ECOSYSTEM GLOSSARY
- Action inquiry is a lifelong practice for intentionally interweaving action and inquiry, both in the midst of action and in scientific inquiry, in order to achieve more frequent and more far-reaching timely and transforming action in new situations.
- The encompassing aims in action inquiry are to increase one’s own and other’s capacity to appreciate and cultivate transformation, integrity, mutuality, justice and sustainability for ourselves, for our groups and for our institutions. This […] is accomplished […] more by the growing capacity of the acting system (whether person, team or nation) to experience and be in a productive and mutually emancipatory dialogue with difference, diversity, incongruity in each event, as timely.
- Aporia (Ancient Greek: ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ, literally: “lacking passage”, also: “impasse”, “difficulty in passage”, “puzzlement”) is a term often used in philosophy and rhetoric to describe a state of puzzlement or doubt. Jacques Derrida, a philosopher who explored aporia in the context of deconstruction, used this term to describe moments where a text or a concept reveals its own internal contradictions, creating a space where meaning becomes unstable or undecidable.
- The use of the Greek word “aporia” comes from Derrida’s application of the term to describe a paradoxical or unanswerable question that forces you to think differently. In the Cynefin framework, the central aporetic domain is often the starting point for sense-making.
- Boundary is something that points out or shows a limit or end; dividing line.
- There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.
- The Circle of Concern includes things that individuals are concerned about but have no control over, such as the weather or global politics.
- The Circle of Influence includes things that individuals can influence but do not have complete control over, such as their relationships, work environment, and health.
- “[…] rigid, inflexible, strongly-held beliefs about the self, others, the world, or the future […]”
- “[…] Core beliefs are our most deeply held assumptions about ourselves, the world, and others. They are firmly embedded in our thinking and significantly shape our reality and behaviors […]”
- An ecosystem is a community of organisms and their physical environment interacting together. Environment involves both living organisms and the non-living physical conditions. These two are inseparable but interrelated. The living and physical components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows.
- An ecosystem may be of very different size.
- Ecosystem boundaries are not marked (separated) by rigid lines.
- Ecosystems are “socio-ecological systems”, where diverse and interconnected actors are intricately tied by cultural practices, identities, intentions, roles, beliefs, values, and available resources. In this understanding, ecosystems yield societal value that transcends the capacity and intentions of individual actors.
- Catalyzation can be understood as a continual process of stimulating the reconfiguration of an ecosystem. Through this process, the key factors that define the core-functioning of the ecosystem, such as power, resource flows, relationships, and purpose, are reconfigured. Stimulation may happen on different levels simultaneously until there is a tipping point and a new equilibrium is reached in which emergent patterns become dominant.
- Fractals are self-similar patterns that repeat across many scales, such that small parts of an object look similar to the whole. Fractal patterns are simple to generate, yet dynamic and infinitely complex. Social fractals can be described as self-similar patterns that repeat themselves across a range of structures at different scales, extending from small social interactions to large national and international institutions. They can be generated by principles, values, ideas, initiatives, or endeavors that are designed with the same characteristics desired for the whole.
- Generative listening is a type of listening from the emerging field of future possibility and transformative conversation. This type of listening may be seen as the most valuable mode of listening in terms of knowledge creation as well as of personal growth. It transforms the listener’s self profoundly and enables him to connect to a deeper source of knowing, including the knowledge of your best future possibility and self. In the mode of generative listening, the listener may grasp the essence of what is being said which might not be fully uncoverable by sticking to (spoken) words only. Rather, the listener tries to understand comprehensively what the speaker wants to express. This deeper message is likely to be beneath the level of explicit words.
- The Hawthorne Effect is frequently referred by researchers to account for unexpected outcomes which are believed to depend on the fact that the subjects in a study have been aware that they are part of an experiment and are receiving extra attention as a result.
- Intangible resources refer to a broad classification of assets that hold value, but have no physical existence. Intangibles may include management credibility, innovativeness, ideas, brand identity, reputation, customer loyalty, trust, ability to attract talented workers, access to networks, research, leadership, social and environmental responsibility, and so on.
- Interventions are a series of inter-related events occurring within a system where the change in outcome (attenuated or amplified) is not proportional to the change in input. Interventions are thus considered as ongoing social processes rather than fixed and bounded entities
- Leverage points are places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
- Mapping is a generic term for a wide array of methods and tools that help build shared reality and shared understanding by making systems explicit, seeing interconnections, dynamics, casualties, patterns, roles and relationships as well as underlying values and mindsets.
- Momentum […] is experienced as a […] force in which several factors or qualities converge in a synergistic way to enable one to perform at a level not ordinarily possible.
- Momentum is a tendency to keep evolving in the same direction.
- […] momentum as an impetus for action that stems from an element considered essential for action. Three of the four definitions found in the […] literature suggest that element essential for action is temporal in nature (the fourth is timeless in the Newtonian sense) — the past inexorably intruding into the present and future, the future goal shaping the present and breaking the strength of the past, and the present as the contextual ground on which the past and future interact with the present in the ongoing accomplishment of momentum.
- The broadest range of scenarios, encompassing all potential outcomes that could arise, regardless of likelihood or feasibility.
- Narratives are often described as a collection or system of related stories that are articulated and refined over time to represent a central idea or belief. Unlike individual stories, narratives have no standard form or structure; they have no beginning or end. What tiles are to mosaics, stories are to narratives. The relationship is symbiotic; stories bring narratives to life by making them relatable and accessible, while narratives infuse stories with deeper meaning. Thus, “stories can be told,” according to communication strategist Jen Soriano, “while narratives are understood at a gut level and activated by simple words, sounds, signals and symbols”.
- Narratives are messy. Nonlinear, emotional and contradictory, they often resonate with visceral meaning, feel authentic and ring true, regardless of their relationship to facts and evidence. They provide us with frames of reference that determine how we comprehend complex realities and define the important boundaries between what we imagine to be possible, probable or practical. They facilitate interpretation of the past, understanding of the present, and a vision for the future.
- Nodes are parts of networks where elements of the network intersect. […] The concept of nodes focuses our attention on the key organizations, people, and technologies that provide stable anchor points and typically act as brokers at crucial intersections.
- Nodes are sites worthy of attention because many things happen when flows intersect at nodes.
- Social norms are the perceived informal, mostly unwritten, rules that define acceptable and appropriate actions within a given group or community, thus guiding human behavior. They consist of what we do, what we believe others do, and what we believe others approve of and expect us to do. Social norms are therefore situated at the interplay between behavior, beliefs and expectations.
- Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to research that prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives. PAR involves the participation and leadership of those people experiencing issues, who take action to produce emancipatory social change, through conducting systematic research to generate new knowledge.
Source: Cornish, F., Breton, N., Moreno-Tabarez, U. et al. (2023). “Participatory action research”. Nat Rev Methods Primers 3, 34 (2023). doi: 10.1038/s43586-023-00214-1
- […] the future unfolds through the patterns that have been established in the past, interacting with current events […] The future state of the system is, in this way, path-dependent.
- Patterns — established and contextual ways of being in the world.
- There are four parts to our suggested definition of what constitutes a social pattern: (1) a form (2) which consists of social actions (behavior plus meaning); (3) a repetition of the form in time, space, context etc.; and (4) some probability that it will occur again.
- […] periphery as a position that is not only remote from a core but characterized by internal dispersion (i.e. low internal cohesion and interrelation between elements in the field).
- [...] Peripheral elements are those areas of the field with the least network density, disconnected from each other and only sparsely connected to the network core. Within a social field, a peripheral actor will have fewer realized interactions or relations with other actors than a more central actor.
- The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense that Energy is the fundamental concept in physics [...] The laws of social dynamics are laws which can only be stated in terms of power.
- The ability to impact and influence situations across diverse and unpredictable contexts with legitimacy (implied or explicit cooperation and agreement of others) for the greater good.
- Regenerative approach is a system of developmental technologies and strategies that works to enhance the ability of living beings to co-evolve, so that the planet continues to express its potential for diversity, complexity, and creativity through harmonizing human activities with the continuing evolution of life on our planet, even as we continue to develop our potential as humans.
- Resilience refers to the capacity of a dynamic system to adapt successfully to disturbances that threaten the viability, the function, or the development of that system.
- The ability of an ecosystem to maintain equilibrium despite disturbance is called resistance and how readily an ecosystem returns to equilibrium after being disturbed is called resilience.
- The ability of an ecosystem to maintain equilibrium despite disturbance is called resistance and how readily an ecosystem returns to equilibrium after being disturbed is called resilience.
- Resistance can manifest by withholding collaboration in the accomplishment of joint courses of action and activities, slowing down or halting the progress of the ongoing activity, withholding endorsement of proposed versions of reality (e.g., self- and other-categorization), or misaligning with the epistemic, deontic, or affective stances proposed by initiating actions.
- Resistance is an intentional act […] with a complex nature. Resistance […] actively engages with power through a combination of avoidance, breaking resistance and/or the construction of alternative subjectivities, narratives and communities.
- Rituals are socially stipulated, conventional behaviors. They are (i) predefined sequences of action characterized by rigidity, formality and repetition, which is (ii) embedded in systems of meaning and symbolism, and which (iii) contains non-instrumental elements that are causally opaque and goal demoted.
Source: Legare, C. H., Nielsen, M. (2020). “Ritual explained: interdisciplinary answers to Tinbergen’s four questions”. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2020 Aug 17;375(1805):20190419. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0419
- Tangible resources are the physical resources of the organization that contribute to its value added.
- A trauma-informed approach refers to efforts that are informed by knowledge of trauma and its potential lifelong consequences and that target risk and protective processes at multiple levels (individual, relational, organizational, and community).
- Weak signals are […] ambiguous and controversial bits of information about the competitive environment that are typically hidden among the “noise” of the prevailing sense-making paradigm and that gradually coalesce to form a pattern of intelligence.
- Well-being encompasses quality of life, as well as the ability of people and societies to contribute to the world in accordance with a sense of meaning and purpose.
The Ecosystem Cards are published under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
