Glossary
Language shapes how we understand each other and the work we do. This space gathers key terms, concepts, and ideas that guide our collective practice, offering a shared reference to help everyone speak, think, and act together. By building a common language, we strengthen our connections, clarify our intentions, and support the field as it grows.
Please see high-level descriptions of some of the key concepts in our work:
What is *trust?
Trust is, in part, a leap of faith – a willingness to be vulnerable. It means actively engaging with the unknown [1]. It says: I don’t know for sure, and I am still willing to try. At the same time, trust is also an intentional and structured process built on several critical components: consistency, communication, transparency, and practising curiosity, self-reflection, and repair, among other things.
Consistency involves being reliable and predictable in our behaviour, ensuring that our words actually match our actions. Communication means keeping an open dialogue and addressing issues as they arise. Transparency is about being open and clear about our actions and intentions. Trust is also about the ability to repair: it is not about avoiding conflict or disagreements, but about having confidence that disagreements can be resolved in healthy ways.
Building trust and a sense of belonging:
In an organisation, for instance, trust (1) means [2-]:
- being able to rely on our team and leaders to have our back,
- trusting that our leaders won’t betray us or put their own interests ahead of ours,
- trusting that they won’t take credit for work that isn’t theirs, and
- that there is a culture of psychological safety, generative curiosity, and avoiding shaming and blaming at all costs.
It’s also about recognising: We are stronger together than apart.
This creates a sense of belonging (2). In that shared space,
- I start to get a sense of who I am.
- The group shapes me – and I shape the group.
- It’s a mutual and reciprocal relationship.
And mutuality (2.a.) is essential in all social-ecological systems. It leads to a sense of belonging.
Belonging (2.b.) is tied to recognition:
- It means feeling valued.
- It means that my individual contribution is not just made, BUT also seen.
We can achieve and perform a lot, but if our efforts go unrecognised, we will lose motivation and feel used.
When this doesn’t happen, it doesn’t meet our inner drivers and needs (e.g. colleagues reading emails in the background on zoom calls).
Collective resilience is not just about individual toughness in the face of adversity.
- It’s about facing challenges creatively, adaptively, and flexibly. Together.
The workplace and work are in massive flux: An organisation’s resilience is no longer about the good-to-have ‘soft’ skills.
These values and guiding principles, including relationality, trust, and a sense of belonging, are increasingly recognised as the new bottom line.
As Nathan Kinch (2025) succinctly describes, “trust can be usefully thought of as the willingness (an intentional stance) to be vulnerable (accepting a spectrum of uncertainty, but particularly the possibility of ‘harm’ at some level) to the actions of another based on positive expectations (an assessment of their trustworthiness; their benevolence, integrity and normative competence). It is a deliberative process of sorts, influenced by a variety of factors, that leads to a position that then influences action.”
[1] Esther Perel: Building Trust in Relationships <https://www.estherperel.com>
[2] Mayer, Roger C., James H. Davis, & F. David Schoorman. 1995. “An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust.” Academy of Management Review 20, no. 3 (July): 709–734.
[3] Rousseau M., D., Sitkin B. S., Burt S., R., & Camerer, C. (1998). “Not So Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust.” Academy of Management Review 23, no. 3 (July): 393–404.
[4] Luhmann, N. (1979). Trust and Power. Chichester: Wiley.
[5] Sztompka, P. (2000). Trust: A Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[6] Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press.
[7] Putnam, R. D. (1995). ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’. Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (January): 65–78.
[8] Gambetta, D., ed. (1988). Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
[9] Baier, A. C. (1986). Trust and Antitrust*. Ethics 96, no. 2 (January): 231–260.
[10] Kinch, N. (2025) TruTrusting AI ≠ 'Trustworthy AI
What is (a) collective of intelligence(s)?
in our framing is more ‘a collective of intelligences’ (for the lack of a better word). Building on the work of Geoff Mulgan and others (e.g., Anita Williams Woolley, Thomas W. Malone, and James Surowiecki), in our work, we study collective intelligence as an outcome of enhanced relational capacity within an ecosystem. Collective intelligence emerges when people, communities, and ecosystems think, learn, and act together in ways that surpass what any individual or part could achieve alone [1] [2]. It involves the dynamic combination and evolution of knowledge, ideas, experiences, and instincts through relationships – whether between people, organisations, technologies, or ecologies [3].
Types of intelligences might include: Logical-Mathematical Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, Musical Intelligence, Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, Existential Intelligence
Collective intelligence is the quality of the dynamics and relationships within an ecosystem of actors and things. It is the capacity that emerges when people, communities, and ecosystems think, learn, and act together in ways that go beyond what any one person or part could achieve alone.
The critical step for our future is to move beyond focusing on individuals, towards the relational space between them. As Anita Williams Woolley and others explain, improving collective intelligence (bringing together a group of smart or competent people) will not ultimately make the group more collectively intelligent. There are critical relational qualities, conditions, or dynamics that enable collective intelligence to emerge and improve. These include actions like:
- Increasing the number of team members with high empathy, emotional intelligence, and social perceptiveness (i.e. the ability to pick up on non-verbal cues and to read between the lines).
- Improving diversity & gender equality → diversity (across worldviews, socio-economic backgrounds, races, ethnicities, cultures, ages, genders, sexual orientations, thoughts, and ideas, and more) and greater emotional attunement (e.g. protecting against subtle exclusions and watching for behaviours that create fear, such as eye-rolling, sarcasm, dominating conversations, or starting to look at our phones or send emails when someone else takes a turn).
- Improving the conditions for transactive memory to develop (i.e. allowing the same team members to work together long enough to develop transactive memory → a shared system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information within a group or team; how groups divide up knowledge and rely on each other to remember different things).
Exploring how organisations might operationalise or formalise the ways, practices, and processes that allow transactive memory to develop or improve (i.e. how institutional knowledge is organised, maintained, and accessed within an organisation or ecosystem) is equally critical.
- Transactive memory (in short) is = the map and ongoing navigation of institutional knowledge
Collective intelligence is about:
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sensing and making meaning together;
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navigating complexity, ambiguity, and uncertain future trajectories through many ways of knowing (not just quantitative data, but lived experiences, stories, and memories); and
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finding ways to coordinate, adapt, and respond collectively – often in messy, nonlinear ways.
- improving cognitive flexibility across the team (as a critical future skill);
It can emerge in formal (like citizens’ assemblies or open-source platforms) and informal spaces, like how neighbourhoods self-organise during a crisis, how ideas are being co-designed with more plurality, or how indigenous knowledge is held and passed on across generations, and many more.
*References:
*Anita Williams Woolley is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.
[1] Malone, T. W., Laubacher, R., & Dellarocas, C. (2010). The collective intelligence genome. MIT Sloan Management Review.
[2] Woolley, A. W., et al. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686-688.
[3] Mulgan, G. (2017). Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World. Princeton University Press.
Relationality
Relationality describes how people and things are connected – not just formally, but emotionally, socially, culturally, and ecologically. It’s the idea that governance doesn’t happen in isolation or solely through structures and rules, but through the quality of dynamics and the depth of relationships between actors – whether between governments and communities, institutions and ecosystems, or systems and everyday life. Relationality invites us to act not as isolated agents, but as proactive and reflective participants in a wider web of relationships – human, non-human, and planetary.
Soft infrastructures
We desribe ‘soft infrastructures’ as the skills, capabilities, capacities, institutions, networks, and processes [4] needed to make quality collective decisions amidst the complexity and unpredictability of our societal and planetary conditions.
*References: Evans, Bob & O’Brien, Marg. (2015). Local Governance and Soft Infrastructure for Sustainability and Resilience. 77-97. 10.1007/978-94-017-9328-5_5.
TO BE CONTINUED!