Approach
An approach is a pattern or structure of interactive engagement. It is coherent, comprehensive within its own concerns, and roughly reproducible and communicable. An approach shapes ways of noticing, orienting, deciding, and interaction.
Example A cuisine can be transmitted by working alongside someone who has mastered it for an extended time. Years of requests, demonstrations, corrections, and feedback can teach someone to recognize and produce qualities they cannot fully state as rules. An approach can involve cultivated intuition without being formalized; appealing solely to personal intuition does not, by itself, make that intuition communicable.
Back to term indexMultisystematicity
Multisystematicity is about expanding the possibilities of working with a situation to benefit the totality. It concerns systems which cannot ultimately be subsumed or made parts of a larger system. Several approaches are usually active together, affecting and constraining engagement in the situation. Choosing which approaches to use and when is also part of this engagement.
Example Preparing dinner for friends may involve considerations of nutrition, taste, and hospitality. These independent systems affect and constrain one another in that circumstance: a nutritional requirement may limit ingredients, while accommodating a guest’s preferences may change the meal’s flavors and nutritional balance. A participant or outside observer can comprehend how these systems are at work together; this comprehension is the explicit aspect of multisystematicity.
Back to term indexTacit knowledge
Tacit knowledge is practical sensitivity and judgment developed through participation that explanations and rules alone do not convey.
Example By tending a garden alongside an experienced grower, a newcomer gradually learns to notice changes in plants and soil and judge what care is needed. Demonstrations, corrections, and shared work develop this sensitivity.
Back to term indexSituation
A situation is an unfolding set of circumstances that people participate in and help shape, including activities and concerns, material surroundings and artifacts, social relationships, cultural context, and energetic atmosphere.
Example At a dinner, a crowded table and shared serving dishes bring old friends and newcomers into close contact, while customs of hospitality shape who serves and speaks. When a guest announces that they are moving away, the lively atmosphere becomes quiet and tender, and someone raises a glass for a farewell toast.
Back to term indexObservation
An observation is a feature, occurrence, change, sensory experience, or texture noticed in a situation, distinguished from what it is taken to mean. What someone notices is shaped by their experience, participation, and practices of attention.
Example Through rehearsal, a musician learns to notice a partner’s intake of breath, the grain of their tone, and the felt pulse of the music. Taking a particular breath as a cue to enter is an interpretation grounded in their shared practice.
Back to term indexInterpretation
Interpretation is making sense of what is observed, drawing on prior understanding, cultural context, and familiarity with the activities and relationships involved.
Example When a guest raises a glass and conversation quiets, you recognize the beginning of a toast. Knowing the gathering is a farewell shapes how you understand the words and gestures that follow.
Back to term indexMathematical Metaphor
Using a mathematical structure as a rough lens for thinking about a situation.
Example Small adjustments to an existing dinner menu may offer little improvement, while a substantially different menu might work much better. The mathematical metaphor of a local maximum prompts us to consider whether continued tweaking is limiting our search. It does not establish that meals have a single quality score or that a better menu exists.
Back to term indexSocial cybernetics
Examining how feedback among people and artifacts shapes social activity.
Example Walkers wear a path through grass. The worn path encourages subsequent walkers to follow it, and their footsteps reinforce it: people change the environment, and that changed environment feeds back into their behavior. This is stigmergy: coordination through traces of activity left in a shared environment.
Back to term indexSpeech acts
Actions performed through communication, such as requesting, promising, authorizing, refusing, or accepting responsibility.
Example “You’re welcome to borrow my bicycle.” The owner authorizes something the listener previously had no permission to do.
Back to term indexExploratory reasoning
Developing and reconsidering questions, explanations, concepts, and possibilities in ways that can fundamentally change how a situation is understood and approached.
Example A team asks how to get everyone to agree. Exploring their disagreements leads them to question why agreement is necessary and what they need it for. They begin asking how to work together while preserving meaningful differences, changing both their understanding of the disagreement and the possibilities they pursue.
Back to term indexContemplative attention
Cultivating attention through one’s participation at individual, team, and institutional scales.
Example A football player practices scanning the field before receiving the ball. Through drills, calls, and coordinated movement, teammates develop ways of distributing their attention across the play. The club’s coaching traditions and training routines sustain and transmit these patterns across teams and generations of players.
Back to term indexPhases of transformation
Recognizing actual and potential transformations in a situation.
Example At a gathering, participants recognize that their shared enjoyment of singing could become a regular activity. An emerging plan could be refined to accommodate both beginners and experienced singers. The expectation that everyone at the gathering must participate could be let go.
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