systems change • complexity • foundational
systems change vocabulary: the basics
Work with systems and systemic approach are at the heart of resense360. When designing and facilitating learning experiences, consulting teams, organizations, and networks, accompanying strategy processes, we always introduce systemic practices.
Quite often, we have been asked if there is a vocabulary around the domain of systems change — to synchronize and “speak the same language”. We couldn’t find one, so we decided to build our own.
Although this list of systems change words is not extensive, we believe it gives a good overview and navigation, especially for those starting to explore the field. We refer here mainly to works of our trusted fellow colleagues and partners, and this is how systems change is perceived at resense360.
Quite often, we have been asked if there is a vocabulary around the domain of systems change — to synchronize and “speak the same language”. We couldn’t find one, so we decided to build our own.
Although this list of systems change words is not extensive, we believe it gives a good overview and navigation, especially for those starting to explore the field. We refer here mainly to works of our trusted fellow colleagues and partners, and this is how systems change is perceived at resense360.
- Complexity paints a picture of the world as interconnected, with new patterns and features emerging, where the detailed pathways and local particularities help to shape the future.
- Complexity is a middle ground theory between saying we know everything and we know nothing.
- 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.
- Emergence is a process by which, through many interactions, individual entities or “agents” create patterns that are more sophisticated than what could have been created by an individual entity.
- Feedback loops are when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs, triggering a cause-and-effect chain that forms a recurring pattern of behavior.
- 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.
- Your mindset is a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. It influences how you think, feel, and behave in any given situation.
- Patterns — established and contextual ways of being in the world.
- Pattern spotting — a practice that can help understand the dynamics that characterise a complex system.
- Polycrisis is a complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the planet.
- <…> interwoven and overlapping crises.
- Regenerative practice is based on the premise that we cannot make the outer transformations required to create a truly sustainable world without making inner transformations in how we think, how we work, and who we are.
- In a positive sense, resilience reflects the ability of a system to adapt to changing circumstances or environments <…> In a negative sense, resilient systems that do not change or adapt over time can be in a pathologic state or on pathologic trajectories.
- 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.
- A social system is defined as any group of people who interact long enough to create a shared set of understandings, norms, or routines to integrate action and established patterns of dominance and resource allocation.
- A system is a set of things — people, cells, molecules or whatever — interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.
- A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that it achieves something (function or purpose).
- Systems change — the emergence of a new pattern of organizing or system structure.
- Systems practice is an approach to grappling with adaptive problems in complex environments with the aim of making enduring social change at scale.
- To think systemically is to look widely, to seek out patterns of connections, to make the assumption that knowledge is held in the forms that emerge from interdependencies and reflexive connections.
- Tipping point (i.e., a catastrophic bifurcation) is where a local perturbation can cause a domino effect cascading into a systemic transition.
- <…> uncertainty is defined as that which cannot be known, as an ‘unknown unknown’; it is associated with the underlying structures and constructs themselves shifting, or disappearing and new ones appearing.
- A worldview synthesizes the way different cultures at different periods explain how the world works and why.
- A worldview will encapsulate beliefs about how things change, and about the nature of reality.
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Zoya Lukyanova, Ruslan Kildeev, and Indira Shah for resense360.