GPS Glossary

Autocatalytic Memes
Contagious ideas that self-proliferate. –Kurt Weibers
A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one.

Attractors
[Archetypal] states towards which a system may evolve when starting from certain initial conditions.

Binary Oppositions
People necessarily and automatically create binary oppositions as ways of easily discerning one thing from another. For example, we view the concept of "Good" as we do because of the way it relates to the concept of "Evil." We are limited to understanding everything only as relative to something else.

Corporate Culture
1) Organizationally shared values, beliefs, assumptions, and understandings that are the basis for relevant corporate norms and behavior patterns.
2) A worldwide system of shared goals, values and behaviours.
3) "Culture must not remain a fond relic of the organization's past. It needs to evolve...adapt...help deliver a successful future." –Price Pritchett

Dialogue
In Dialogue, a group of people can explore the individual and collective presuppositions, ideas, beliefs, and feelings that subtly control their interactions. It provides an opportunity to participate in a process that displays communication successes and failures. It can reveal the often puzzling patterns of incoherence that lead the group to avoid certain issues or, on the other hand, to insist, against all reason, on standing and defending opinions about particular issues.

Ethical/Aesthetic Paradigm
1) How culture, shared values, look and feel (or any other non-reducable attributes) of an operating environment predetermine all the possible vectors of change within a given organization, and even at times, within the subjective forces, i.e. individual subcomponents leading to production of creative ideas. –Kurt Weibers
2) "We are faced with an important ethical choice: either we objectify, reify, ‘scientifise’ subjectivity, or, on the contrary, we try to grasp it in the dimension of its processual creativity."–Felix Guattari
3) A paradigm is a conglomeration of all of the background that affects how science operates, what questions it can ask, and what answers it can provide.

Identity Systems (link to video)
1) Constructions that serve to further polarize or essentialize elements into aggregates. For example, the effect of a magnetic field on iron filings. Conventional notions of identity are psychological, relating to Jung’s idea of the Self, which is, as one might assume, a self-conception that is more authentic in meaning than the Ego. The placement of the word “systems” next to the word “identity” depersonalizes the idea of identity – a tree has an identity system. Systemization also processualizes identity and disassociates the notion of identity with any entity. At GPS we focus on three levels of identity systems: personal, organizational and global, which we believe can be engaged and affected in basically two ways. Identity systems can be either enhanced through polarization (leading to increased essentialism, tribalism, nationalism, corporate culture, team spirit etc.) or opened up through depolarization (leading to increased realism, objectivity, questioning and truth). In our introductory seminars we deliberately juxtapose the twin polarities of identity systems (consistency and change) to facilitate a group dialogue or MID.
–Kurt Weibers
2) Self is the centre of the individual, the dynamic nucleus from which consciousness and the ego emerge.

Immanence
1) (from Lat. in-manere to dwell in, remain), in philosophy and theology a term applied in contradistinction to transcendence, to the fact or condition of being entirely within something.
2) See also this excellent paper on transcendental empiricism.

Motivation
1) A flow or direction towards a goal. Not to be confused with a trajectory, which may or may not have a goal, a motivation always has a goal. At GPS we do not consider stimuli-response behavior as motivation per se, simply because we have observed that motivation does not require stimuli. Motivation flows can be enhanced simply by tending to their channels. When a worker has a wider channel to move toward a goal, she will move faster towards that goal, thus she will appear more motivated. Constriction of motivational flow is the primary problem in conflicts between individuals and organizations in our day. Think about it: what is important to achieving anything than the level of motivation?
–Kurt Weibers
2) See also this superlative paper outlining a processual theory of motivation.

Multiplicities
Multiplicities are the space of meaning between binary oppositions. They are not to be confused with their associative term an “assemblage” which is a combination of binary oppositions (this glossary is an assemblage). The identification and utilization of multiplicities and assemblages constitutes original or creative thinking. No idea can be original, but conceptualization based on multiplicities is always processual, that is, it is always between binary oppositions. Thinking is really just movement (that’s why we are not yet thinking), thoughts (or the disciplines of knowledge) are simply a reiteration of binary oppositions., absolutisms, or so called facts in a history. –Kurt Weibers

Organizational Citizenship
1) Individual behavior that benefits the organization, but is not prescribed by the organization, for example courtesy and congeniality or other behavior patterns that cannot be directly demanded or enforced by management. –Kurt Weibers

Relational Aesthetics
Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks [organizations] on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.
Co-existence criterion:
All works of art [identity design] produce a model of sociability, which transposes reality or might be conveyed in it. So there is a question we are entitled to ask in front of any aesthetic production: 'Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue’. -Nicolas Bourriaud

Singularities
Eternal (thus non-functional, non-reducible) subcomponents of a functional equation. A singularity is an aggregate, for example the Mandelbrot set is undeniably “whole” yet simultaneously, eternal and irresolvable. Identity systems are formed from singularities, eternal crystallizations that are functional not in themselves, but their relation to other subcomponents that together form the identity system. –Kurt Weibers

Systems Theory
Systems theory or systems science argues that however complex or diverse the world that we experience, we will always find different types of organization in it...The systems approach distinguishes itself from the more traditional analytic approach by emphasizing the interactions and connectedness of the different components of a system.