Lexicon

Reference · Working definitions · Draft of 1 October 2026

Short names for things that are hard to say. A name makes a pattern easier to point at, compare, and question.

Pattern names are prompts for inquiry. A label alone does not establish motive, diagnosis, equal responsibility, or the right response. Check each one against the particular situation. Entries marked working label are newer and still being tested.

On this page: Kinds of situation · Distinctions · Moves · Dynamics · Working products · Stances

Kinds of situation

Emergency without solution: A high-stakes situation that no existing service is set up to handle. The name does not mean that nothing can be done. It means that no single lane can do it.

Configuration: The actual web of specific people in a situation: their work, limits, histories, and the next moves available among them. It sits between individual coping and big-system talk, and it is where coordination succeeds or fails.

Wicked systemic problem: A problem spread across many people that changes while you work on it, so the way of investigating it has to be designed along the way. The term is Lina Markauskaite and Peter Goodyear’s.

Broken Life Math: Essential obligations exceed available resources, so rearranging them cannot by itself close the gap.

Meanwhiles: Everything else that keeps running while attention is on one thing: the world’s ongoing processes, and the parallel threads a person is responsible for holding. A future possibility is not present coverage.

Conscience pressure: The weight of trying to respond responsibly when visible needs, interpretive complexity, and failing response systems exceed ordinary capacity.

Pressure: Pressure can constrain, mobilize, or give direction. Some of it is a burden to be relieved or shared, such as paperwork, shortfalls, and colliding demands. Some is a challenge people look for: meaningful work, responsibility, a deadline that matters. Ask what produces it, what it asks of each person, and what support or change would make a response workable. Pressure is not proof of manipulation, and discomfort is not by itself a sign that something is wrong.

Fog of story: The uncertainty of acting inside a situation whose full story nobody can yet see, by analogy with the fog of war.

Liminality: Being between one settled arrangement and the next, when old rules have stopped applying and new ones have not formed. The term comes from the anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner.

Distinctions

Recognition / coordination: A problem can be acknowledged while the need remains unmet.

Needed / offered / usable / delivered: Four different states of a resource. An offer is not yet help.

Request / proposal / accepted commitment / outcome: None implies the next.

Explanation / agreement / responsibility: Context can change a judgment without settling it.

Association / hypothesis / checked claim: A connection stays provisional until its support has been examined. Nothing promotes silently.

Moves

Working the problem: Making sense of what is actually happening, with whom, and under what constraints; finding what kind of move is available; coordinating with others; and learning from what happens.

Whole Story Assembly: Bringing together enough relevant history, perspectives, conditions, and possibilities to understand a situation and respond intelligently. The picture stays revisable.

Generative accountability: Accounting for what happened and its effects, then creating and checking the changes needed for repair, reliable conduct, and less recurrence.

Triangulation: Cross-checking a reading against several independent vantage points, so no single frame closes the question too early. The manipulative kind plays people against each other; this kind checks a reading against reality.

Closing triangles: Building direct channels so people in a tangle can coordinate on shared, checkable facts, where before they related through rumor and assumption.

Deconfliction: Finding how demands that cannot currently coexist might be sequenced, separated, narrowed, or resourced, with any remaining shortfall kept visible.

Calibration: Marking how well supported each claim is, and keeping that mark attached as the claim travels. Repetition is not promotion.

Showing the work of a tradeoff: When demands collide, laying out the options, limits, and costs, so the decision can be understood and reviewed.

Recalling a good future (working label): Imagining that a year has passed and things are going quite well, then asking what each person did, who helped, and what made the worries smaller. Adapted from anticipation dialogues, developed in Finland by Tom Erik Arnkil and colleagues.

Reporting against the whole (working label): Stating progress as a share of the whole picture, the way fire crews report how much of a fire’s edge is contained. A step forward then neither hides what is still open nor gets dismissed.

Dynamics

Recurring patterns in how a situation changes. See Dynamics for a first response to each.

Command Collision: Competing directives or necessary activities converge on one person or resource without an agreed way to handle the tradeoff.

Context Overflow: Each new conversation needs so much background that explaining the situation uses up the capacity available to work on it.

Connection / Deflection Ambiguity: One person offers context that another experiences as avoiding responsibility.

Referral Loop: People move among helpers or institutions without reaching support that is accessible and suited to the need.

Assessment Narrowing: A situation is filtered into a narrower frame that can recognize some facts but not the larger entanglement.

Interpretive Lockout: The frame has flipped, so that explaining is itself treated as the problem.

Activation Gap: The same person, with the same values, can act on one day and not on another. What changes is bandwidth, access, or physical state, not motivation.

Mode-switching: People shift, sometimes mid-sentence, between states where they can hold complexity and states where they cannot.

Flexibility moment: New money, time, or help makes some changes possible while many deferred needs compete for it.

Partial Maps (working label): Several people respond to the same situation from different corners, each seeing a simpler story. The person at the center is left with care but no route.

Scale Bind (working label): Reporting one step forward is heard as ignoring everything still wrong, and laying out the whole picture is heard as trying to do too much.

Working products

Situation map: A shared, revisable picture of who is involved, what is needed, what is blocked, and what could change next.

Two boards: A private situation board for the consented working details, and a public learning board for what people choose to share: their own account, a limited version, or an anonymized pattern. The person whose situation it is decides what moves from the first to the second.

Role brief: A short description of a role’s tasks, rhythms, and non-negotiables, shared before any private history.

Work story: The account of what someone is actually carrying inside a situation.

Intelligence artifact: A document that compresses a complex, many-layered reality into something a specific reader can take in and act on.

Stances

Plausible believability (working label): A better future described in a way that stays consistent with people’s actual constraints, so belief is earned and does not have to be asked for.

Reviewability: Would this still make sense if reviewed later by a reasonable, fair outsider?

Structure, then move: “It’s not okay, here’s the structure, here’s the workable move.” Naming what is wrong, what is producing it, and what can be done next, in that order.

Edge emotions: The uncomfortable feelings that arise when a person’s way of making sense of things is challenged. The term is Kaisu Mälkki’s.

The lexicon is revised as the work is tested. Related: Concepts; Dynamics; Methods & Tools; Open Questions.