gesellschaft with modern life and rational self-interest, which weaken the older bonds. Max Weber, replying to him, rooted Gemeinschaft in a “subjective feeling” and Gesellschaft in “rational agreement by mutual consent”, such as a contract.…
Bourdieu’s point is that it runs both ways: social position forms our habitus, and acting from it tends to reproduce that position. Critics call this deterministic, though he described habitus as “durable but not eternal”. Rationale Named in Part 1 among…
In his worked example on household food waste, the assumption that abundance means security and care gives way, once reframed, to the idea that sharing beats hoarding. Rationale Part 1 defines a deep disposition as “an underlying unconscious assumption about…
Fisher built it into his narrative paradigm: people judge what they hear less by formal argument than by whether a story hangs together and rings true to their experience. Rationale Story-first thinking like Fisher’s is where our inquiry began, under the name…
Hope is defined as “the belief that tomorrow can be better than today, if we take action”. The problems aren’t dropped: the point, Coombes writes, “is to have balance”. Rationale Part 1 allows that a disposition “can be tailored in messages”; Coombes’s shifts…
Her case that it’s learned draws on developmental and cross-cultural psychology. In American and European studies, adults overwhelmingly put one human life above many animals’; children often didn’t. And many Indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems…
Brown thought his discipline “riveted more surely by differences between societies than by their commonalities”. He was careful all the same: it rests on imperfect sampling, some universals have known exceptions, and a shared human mind is “entirely…
In campaigning, the term describes work that has an immediate positive impact while also reinforcing the deeper values and ways of understanding reality that maintain harmful systems. Rationale The articles don’t use the word, but Part 1 gives cases of it: a…
Unity Effect says it helps people see “what’s truly thriving, what needs tending”. Built for evaluation, it’s also offered for strategic planning, network building and project design. Rationale Part 1 doubts that anyone can trace “a straight line from…
Its opposite is an explicit model, a deliberate description, often a story about causes and effects. Implicit models are shared, formed by biology and culture, and mostly hold up; when one fails, we’re surprised and reach for explicit models, which fail more…
Researchers who compare cultures set it against collectivism. They find that societies differ by degree, not in kind, with North America and Western Europe among the most individualistic. Rationale Part 1 treats individualism less as a philosophy than as a…
Critics say it treats change as individual self-improvement and overlooks systems and culture. The report admits a probable Western bias. Rationale We share its starting point, that policy and technology aren’t enough, but not its remedy. Individual skills…
For him it restates Buddhist insights into emptiness and non-self, realised through practice – more than most borrowings of the word carry. It has travelled widely since: the writer Charles Eisenstein, for one, sets a ‘Story of Interbeing’ against a ‘Story of…
Its counterpart is internalised domination: members of a dominant group accepting their privileges as natural and deserved. Because people who absorb a prejudice often go on to act it out, the process helps oppression sustain itself. Rationale Our articles…
Gestalt therapists Fritz and Laura Perls later contrasted it with assimilation. An introject is an idea swallowed whole; assimilated experience has been chewed over, tasted, and then accepted or rejected. Rationale Introjection describes, one person at a…
Its test is process as much as destination: the Alliance says Just Transition describes “both where we are going and how we get there”. Rationale Its rule that an unjust process can’t yield a just outcome is our concern too: Part 1 warns that we replicate…
Both are lived values with long histories, reshaped by Spanish Catholic colonisation, and kapwa reaches beyond relations between people into the cultural, historical and spiritual. Rationale Kapwa came up when we interviewed Leni Velasco, and Part 1 names it.…
She added caveats. The higher the point, the harder the system resists, and the list is “an invitation to think more broadly about system change”, not a recipe. Rationale Her ‘paradigm’ is near what we mean by deep disposition. But Part 1 prefers “making…
It was practised as well as written, in ‘base communities’ joining worship to organising for land and labour rights. Its Marxist analysis drew a Vatican admonition in the mid-1980s. Black, Dalit and Minjung theologies are relatives. It remains a theology…
In a 1974 essay Turner coined ‘liminoid’ for what resembles it in industrial societies: theatre, sport, carnival, art. Ritual in the societies he called tribal is compulsory and collective; leisure is optional, often individual, often bought. “One works at…
They name seven systems: decision making, conflict engagement, resource flow, information flow, care and support, connection and community, and feedback. These are agreements, but “three-dimensional and dynamic”, more than policies or procedures. Rationale…
A memeplex is a set of memes that support one another and travel together, such as a religion or political creed. Memetics, the resulting field, is criticised as loosely defined and unscientific; Dawkins cautioned against pushing the gene analogy too far.…
The term came up in our interview with Leni Velasco of Dakila. We haven’t found a settled definition in published writing, so treat it as a working label; in practice the three levels blur into one another. Rationale Part 2’s circles have a middle ring,…
His critics reply that grand narratives still do plenty of work. In communications the related term ‘master narrative’ means a long-lived story deeply embedded in a particular culture. Rationale Some in our process spoke of a ‘meta deep narrative’, yet Part 1…
Patterns across many small stories then show what averages tend to hide. In linguistics ‘micronarrative’ is an unrelated unit for analysing gesture. Rationale Part 1 calls for “always-on listening and sensing”. Dave Snowden, whom we interviewed, offers one…
FrameWorks treats mindsets as something that can be tracked over time. The Institute has done so in the US since 2020, reporting a rise in systemic thinking about racism and the economy, and FrameWorks UK’s Moving Mindsets programme is building a UK…
The best-known study is Zhong and Katie Liljenquist’s of 2006, which found that recalling unethical behaviour increased people’s desire to clean themselves, the ‘Macbeth effect’, though replications have been mixed. It differs from moral licensing, where…
It is contested. Oliver Scott Curry, who champions a rival account, argues the list is “not based on any particular theory of cooperation”, leaves out reciprocity and kinship, and that its questionnaire usually yields two factors, not five. Rationale Its…
Its use is in mapping who does what, and reading clashes between groups as differences in theory of change. “In this model, each of the wedges needs the others to win”, Cockburn writes. Rationale Part 1 warns that a field disposed to individualistic…
The programme builds on the Culture Change Project of the US FrameWorks Institute, whose survey follows mindsets such as individualism and fatalism. The UK pilot, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Health Foundation, has published briefings on…
Transitions happen when landscape pressure and maturing niches destabilise the regime. Geels and Schot (2007) set out four typical pathways this can take. Rationale Culture appears twice in this model: as slow ‘landscape’ values and as meanings held inside a…
The model traces a loop between the two. Someone sees a meme and feels something; frames and metaphors give the feeling a meaning; ideologies turn the meaning into an intention; the person shares it. It draws on embodied cognition, the view that thinking…
An ocean is bigger than any one story. Evans’s example is a hit film: what changes culture is the fandom, commentary and community that gather around it and outlast it. Oceans can be strengthening or toxic, so changing culture means changing them. Rationale…
Mandy Van Deven, writing for arts funders, defines it as “the ability to determine which meaning-making systems people use to interpret and construct the world”. Both say it depends on narrative infrastructure. Rationale Part 1 cites Robinson’s essay, and…
It works by a different route from argument: a transported audience is inside the story, not weighing it up, which can lower resistance to persuasion. Green and Markus Appel put it carefully: people “are changed, at least temporarily, by their experience in…
There, loving-kindness’s near enemy is greed and its far enemy ill will; compassion’s are worldly grief and cruelty. A commentary says the near one corrupts “like an enemy masquerading as a friend”. Meditators use it to check their own minds on a path to…
Katie Donington traces those ideas of African inferiority into post-war Britain. Omar Mohammed of the Global Narrative Hive finds old mischiefs in development work’s assumptions about where expertise resides: “The mischief is that they often become…
Evelien Geerts, summarising Barad, puts the consequence this way: “because we are part of the world, we can no longer see ourselves as innocent bystanders”. Responsibility becomes ‘response-ability’, an ability to respond that is owed to non-human beings as…
The term was used in Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’s ‘Understanding Computers and Cognition’ (1986), drawing on the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and developed by Tony Fry and by Willis, whose 2006 paper ‘Ontological Designing’ sets it out at length.…
The phrase is used in several fields without one agreed source. In change work it is used by Culture Hack Labs, among others, who argue that justice work needs alongside it a deep change in how people view, sense and relate to the world. Rationale Close to…
We met the term in a June 2025 episode of the podcast Planet: Critical, in which host Rachel Donald talks with Damien Williams, who teaches philosophy and data science, about why people can no longer agree on shared facts and why other people’s realities feel…
‘Panarchy’ refers to how these cycles nest across scales, from fast and small to slow and large. Slower cycles provide memory and stability; faster ones bring novelty, and a collapse at one scale can cascade upwards, as when a ground fire takes a whole forest…
He calls paragogy “a learning at the edges of self”, and in place of ‘what do we do?’ asks how we might become more available to what is happening. Rationale Part 2 lists “Exploring unlearning and deconditioning” among possible approaches. Akomolafe’s post is…
The mechanism is self-reinforcement: the more a choice is made, the greater its benefits, so switching gets harder. Political scientists apply it to institutions, where Kathleen Thelen has called it both too contingent and too deterministic. Rationale Part 2…
Other models of transition, she complains, cast radicals as outliers trying to break in. This one puts the alternative future “in the centre of the action rather than the outskirts of possibility”. The rings overlap because “the new lives alongside the old…
In his account, complex systems are “held in their current state by feedback loops”, which are a system’s strength until conditions change: “Then they become its trap.” He builds on the ecologist C. S. Holling’s adaptive cycle of growth, conservation, release…
Its working image is an eddy in a river: the water is different each moment, but the form persists in motion. Bodies, ecosystems and societies are treated the same way, as flows folded and linked into longer-lasting patterns. The project asks why so many…
It is a political programme before it is a concept. It asks first for a stop to present harms, then for repair: restored sovereignty, redistributed wealth and due recognition of Indigenous knowledges. Rationale Part 1 describes a disposition of separation.…
Guardian columnist George Monbiot has popularised a stronger, psychological version, his ‘values ratchet’: a health service open to all “helps instil the belief that it is normal to care for strangers”. Rationale Our examples of contexts that form…
Examples include the Zapatistas’ self-government, the Occupy camps and community land trusts. Since the future can’t be known in detail, Paul Raekstad notes, such practice has to be experimental. Rationale The term isn’t in our articles, but its premise is:…
A prior in this sense is a statistical quantity inside one perceiving system, not a belief someone could state. Rationale The first concept Part 1 lists for what lies under belief. We borrow the pointer, not the maths: whether whole cultures share priors is…
Dougald Hine, crediting Greer, and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira have both taken it up; she says modernity reads its harms as “complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted”. Rationale By this distinction a…
The quieter half of each pair is the less familiar. Agitation propaganda stirs people to sudden action; integration propaganda reinforces a society’s norms and way of life over the long term. Its ‘sociological’ form is mostly undeliberate, carried by films,…
Its premise is that racism works as “a divide-and-conquer tactic”: wealthy interests stoke racial fear so that working people turn on each other and on government. So the message names race openly, says who gains from division, and calls for joining together…
The ‘observer’ needn’t be a mind; any physical system will do. It is one of several competing interpretations, not settled physics, and Rovelli revised it in 2023. Rationale We keep this entry as an analogy, not evidence. Physics that finds properties only in…
Of the form she wrote: “It controls meaning, it restricts what is said”. Her bolder claim, that modern Western readers misjudge such texts as muddled, is the one her reviewer Päivi Mehtonen found weakest. Rationale An example from what Part 2 calls the ‘Told’…
The psychologist Frederic Bartlett showed this in 1932: asked to recall a Chinook folk tale, his participants reshaped it to fit their cultural expectations. Jean Piaget used the term for children’s developing understanding. In 1997 the sociologist Paul…
Accounts of its origins differ. Eisenstein traces it to the emergence of agriculture; the collective ties it to modernity and colonialism. Rationale Part 1 calls the move away from this “one key reorientation” our research kept highlighting, and leaves open…
The French sinologist François Jullien brought the idea to Western readers in ‘The Propensity of Things’ (French 1992, English 1995). Shi’s home is war and statecraft, and Jullien’s account has critics; it is one reading, not ‘the Chinese view’. Rationale…
The unit of analysis is the practice, not the individual’s attitudes or choices. In Janine Morley’s summary, practices “evolve as new elements and/or new interlinkages are (per)formed, and disappear as links are broken”. Rationale Part 1 calls deep…
It isn’t a psychological construct, and it doesn’t reduce to a definition. The same entry says Inuit knowledge flows where Western language demands exactness. Sila belongs to that knowledge and to the peoples who live by it. Rationale Our route to sila was…
The distinction matters politically. Everyday culture guides what people take to be right, beautiful, just and possible, so it can quietly hold power in place or loosen it. Beautiful Trouble calls it “a politics that doesn’t look like politics”. Rationale…
They describe SDO as a “general attitudinal orientation toward intergroup relations”, measured by questionnaire. Higher scorers tended to back ideologies and policies that support hierarchy and to seek roles that maintain it; lower scorers showed more empathy…
An imaginary is lived more than stated, which separates it from a theory or an ideology. Manfred Steger and Paul James call imaginaries “deep-seated modes of understanding” that set “largely pre-reflexive parameters within which people imagine their social…
In practice a production is paired with an impact campaign, partners and evaluation. Rationale SIE works in what Part 2 calls the ‘Told’ zone. Part 1 doubts dispositions move through “communications alone”, and Part 2 wonders if each zone’s work is “more…
More recent work asks what holds a norm in place. The philosopher Cristina Bicchieri argues that people follow one when they believe others do, and that others expect them to. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry she co-wrote reports the view that norms are “a…
Tithi Bhattacharya, introducing a collection on the theory, puts its opening question as: “If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?” The work that does, she writes, is “naturalized into nonexistence”. Rationale…
His argument is that lasting change in a system needs both to be tended, and that the soil is the neglected half. The essay goes on to propose practices for cultivating it, building people’s shared capacity for change from the bottom up and across sectors.…
The influence runs both ways: visions of the future steer what gets researched and built, and what gets built reshapes what people can imagine. The idea extends the older notion of social imaginaries, and now covers companies, social movements and professions…
They name four interconnected parts: skills such as building trust and handling conflict; spaces where relationships and strategy are built; scaffolding, the shared frameworks and tools that help groups coordinate; and structures, the agreements and…
The model starts with the person initiating change and treats influence as running both ways. NPC’s worked example is a coalition’s policy campaign that stalls because one leader can’t trust his partners. Rationale Kin to the micro, meso and macro models Part…
It’s often compared with the Cynefin framework and has been much adapted. Stacey later dropped it, arguing that it tidies away how uncertainty and disagreement keep shifting in real organisations. Rationale Deep disposition work belongs in the matrix’s…
Its argument is that “Generative and life-giving stories will only come from generative and life-giving practices”. More diverse newsrooms or more fact-checking aren’t enough; how stories get made, and who holds them, has to change too. Rationale Here the…
His narrative work starts from the same idea. The Cynefin wiki describes its focus as narratives “in the wild”: “the small stories and anecdotes that are already being told and circulating, rather than larger, purposefully created stories”. Formal research,…
For Snowden this substrate can’t be written to order. It forms as stories are told, retold and argued over. Harry Potter and Marvel, he suggests, now do some of the work the Bible once did. Rationale Snowden’s substrate is one account of the ground in Part…
In ‘shifting the burden’, a quick fix eases the symptoms while the real cause is left alone, as when debts are paid by borrowing. In ‘escalation’, each side answers the other’s move, as in an arms race. In ‘tragedy of the commons’, everyone draws on a shared…
The theory’s answer is that believing the system is just brings comfort: it meets needs for order and certainty and eases anger and guilt about inequality. One cited finding: women paid less than men often judge that they deserve less. Critics from social…
Its experiments remind people of their mortality, then measure their reactions. In a 1990 study, Christian participants reminded of death rated fellow Christians more favourably and Jewish students less so. Critics say such results are hard to replicate and…
The reasoning is that an emergent pattern can’t be engineered directly, but what shapes it can be adjusted and the direction watched. Snowden on why assemblages matter: “Those patterns trigger an assemblage from which we find it very difficult to escape”.…
The authors call the map “a pedagogical rather than normative exercise”, a way of seeing tensions in each position. Rationale Its three depths – doing, knowing, being differently – mirror our move from “what stories we should tell” to the orientations beneath…
No layer comes first, and a new policy or a change of heart touches only one. Hamedani and Markus argue change lasts best when all four shift together, since “one way to change minds and behaviors is to change cultures, just as one way to change cultures is…
It sorts situations by how cause and effect relate. In clear ones the link is obvious and best practice applies. Complicated ones need analysis or expertise. In complex ones the link shows only in hindsight, so you probe with small experiments, then respond.…
Her reading of Francis Bacon’s language as echoing witch-trial interrogation is disputed. Merchant herself notes he never wrote of torturing nature. Rationale Where separation came from, Part 1 doesn’t say. Merchant gives one origin among several here:…
Ronald Purser applied it in 2019 to the mindfulness industry, or ‘McMindfulness’, which he says sells the message that “individual action is the only real way to solve social problems”. Rationale A warning we take personally. Work on inner orientations can…
David Korten says Craig Schindler and Gary Lapid used the phrase first, in the 1980s, and reports Macy’s wish that it be “used by everyone and owned by no one”. Rationale Macy files community gardens under structural alternatives and keeps consciousness as a…
The heroine first turns from the feminine and succeeds on masculine terms, where a hero’s story usually ends. The success proves hollow; she descends, reconnects with what she rejected and brings the two together. In Murdock’s words: “The feminine journey is…
The house has “a foundation of separability”, two carrying walls – universal reason and the nation state – and a roof of global capital. Its costs fall on those in the basement and outside. Further frames show how it shapes inhabitants’ reasoning, fears and…
The house rises from the interests it serves and the values behind them, through principles and the institutions that carry them, to a narrative, policy priorities and outcomes such as inequality. Quaker trainers have used it to imagine a ‘House of the New…
Its origin is unclear. The charity consultancy NPC traces the image to the anthropologist Edward Hall’s 1976 iceberg of culture, later adapted by systems and management theorists. NPC is frank about its limits: “too simplistic to provide a thorough analysis”.…
His hero “ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder”. Campbell modelled the pattern on rites of passage and saw in it a shape for a life as well as a plot. Asked in 1983 about a woman’s version, he replied: “Women will…
One of his examples: a railway whose purpose, from his seat, was to put him off rail travel. Purpose, he added, is read by an observer. The acronym POSIWID seems to have come later. Rationale We can turn Beer’s test on ourselves. Part 1 admits we may live…
His claim is that post-war social democracy and neoliberalism each rose by telling a version of it, with different villains and heroes, and that a failing ideology is only displaced by a new story of the same shape. His own candidate is a ‘politics of…
Their test was within one country: among 1,162 Han Chinese, people from the rice-growing south were more interdependent than those from the wheat-growing north. They conclude that “these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world”.…
Two axes, formal to informal and individual to societal, give four quadrants: Community, Public Space, Service Provision and Institutional Power. SMK found that successful campaigns ‘pinball’ between them: change “originates in one quadrant, but success…
He isn’t complaining about too much television. Thesis 4 reads: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” It is the economy’s rule over everyday life made visible: news, advertising and…
Three of the paper’s leading roles matter there: insider-outsiders who see their own system’s failings, entrepreneurial ventures that embody a different system, and convenors who bring them together. Hybrids emerge. Change, they suggest, grows likelier as…
The title is from the joke about a fish asked how the water is. Funders swim in it too: they “cannot support efforts that run counter to their own mental models”. Rationale Many readers will know its inverted triangle. Our caveat is the bottom label: ‘mental…
The guessing draws on past experience and on concepts shared with other people. A scowl means anger, Barrett says, only because “we all agree that scowling is anger”. Her summary: “Emotions are constructions of the world, not reactions to it.” Rationale We…
The U is the journey’s shape: down one side by observing and listening; a still point at the bottom he calls ‘presencing’ (presence plus sensing); up the other by testing the new in quick prototypes. Rationale Looking beneath what leaders do to the place they…
The third attractor is whatever could avoid both: enough coordination to prevent catastrophe without concentrating power. As the series title suggests, it is posed as a search, not a finished design. Rationale His two feared outcomes are the backdrop Part 1…
You can turn up uninvited, it’s nearby and unpretentious, there are regulars, and conversation is the main activity. A 2023 edition presents third places as an answer to loneliness and polarisation. ‘Third space’ is a separate theory, often confused with it.…
Those powers exist even when nothing triggers them: a match can light whether or not it is ever struck. Bhaskar’s target was empiricism, which admits only what can be experienced and so collapses the three domains into one. Rationale Bhaskar’s causal powers…
Its argument is that the US right has built all three over decades, while progressive movements have stayed mostly in the first. Rationale Its third face is where our inquiry sits: dominant dispositions “help make existing institutions and arrangements feel…
A three-horizons model first appeared in a 1999 business book. The futures version was set out by Andrew Curry and Anthony Hodgson in 2008 and in Bill Sharpe’s 2013 book ‘Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope’. Rationale We used it: a strategy diagram on our…
Schein (1928–2023), a psychologist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, developed the model in the 1980s. Its practical point: trouble follows when what leaders espouse doesn’t match the assumptions underneath. Rationale Schein’s deepest level is a deep…
At the micro level are niches, where people try new practices and technologies. At the macro level is the wider setting of values, ideologies, demographics and economic conditions. Between them sits the ‘regime’: the institutions, markets and rules that give…
His model is the Hebrew prophets’ response to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, “a huge upheaval of every dimension of Israel’s life”. He argues that 9/11 dislocated the United States similarly. For Brueggemann these are acts of faith, bound to love of…
‘The Dreaming’ is an English gloss devised by early anthropologists from an Arrernte word, and some Aboriginal people reject it as implying something unreal. Much of Tjukurpa is secret and stays with senior Aṉangu. Rationale Not named in our articles, and not…
The collective’s introduction says why they are hard to spot: “Modernity often presents itself as the natural order of things, making its assumptions feel inevitable and invisible.” The chapter is offered as a practice of noticing “how these habits of thought…
It is more than a saying about community. The philosopher Fainos Mangena describes its ethics as “spiritual, dialogical and consensual”, binding the living to ancestors and a creator as well as to each other. Rationale Our articles don’t name ubuntu. We…
Some in the project hesitate over the image, because a metaphor from nature can make today’s dominant patterns sound natural, when they are made and remade by culture. Rationale Our own image, which Part 1 credits to Suzanne Dhaliwal. Part 2 widens it:…
Later scholars note it came to the fore as Pacific communities in Aotearoa New Zealand rebuilt relationships far from home. Vā is an ethic to be kept within a living social order, more than a theory. Rationale Part 1 names vā, “the relational space between,…
Donald sets this against ‘homo economicus’, the self-interested individual, whom he argues schooling trains children to become. Wahkohtowin is lived daily within Cree communities, more than an idea to adopt; this entry rests on a single passage. Rationale…
Compared with most of the world, WEIRD people lean towards trusting strangers, individualism and analytic thinking – sorting people and objects into categories instead of reading relationships and context. Henrich traces this to the early medieval Church’s…
Some Native American thinkers also use it as a concept, for any person, idea or movement driven by self-serving greed, colonialism included. The best-known statement is Jack D. Forbes’s ‘Columbus and Other Cannibals’, which treats exploitation and imperialism…
It reaches beyond people. All living things, and rocks and mountains too, are held to have whakapapa, which makes it a way of organising knowledge. It also carries obligations and protocols: whakapapa is privileged knowledge, and its misuse is a real concern…
One of their ten properties is that each is “a symptom of another problem”; and such problems, they say, are never solved, only re-solved. Rationale Our caveat is with the word ‘problem’, which can suggest something out there awaiting a fix. Yet Rittel and…
Writing as Indigenous and racialised scholars, they ground the idea in a Māori philosophy of language, in which things are “co-constitutive of each other” and language is itself a living entity. They admit the paradox: writing about worlding is still wording.…
Writers differ on whether a worldview is a set of beliefs an individual can consciously build, or something that works across a community and largely unconsciously. Activist Osprey Orielle Lake, in ‘The Story Is In Our Bones’, uses it in the second sense, for…
For Evans, the “upper layers work on what we think”; the “lower layers work on who we are”. People join those rather than watch them, and they make the upper layers stick. They’re also slowest to show results, which, he argues, is why progressive funders shy…
Earlier Confucians disagreed. Mencius held that people are good by nature and that bad surroundings corrupt them. Rationale We use this with a caveat. Xunzi’s view that character forms through repeated practice fits our “cultural habits”, but his rites…