Chaos—Disorder, confusion, random interaction among diverse agents.
Coherence/coalescing—Coming together; converging into relationship, harmony, unity, bonding, community, shared sense, wholeness.
Compassion—The open-hearted capacity to enter into and be moved by our own and another’s experience.
Complexity—Functional intricacy, especially the degree of diversity, connectivity, interdependence, and interaction involved in the self-organized functioning of a system.
Creativity—The open-ended flow that brings novelty into being.
Differentiation—Breaking apart; becoming separate; diverging, individuality, distinction, uniqueness.
Disruption—Interruption of the status quo.
Dissonance—Lack of agreement or harmony; conflict.
Disturbance—An emotionally troubling intrusion or interruption.
Diversity—Variety, difference; the range of factors, such as race, class, gender, generation, geography, and function, to consider when engaging with a system.
Emergence—Higher-order complexity arising out of chaos. Novel, coherent structures arising through interactions among diverse entities of a system.
Emergent change processes—Methods for engaging the diverse people of a system in focused yet open interactions that lead to unexpected and lasting shifts in perspective and behavior.
Engagement—Participation, bringing the whole of oneself—head, heart, body, spirit.
Feedback—Responses and reactions that give a system information about its interactions.
Intention—Purpose; implicit is a sense of calling, being guided by a deeper source of wisdom.
Interaction—Mutual or reciprocal action or influence.
Intuition—Instinctive and unconscious knowing or sensing without deduction, reasoning, or using rational processes.
Iteration—A repeating process in which the output of the current cycle becomes input to the next cycle.
Life energy—Vitality, flow that attracts and enlivens, a nonphysical quality that animates all living organisms.
Macroscope—A type of tool for sensing the infinitely complex; information, ideas, experiences, maps, stories, art, and media that help us to see ourselves in context.
Pioneer—To go before, to prepare or open a way. One who ventures into unknown or unclaimed territory. One who opens up new areas of thought, research, or development.
Practice—A skill honed through continual study and experimentation. Discipline that develops both craft and artistry.
Principle—A fundamental understanding or assumption that guides further understanding or action. Principles help us to find order out of chaos.
Reflection—(1) contemplation, consideration, search for meaning; (2) active mirroring of another’s meaning—words, feelings, intentions.
Renewal—To make new again, with elements from the past and other elements that are original together forming something novel and of a higher-order complexity.
Strong emergence—Higher-order complexity arising from interactions among diverse individual agents that is not deducible even in principle from the properties of the individual agents.
Sustainability—The capacity of a system to maintain itself, to remain congruent with changing realities; resilience; the ability of a system to recover from disturbances and retain its essential identity, meeting its needs with attention to the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
System—Interactions among diverse agents that persist and evolve as a coherent whole.
Weak emergence—Higher-order complexity arising from interactions among diverse individual agents in which the essential properties are reasonably predictable but the specifics are unexpected (for example, we know it will be a baby but not its eye color, height, weight, etc.).
Wisdom—Knowledge or knowing that arises from and serves the whole; knowledge and knowing deeper than the rational mind; intuitions forged through experience.
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