These are terms used throughout this body of work. Click on an item to get more information.

Legend:

• 👤 An archetype character in the books or notes
• 📝A term or concept of interest

Characters

• 👤 Alnis — The archetype of deep tacit knowledge, stewardship, and the memory of steel.
• 👤 Amber— University Student
• 👤 Fred — The archetype of practical wisdom, stewardship, and working with reality rather than theory.
• 👤 Josh — University Student – The keeper of the Robot
• 👤 Judy — The archetype of social awareness, relationships, and the human dynamics of organisations.
• 👤 Kate — The deep listener who helps others slow down, sense uncertainty, and find the ethical boundary.
• 👤 Mallory — The archetype of constructive scepticism, challenging assumptions and exposing hidden consequences.
• 👤 Mary Schultz— Retired IT Manager
• 👤 Mario — The archetype of systems thinking, helping others see patterns, relationships, and the bigger picture.
• 👤 Michael — CFO
• 👤 Sam Pinoak — The archetype adaptive leader whose journey illustrates learning, stewardship, and expanding line of sight.
• 👤 Spiro — The archetype customer advocate who continually reconnects decisions to human needs and outcomes.
• 👤 Bruno — The archetype modeller who uses structure, language, and abstraction to create shared understanding.

Glossary of Terms

• 📝 Accountability — Responsibility for decisions, actions, outcomes, consequences, and learning, rather than simply being blamed when something goes wrong.
• 📝 Activity Based Costing — is a way of understanding the real cost of work by tracing resources through the activities and tasks that consume them.
• 📝 Adaptive Capacity — The ability of people, teams, organisations, and communities to learn, adapt, and respond effectively to change.
• 📝Adaptive Enquiry — A learning cycle that uses questions, evidence, action, and reflection to adapt to reality.
• 📝 Adaptive Governance — Governance that reviews and changes its principles, structures, controls, and decision arrangements as reality, consequence, and organisational learning reveal the need.
• 📝 AI, Human Collaboration & Dialogue Design — the disciplined design of human–AI dialogue so AI supports inquiry, sensemaking, learning, and judgement without replacing human responsibility for meaning, ethics, and consequence.
• 📝 Ba — A shared context or space where relationships, knowledge, learning, and meaning emerge through interaction.
• 📝 Basho — A collective experience of coherence, connection, and shared meaning within a social field.
• 📝 Business Capability Model — A representation of what an organisation does, independent of structure, people, or technology.
• 📝 Business Process Management (BPM)  — is the discipline of understanding, designing, improving and governing the processes through which work is performed.
• 📝 Capability Ownership  — Accountability for the coherence, performance, development, and consequences of a capability across functions, processes, systems, information, roles, and organisational boundaries.
• 📝Critical Thinking — The disciplined testing of assumptions, claims, evidence, and conclusions.
• 📝Consequence — The real-world effect of action; broader than Consequential Intervention, which is a deliberate act that creates consequence.
• 📝 Consequential Intervention — An intervention designed to influence outcomes by working with consequences rather than imposing control.
• 📝 Common Data Model — A high-level representation of the key subjects and relationships important to an organisation.
• 📝 Data Quality and Information Quality — The fitness of data and information for purpose
• 📝 Data Ownership — Stewardship of the meaning, quality, use, protection, and lifecycle of data so it can be trusted in decisions, operations, reporting, AI, and learning.
• 📝 Decision Rights — The explicit authority to make particular decisions, within agreed boundaries, with clear responsibility for consequences.
• 📝 Design Thinking and Strategic Thinking — The ability to explore possibilities, anticipate consequences, and choose design options or shape future direction.
• 📝 Dialogue, Dialectic & Debate — Conversation types used for different purposes in advocacy and enquiry in the quest to seek truth and understanding.
• 📝 Double-Loop Learning — Learning that challenges underlying assumptions, beliefs, and mental models rather than simply improving actions.
• 📝 DSRP — A systems thinking framework based on Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives.
• 📝 Ecocentric vs Egocentric Thinking — A worldview that considers the wellbeing of the broader economic, social, and ecological system versus individual or organisational self-interest.
• 📝 Enterprise Architecture — The practice of creating shared organisational understanding through models and structured knowledge
• 📝 Ethics  — The discipline of deciding what ought to be done by considering purpose, affected stakeholders, foreseeable consequences, and the boundaries that should not be crossed.
• 📝 Ethical AI Governance — The governance of AI use so purpose, permitted use, data, accountability, human judgement, contestability, and downstream consequences
• 📝 Explicit Knowledge and Tacit Knowledge — Two interdependent forms of knowledge: one that can be documented and shared through artefacts, and one carried in experience, judgement, practice, and context.
• 📝 Feedback — Information about the results of actions that supports learning, adaptation, and improvement.
• 📝 Gemba — The place where reality teaches and learning becomes unavoidable.
• 📝 Governance — The discipline of making decisions coherent, responsible, and connected to purpose, evidence, risk, accountability, and consequence.
• 📝 Governance Ownership — Accountability for keeping governance visible, coherent, relevant, effective, and aligned with purpose, ethics, reality, and consequence.
• 📝 Great Inertia — The tendency of individuals, organisations, and systems to resist meaningful change.
• 📝 Hansei — The practice of deep reflection to learn from experience and improve future actions.
• 📝 Human as the Integration Layer — The role people play in connecting information, knowledge, context, and meaning across systems.
• 📝Informed Judgement — The practical use of evidence, experience, context, diverse perspectives, and ethical reasoning to decide and act under uncertainty.
• 📝 Islands of Coherence — Groups of people who develop shared understanding, trust, and coordinated action around a common purpose.
• 📝 Kanban Architecture — Architecture pulled by need, tested at Gemba, governed through the Knowledge Base
• 📝 Knowledge Base — A  structured repository of organisational knowledge that provides a shared understanding of how an organisation operates
• 📝 Knowledge Operating System (KOS) — The structures, practices, and relationships that enable knowledge to flow and create value.
• 📝 Line of Sight — The ability to see and understand the consequences, relationships, and realities relevant to a situation.
• 📝 Managing Complexity — The practice of working effectively with uncertainty, emergence, and interconnected systems.
• 📝 Mindsets — Thinking drives action. Action drives consequences
• 📝 Operating Model — the working configuration of capabilities, work, roles, decisions, information, systems, governance, measures, cost, partners, and learning routines through which an organisation turns purpose and strategy into action and consequence
• 📝 Organisational Awareness — The 24/7 radar that scans the business environment seeking week signals
• 📝 Organisational Coherence — The condition where purpose, capability, work, information, systems, decisions, measures, accountability, and consequence fit together well enough for the organisation to act as a whole.
• 📝 Organisational Learning Ecosystem — The living network of relationships, knowledge, culture, and interactions within an organisation.
• 📝 Organisational Regeneration— Rebuilding the human, social, knowledge and organisational foundations depleted through restructuring, short term thinking, fragmentation and repeated transformation.
• 📝 Phronesis — Practical wisdom: the judgement to act well in context, under uncertainty.
• 📝 Psychological Safety — A shared belief that people can speak openly without fear of punishment or humiliation.
• 📝 Purpose — The organisation compass that gives direction, coherence, and meaning to action.
• 📝 Regeneration — Restoring and enhancing the capacity of people, organisations, communities and ecosystems to renew and flourish.
• 📝 Regenerative Capacity  — Adaptive capacity embedded within a healthy social ecology and connected to ecological reality.
• 📝 Regenerative Momentum  — The reinforcing dynamic through which improving capability, trust, relationships and ecological health increases a system’s capacity to continue renewing itself.
• 📝 Risk Governance— The discipline of connecting uncertainty and exposure to consequence with ownership, attention, judgement, escalation, and timely intervention.
• 📝 Scout Mindset — An orientation toward seeking the best available understanding of reality rather than defending a preferred position.
• 📝 Scenario Planning — A structured approach to exploring multiple plausible futures and their implications.
• 📝 SECI — A model describing how tacit and explicit knowledge interact to create organisational learning.
• 📝 Sensemaking — The process of interpreting experiences and information to create understanding and guide action.
• 📝 Shared Mental Models — Common understandings that help people coordinate decisions and actions effectively.
• 📝 Social Ecology — The evolving network of people, communities, institutions, practices, knowledge systems and relationships through which understanding, collective action and stewardship become possible.
• 📝 Stakeholder Engagement — is the practice of identifying, understanding and working with the people, groups or entities affected by, or capable of affecting, an organisation’s activities.
• 📝 Stewardship — Responsible care for a system, capability, relationship, or shared future over time.
• 📝 Sustainability — Maintaining the ecological, social, human, institutional and economic conditions required for continued existence and responsible future action.
• 📝 Tacit Withdrawal — The loss of tacit judgement and understanding while formal processes and behaviours remain.
• 📝 Tacit Withholding — The conscious or conditioned withholding of concerns, observations, uncertainty, or judgement when speaking feels unsafe, futile, or unwelcome.
• 📝 The Common Good — The shared conditions that enable people, communities, organisations, and ecological systems to flourish, rather than privileging narrow or short-term interests.
• 📝 Theory U — A framework for transformation based on sensing, presencing, and emerging future possibilities.
• 📝 Triple Bottom Line — A framework that evaluates performance across social, environmental, and economic outcomes.
• 📝Trust — The willingness to rely on others in situations involving uncertainty, vulnerability, and interdependence.
• 📝 Value Stream — The end-to-end flow of activities through which value is created, delivered, protected, or damaged for a stakeholder.