Summary
An ontological shift is a change in a person’s or a culture’s working sense of what is real: what exists, what is alive, and how things relate. Ontology is the philosophical study of being. Since the 1990s anthropologists have also used the word for the different ways cultures experience and understand the nature of being; some, for example, ascribe intention to plants, forests and rivers.
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 what we first set out to do. We’re now “much more wary” of ‘shift’: nobody’s sense of what’s real flips once and stays put while their surroundings keep working on them.