Research · Glossary
A database of all the Concepts, Frameworks, and Theories of Change we identified during our research — categorised by field and by the role each plays in thinking about ‘deep disposition work’. Filter below. This list is not exhaustive, and will continue to be updated. Each term has its own note; definitions are being filled in over time.
149 terms
A mental model at the bottom of the Iceberg, an expectation of what the future holds, an unspoken vision of the future – unspoken, semi-conscious – basic, linear, blends seamlessly with received wisdom. This acts as a filter for present experience, always…
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer and prison abolitionist and a co-founder of Critical Resistance. Her work frames abolition not simply as removing prisons and police but as building the social conditions — housing, healthcare, education, meaningful work —…
Actant refers to any entity that can act to influence a network, anything that can modify other entities through action.
The adjacent possible, a concept introduced by Stuart Kauffman and popularized by Steven Johnson, refers to the set of all possible next steps or innovations that are immediately accessible from a given state of a system.
“What is made available to you by the environment in which you are placed.
“Agape from Ancient Greek is "the highest form of love, charity" and "the love of God for [human beings] and of [human beings] for God".
It's the realm of becoming generative possibilities, where storytelling is rhizomatic, fluid and open to between of relational interpretation. Here, we explore the potential of futures arriving, yet to be told.
Closer in meaning to ‘bricolage’
Unlike regular attractors, which maybe points, close loops, or more complex but still regular shapes, a strange attractor is highly sensitive to small changes in the initial conditions, leading to chaotic behaviour within the system.”
“Eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches.
“A belief is a subjective attitude that something is true or a state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some stance, take, or opinion about something.
A pioneering modality that accesses and reprograms your sub-conscious beliefs.
The Berkana Two Loops Model, developed by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze of the Berkana Institute, demonstrates how systems undergo transformation by illustrating the interplay between an old, declining system and a new, emerging one.
The development of different, even polarised interpretations of reality, cultivated and encouraged through engagement with media, social media and LLMs.
“Bildung is a German word for education, cultivation, personal formation and character, emotional and moral development, and maturation combined...
What the Block-Bridge-Build framework invites of us to do is to refrain from trying to solve this central challenge but rather incorporate a “both-and” approach into our relational organizing. This way of thinking will help us include the multiplicity of time…
Also see Movement Ecology Framework
“CVT contends that humans evolved unique mental mechanisms for assessing each other’s marginal value to a coalition (i.e., each other’s coalitional value).
“The study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts.1 It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology.
George Lakoff:
Collective healing is the process of tending to trauma that a group, nation, or population has undergone together — restoring the shared coherence that mass violence, oppression, or catastrophe has fractured. The term is closely associated with Thomas Hübl,…
A collective practice, with many different elements.
I believe when we talk about collective trauma, we’re usually talking about the root causes that lead up to the current crises and the way we respond to a current crisis. They’re entangled.
Carl Jung: “In dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working…
From Through a Glass Darkly - A complex systems approach to Futures
Computational irreducibility, a term coined by mathematician and physicist Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science (2002), names processes whose outcome cannot be reached by any theoretical shortcut: "the only way to determine the outcome of a process is to…
Core beliefs are a person’s most central ideas about themselves, others, and the world. These beliefs act like a lens through which every situation and life experience is seen.
Indra Adnan, Jude Currivan:
“An evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social…
A cultural fallacy is a falsehood maintained by people and systems to protect power.
“The dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who shape the culture of that society—the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm.” (source)
Embodied Cognition
Mitochondria are the power centers of biological cells, tiny organelles that convert nutrients into usable energy, keeping the organism and life adaptive and alive.
“A cultural techne or ideology is when you have the social meanings that let you interpret what something is. The social meanings in a context will give you a clue to how we interact with the things…. The cultural techne gives us the means for interpreting…
A transdisciplinary research area informed largely by social psychology, social anthropology and cultural studies.
Only connects with the people who already agree. 2. ISSUE-BASED FRAMES Narrower
A framework by Johan Schot and Laur Kanger (2018) theorising very long-term, large-scale change across many socio-technical systems at once. They argue that over roughly the past 250 years, systems like energy, mobility and food have co-evolved in a shared…
(Notes from Depth Education Design course)
“Ensures that only the ones who express the right viewpoints and subscribe to the right philosophies ever gain the influence or the authority to be listened to.”
Hutchins argues that mental representations, which classical cognitive science held that are within the individual brain, are actually distributed in sociocultural systems that constitute the tools to think and perceive the world.
Dominion theology, also known as dominionism, is a group of far-right Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians and based on their understandings of biblical law.
“Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory explains that an individual’s development is shaped by interconnected environmental systems, from immediate surroundings like family to broader societal structures like culture.”
“Emergent cultural attractors, alongside ‘Hyper Agents’ and ‘Institutions’. The spirit of a group that is different/more than just the individual people (gestalt). Leads to self-organising, emergent memetic tribes/cultural groups, operating with a coordinated…
“Drawing on our interviews with practitioners and the original creators of the frameworks, we asked: what other elements would we make more explicit in some important systems change frameworks? Taking the Three Horizons, the Berkana Two Loops, and Deep…
Relates to Cultural Materialism and Mehrabian’s 7-38-55
“Embodiment is the practice of fully inhabiting our bodies and allowing their intelligence to guide how we live and how we help systems thrive. It offers hope from a different starting place, one rooted in connection, and invites the quiet wonder of feeling…
“In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole.
The lifelong process through which people learn, embody, enact, make sense of, and replicate their culture's norms, values, ways of being and deep dispositions.
The Entangled Time Tree is a decolonial futuring heuristic that reimagines the future not as a projection of current trends but as something grown from a multiplicity of pasts. Introduced by Naomi Terry, Azucena Castro, Bwalya Chibwe, Geci Karuri-Sebina,…
Damien Williams:
Ethnogenesis and ethnomysticism together name the process by which a group's ethnic identity gets treated as sacred, fixed destiny rather than as history. Ethnogenesis is the anthropological term for how ethnic groups form and cohere over time, through shared…
Local autonomy + voluntary coordination
Carol Sanford distinguishes four paradigms, or governing mindsets, that shape how people and institutions act: Extract Value, Arrest Disorder, Do Good, and Regenerate Life. They're arranged as a hierarchy of increasing wholeness rather than a menu of options.…
The four socially sanctioned denials are the interlocking refusals that the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective — including Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti), author of Hospicing Modernity — identifies as the foundation of the…
“The free energy principle is based on the Bayesian idea of the brain as an "inference engine." Under the free energy principle, systems pursue paths of least surprise, or equivalently, minimize the difference between predictions based on their model of the…
“Social ties can be categorized, on one hand, as belonging to personal social interactions, and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions (Gemeinschaft, German, commonly translated as "community"), or on the other hand as belonging to indirect…
People with a common cultural background (social class, religion, and nationality, ethnic group, education, and profession) share a habitus as the way that group culture and personal history shape the mind of a person; consequently, the habitus of a person…
Hidden assumptions are the unstated beliefs or taken-for-granted logics that quietly drive a system — the premises people rarely question because they sit beneath conscious awareness. In narrative and framing work they form a layer between visible surface…
Homo narrans — "storytelling human" — is an alternative binomial for our species, proposing that it is not language or reasoning but narrative that most distinguishes Homo sapiens within the genus Homo. Where earlier descriptors crowned humans homo sapiens…
"human exceptionalism is learned by observing and internalizing the behaviors of others in the world around us"
Technically a term from medical science, referring to the negative unintended consequences of an intervention.
“An implicit model is a non-conceptual, embodied representation of our environment – we navigate it safely because our body, our senses, our social norms, our tools and artefacts guide us through it.”
The Iceberg Model is a systems-thinking tool showing that the visible events we react to sit above less-visible layers: patterns of behaviour, then structures, then mental models. Lasting change comes from working below the waterline rather than reacting to…
“Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, and social outlook that emphasizes the intrinsic worth of the individual.
“In social justice theory, internalized oppression is the resignation by members of an oppressed group to the methods of an oppressing group and their incorporation of its message against their own best interest. Rosenwasser (2002) defines it as believing,…
Introjection is a concept rooted in the psychoanalytic theories of unconscious motivations.
The Just Transition Framework is a set of principles, processes and practices for a fair shift away from an extractive economy — one built on the exploitation of labour and nature — toward a regenerative economy rooted in ecological restoration, community…
Kapwa and bayanihan are two Filipino cultural values that together express a relational, communal way of being in which the self is never separate from others. Kapwa, articulated by Filipino psychologist Virgilio Enriquez as the core concept of Sikolohiyang…
In her essay "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" (1997, revised 1999), systems thinker Donella Meadows ranked twelve types of intervention from least to most powerful. Shallow points include adjusting numbers like taxes, subsidies and…
“Liberation theology is a theological approach emphasizing the liberation of the oppressed.
“We talk about seven systems:
Also see Embodied Cognition
Memetics, a field of study developed from the 80s onwards, is often accused of trespassing in fields such as psychology or sociology, attempting to replace well established and coherent analytical tools and models with half-baked and insufficiently scientific…
Meso narratives are the stories and shared meanings that circulate at the level of communities — a mid-range scale sitting between the vast, society-wide metanarratives (or "meta/grand narratives") that legitimate a whole social order, and the granular…
“In social theory, a metanarrative (also master narrative, or meta-narrative and grand narrative; French: métarécit or grand récit) is an overarching narrative about smaller historical narratives, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated…
Decolonial Work - Pruning Bonsai vs. Metabolizing Decay
We cannot ‘think holistically’, the best we can do is map existing narrative patterns – the substrate – identifying the ‘actants’, and develop ‘constructors’ to encourage the creation of ‘more stories like these, less stories like these’ – focusing on…
Mindsets are deep, enduring patterns of thinking that underlie surface attitudes and opinions — the durable assumptions and framings people draw on, often below conscious awareness, to make sense of an issue. Developed by the FrameWorks Institute as a unit…
“Moral cleansing describes behaviors aimed at restoring moral self-worth in response to past transgressions.
Social movement ecology is the study of how diverse organisations within a country cooperate or compete with each other, and with the entire political and economic environment to create or hinder social change.
“We need to know if culture is changing.
A framework from sustainability transitions research, associated mainly with Frank Geels, for explaining how socio-technical systems (energy, transport, food) change over decades. It works across three levels. Niches are protected spaces where radical…
“We run on scripts. At the individual and societal level, we run on stories (some of which are heuristics) that make it easy for us to navigate our worlds – common sense that we ‘go by’ so we don’t have to stop and think about every tiny thing.
Narrative Oceans is a term used by the Pop Culture Collaborative, the philanthropic narrative-change fund led by CEO Bridgit Antoinette Evans, to describe "the ecosystems of narratives, ideas, and cultural norms that shape the behaviors, mindsets, and…
Rashad Robinson
New materialists emphasize how fixed entities and apparently closed systems are produced through dynamic relations and processes, considering the distribution of agency through the interaction of heterogeneous forces.
AKA Ethico-onto-epistem-ology
Ontology is the study of being.
“Comes from ontological philosophy – ‘the study of what is real’ – and so the ontological shock is that moment where the thing that we thought was real for so long, the fundamental foundation of our world, is shaken.”
A framework from resilience science, developed by C.S. Holling, Lance Gunderson and colleagues, for understanding change in linked social-ecological systems. Its core is the adaptive cycle — a loop of growth, conservation, release (collapse) and…
Bayo Akomolefe:
“Path dependence is a concept in the social sciences, referring to processes where past events or decisions constrain later events or decisions.
The Petal Model of Systems Transformation is a framework from Onion Collective, a social enterprise in West Somerset, that reimagines systems change as a flowering rather than a linear transition. It reframes those building alternative futures not as marginal…
“The starting point is a simple observation: things don't change gradually and then stop. They build, they stabilise, they get brittle - and then they tip into something categorically different. Water doesn't get progressively more solid as it cools. At a…
Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQUtX64uqNc
Building a new society "within the shell of the old" by living out the values and social structures the group desires for the future. Political theorists Paul Raekstad and Saio Gradin define prefigurative politics as: “the deliberate experimental…
In predictive processing accounts of the brain, priors are the expectations a system brings to incoming sensory information — probability distributions over what the world is likely to be doing, built up through experience and shaped by evolution.
Efforts to influence Deep Narrative might be defined as ‘integration’, ‘horizontal’, and/or ‘sociological’ propaganda, to use French philosopher, theologian, legal scholar, and sociologist Jacques Ellul’s taxonomy.
Deterritorialization is the process by which a social relation, called a territory, has its current organization and context altered, mutated or destroyed. The components then constitute a new territory, which is the process of reterritorialization.
Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics which treats the state of a quantum system as being relational, that is, the state is the relation between the observer and the system.
Places the meaning of a text in the middle, framed by a beginning and ending in parallel. To read a ring composition in the modern linear fashion is to misinterpret it, Douglas contends, and today’s scholars must reevaluate important antique texts from around…
Sankofa is an Akan concept, from the Akan peoples of present-day Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. It belongs to the adinkra system of symbols, and the word is built from the Twi san (return), ko (go) and fa (fetch) — go back and get it. It is commonly rendered…
Shove's Triad is a model from social practice theory that explains everyday activities — driving, cooking, cycling, showering — as the ongoing integration of three elements: materials, competences and meanings. Developed by Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and…
- Big-C Culture = culture in an aesthetic sense - Small-c culture = culture in an anthropological sense: the norms and mores and discourses that make up our everyday lives – culture, in this sense, is what allows us to navigate our world, guiding our ideas of…
A social imaginary is the shared web of meanings, symbols, and taken-for-granted structures through which a society understands itself and organises its collective life — not a single belief but the imaginative background that makes particular institutions,…
Social Impact Entertainment (SIE) is entertainment content — spanning narrative film, documentary, television, theatre and emerging digital forms — that is intentionally designed to raise awareness of social issues and catalyse real-world change while…
“A social norm is a shared standard of acceptable behavior by a group. Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into rules and laws.
“For social systems to truly change we need to upgrade their underlying operating systems, that is, we need to cultivate not only what is growing “above the ground”, but also the conditions of social soil.
Socio-technical Transition Theory explains how large-scale societal systems — energy, mobility, food, housing — shift from one dominant configuration to another over time. Developed by sustainability-transitions scholar Frank Geels, it is built around the…
How we imagine the future through 'collectively held visions & aspirations about desirable futures, particularly how scientific & technological advancements will shape social life and order’.
From the Building Movement Project
The model draws on and expands another model, Bronfenbrenner’s socio-ecological systems model (below), which describes the ways that different systems interact on a child’s life to influence their development.
A decision-making aid developed by management theorist Ralph Stacey in the early 1990s. It plots issues on two axes: how much agreement there is among stakeholders, and how much certainty there is about cause and effect. The resulting zones — simple,…
A storytelling commons applies the logic of the commons — a collective resource cared for by a community according to mutually agreed rules — to stories and the shared information space. Rather than our most powerful narratives being shaped by corporations or…
Also see Meso Narratives
Street narratives are the stories, framings, and running commentary that actually pass between people in daily life — in conversation, workplace chatter, family arguments, social media threads — rather than the accounts captured by formal research. The term…
I have several concerns about the use of ‘narrative’.
System archetypes are recurring patterns of structure and behaviour in systems thinking and system dynamics, popularised through Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline and catalogued in William Braun's widely cited paper "The System Archetypes" (2002). Examples…
System leverage points are places within a complex system where a small, well-targeted shift can produce large changes across the whole. The concept was developed by systems thinker Donella Meadows, who ranked twelve types of intervention from the shallowest…
The three levels of system shift is a model for understanding how large socio-technical systems transform, presented by System Innovation and drawn from the "multi-level perspective" developed by Professor Frank Geels at the University of Manchester. It maps…
“System justification theory is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function.
reference for using Terror Management Theory methods in interdisciplinary environmental research Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/basics/terror-management-theory
The 3As is a typology to describe a situation in such a way that we can focus our decision-making where change is possible.
The beyond-reform space is one of four "spaces of enunciation" in the social cartography of responses to modernity's violence mapped by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Sharon Stein, Cash Ahenakew and Dallas Hunt (2015), later carried into the work of the…
The Cynefin Framework was developed to help leaders understand their challenges and to make decisions in context. By distinguishing different domains (the subsystems in which we operate), it recognises that our actions need to match the reality we find…
1. HEROINE SEPARATES FROM THE FEMININE. The “feminine” is often a mother/mentor figure or a societally prescribed feminine/marginalized/outsider role. 2. IDENTIFICATION WITH THE MASCULINE & GATHERING OF ALLIES. The heroine embraces a new way of life. This…
The House of Modernity is a pedagogical metaphor that depicts modernity — the dominant way of being, knowing and organising life — as a single house whose comfort for those inside depends on exploitation and destruction it renders invisible. Developed by…
The House That Hayek Built is a framing device created by the New Economy Organisers Network (NEON) in 2016 to show, in its own words, "how neoliberalism is organised to sustain its power in the UK." Named for the economist Friedrich Hayek, whose free-market…
The Iceberg Model is a systems-thinking tool for looking beneath visible problems to the deeper forces that produce them. Like an iceberg, only a fraction of any system shows above the waterline; the tool invites us to descend through four levels, on the…
“Ken Wilber sought to create an all-inclusive map of human potential.
In the non-dual Trika philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism, the tattvas are 36 principles describing how reality unfolds from pure consciousness (Shiva) down to gross matter (earth). They extend the 25 tattvas of the older Samkhya system by adding eleven higher…
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men.”
Also see The Monomyth Hero’s Journey
The theory that major global cultural differences can be explained by the grains we consume.
The Social Change Grid is a framework developed by the Sheila McKechnie Foundation (SMK) through its Social Power research, a year-long inquiry into how change happens in civil society. It maps the full repertoire of methods people and organisations use to…
We need a third attractor, in a game theory sense, vs Dystopia or Catastrophe: the two primary attractors for the world.
“Jungian scholars might call it a collective consciousness, business consultants refer to corporate culture and therapists address family system dynamics.
“The third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place").
Theorist Roy Bashkar suggests that the world can be nested into three domains:
“While there are many definitions of this word, power as “capacity” to do things to “achieve a purpose” is a good starting point. We are especially interested in understanding power as a way of describing a set of relationships between and among people,…
The Three Horizons Model is a framework for structured thinking about transformation over time, developed by futurist Bill Sharpe with colleagues at the International Futures Forum, among them Anthony Hodgson, Andrew Curry and Graham Leicester. It holds three…
Edgar Shein Level 1 - The Artefacts The visible manifestations of culture for example dress code and décor. Level 2 - Espoused Values How an organisation explains its culture, for example official policy and accepted
“A current of water below the surface and moving in a different direction from any surface current.”
“Volution is a profound way of seeing ourselves, our world and the process of life. It enables us to integrate our deep felt sense of interconnectedness with the dynamic self-organising reality that the new sciences describe. A perspective that can help heal…
Wahkohtowin is a Cree concept, presented here through the work of Dwayne Donald, a Papaschase Cree scholar at the University of Alberta, in 'Homo Economicus and Forgetful Curriculum: Remembering Other Ways to Be a Human Being' (2012).
WEIRD is Joseph Henrich's acronym for the psychological profile of societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic — a slice of humanity that supplies the overwhelming majority of participants in behavioural-science studies whose…
Wetiko is an Algonquian concept — appearing as wîhtikow in Cree, wiindigoo in Ojibwe, and in cognate forms across the Algonquian language family. It names a cannibalistic spirit driven by greed, excess and selfish consumption.
“We propose a distinction between two onto-metaphysical orientations: one that reduces being to discursive practices, which we call ‘wording the world’; and another that manifests being as co-constitutive of a worlded world, where language is one amongst…
Osprey Orielle Lake