Glossary
Adaptive Leadership: Adaptive Leadership is a leadership practice that helps individuals work with organizations & communities to adapt and thrive in challenging environments.
Container: The process, space, qualities and structures that hold people through a change process whilst keeping them focussed on adaptation.
Cultural competency: Attitudes, behaviours and ways of interacting that show awareness, consideration, sensitivity and understanding of the history and impact of colonisation on First Nation cultures and traditions.
Cultural Intelligence: Awareness and understanding of our own and others history, identities, values and beliefs that influence how we act and interact with others on a daily basis.
Deep Democracy: Unlike traditional democracy, which focuses on majority rule, Deep Democracy proposes that for systems to make progress, all the voices, states of awareness, and frameworks of reality need to be understood, and their wisdom brought forward and integrated into the system as a whole. The concept was developed by Dr Arnold Mindell.
First Nations: The original peoples of a land. In this case the original peoples of the land now known as Australia.
First Nations expertise and models of working: Experience, skills and ways of doing things which are part of the history and culture of First Nation peoples.
First Nation Peoples: This includes all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across the many nations contained within the Australian Jurisdiction (including land & maritime boundaries).
Black: This term refers to First Nation peoples. Many people prefer ‘black’ to ‘First Nations’ or ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’ as a term that includes everyone in this group. Others prefer one of the other alternatives. When it is used, it refers to a person’s identity and not to their skin colour.
Hot Spot: An intense moment in a group or system where there is strong tension or emotional charge between individuals or a group. When something forbidden or intense happens that causes everyone to become silent, frozen or charged.
Leadership: Use of informal or formal power to help people understand and solve the challenges they experience in groups and systems. It is something we do, not something we have.
Power dynamics: how power affects a relationship between two or more people.
Process Oriented Psychology: also known as “Process work” is a psycho-social-political theory and methodology with applications in Individual therapy, relationship work, and working with processes of change through individual coaching, group facilitation, large-scale conflict transformation, and organisational development. Originally developed by physicist and Jungian Analyst Dr Arnold Mindell.
Psychology: the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in any given context.
Rank: This term is used to indicate the differences types of power used between people that can change from moment to moment and across context. It can help us to understand power dynamics and how we can use it for the benefit of the group.
Relationships and connections: the way things are connected to each other.
Role: This term is used to indicate: the opinions or positions in a conversation or argument; the informal or formal relationships we have in groups or the community; the feelings present in a group; or the atmosphere created. Each of us have many roles at once, including in our families, in our communities, in our workplaces, and in our friendship groups. This term comes from Sociology [glossary link] and psychology [glossary link]. In Deep Collaboration we want everyone to understand their own and each other’s roles as they change in each moment, so we can talk about them and move into different roles when needed. Key to being able to collaborate is ‘role fluidity’. This when we are able to move into a different role and see things from a different perspective.
Role Theory/Practice: Role theory and practice is a useful leadership practice to integrate who we are, the role we take up and the context we’re working in. The theory considers most of everyday activity to be the acting out of socially defined roles (e.g., mother, manager, teacher). Each role has a set of rights, duties, expectations, norms and behaviors that a person has to face and fulfill. Role theory and practice comes from sociology and social psychology. Our use of Role theory extends to field theory in physics which sees groups as being like human magnetic fields, where individuals are pulled into different roles depending on their context.
Shared Place: This describes a conceptual space where First Nation peoples and other Australians are working together, communicating and interacting.
Sociology: the study of the development, functioning and structure of human society.
Systems Change: fundamental change in the conditions of policies, processes, relationships, power, values, norms and mindsets that lead to the emergence of new practices and ways of doing things.
Weather Reporting: providing a broad whole system view of what is happening, as it is happening, with the purpose of bringing a broader perspective to the system.
White: This term is sometimes used to refer to non-Indigenous Australians as the opposite of black in reference to First Nation peoples. It is sometimes used to include people from other cultural backgrounds as well.
Worldview: a particular mindset, paradigm, philosophy of life or way of looking at the world.
