Adaptive Capacity: Adaptive capacity refers to an organisation’s ability to respond to change by learning, adjusting behaviour, and acting coherently under uncertainty rather than simply restoring past practices.
Tacit and Explicit Knowledge: Explicit knowledge is clearly expressed and recorded; tacit knowledge is hidden within experience, judgement, and practice, and can often be hard to articulate directly.
Social Capital: Social capital pertains to the quality of relationships, networks, trust, and shared norms that enable people to collaborate effectively.
Human Capital: Human capital encompasses the skills, experience, and judgement possessed by individuals within an organisation.
Sensemaking: Sensemaking is the collective process of interpreting ambiguous situations to determine how to act.
Islands of Coherence: Islands of coherence are local pockets within an organisation where shared understanding and aligned action arise, even when the wider system stays fragmented.
SECI and learning concepts
SECI describes a cycle of organisational learning through Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination, and Internalisation.
- Socialisation – sharing experience directly
- Externalisation – articulating insights
- Combination – integrating explicit knowledge
- Internalisation – embedding learning into practice. Internalisation is the point at which new knowledge changes how people actually behave, not just what they agree with.
Architecture & modelling (non-industry specific)
A Business Capability Model (BCM) describes ‘what the business does’ and, as such, outlines what the organisation must be able to do to deliver its purpose, independent of how it is structured or who performs the work.
A Common Data Model (CDM) defines ‘What the business deals with’, it contains shared data concepts so that information is understood consistently across the organisation.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) offers a structured view of how strategy, capabilities, information, and systems come together.
Contextual frames
VUCA describes conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Edge of Chaos: The edge of chaos is the zone where systems are stable enough to work but still flexible enough to adapt and learn.
Agreement–Certainty Matrix: The Agreement–Certainty Matrix maps situations according to the degree of agreement and certainty, helping distinguish between simple, complicated, and complex problems.
Triple Bottom Line (TBL): The triple bottom line considers organisational performance in terms of planet, people, and profit.