(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

One of the five normative behaviours that characterise a learning culture. Accountability means holding oneself responsible not only for one's actions but for learning from their consequences — refusing, in other words, the infinite supply of available excuses. What distinguishes accountability from the other four cultural norms (transparency, integrity, issue orientation, inquiry) is that it drives action, not just understanding. An organisation can be transparent and inquisitive and still fail to act on what it learns; accountability closes that gap.

(Core Element within Place Thinking)

One of the six Core Elements through which attention is organised when reading Place. Activity draws attention to what happens in a Place: work, care, movement, play, trade, maintenance, conflict, growth, decay, and change. It is not confined to what a Place was designed for — the gap between intended and actual activity is often where the most significant Place conditions become visible, and where the question of who a Place is actually for begins to surface.

Activity also names one of the six Structural Systems, where it operates at a different scale: not what is happening now, but the broader patterns of work, daily life, culture, and practice that organise how a Place functions over time. The Core Element asks what is happening here; the Structural System asks how patterns of activity produce and reproduce Place conditions. Both questions are necessary; neither substitutes for the other.

(Froma Walsh; adopted and preferred over 'bounce back')

Walsh's corrective to the dominant metaphor of resilience as recovery — the idea that resilience means returning to a prior state. To bounce forward is to emerge from adversity into something stronger, more resourceful, more adaptive than what existed before. I adopt this framing throughout my work because it captures what I observe in genuinely resilient organisations: they do not simply survive disruption, they are changed by it in ways that increase their capacity to meet future challenges. The direction of the movement matters.

(Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum — capabilities approach)

The word chosen over "ability" in the definition of Place Literacy, and the choice is not cosmetic. Ability implies something a person either has or does not have — a fixed attribute, unevenly distributed. Capability, in the Sen/Nussbaum sense, is something that develops through conditions, and whose absence reflects a structural failure to create those conditions rather than a personal deficit. Framing Place Literacy as a capability changes the nature of the claim being made: not that some people are more perceptive or more engaged than others, but that the conditions under which Place Literacy develops have not been made available to everyone — and that this is a failure worth naming.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman — Policy Facet)

One of three management policies that facilitate organisational learning. Expressed not in mission statements but in resource allocation: the design of OLMs, investment in training, time set aside for reflection, reward systems that recognise learning behaviours, and — notably — even the physical layout of the workspace. Commitment to Learning is the signal that learning is not an add-on but a core organisational priority.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman — Policy Facet)

A management policy that de-emphasises status differences and guarantees employment security. The logic is structural: job security is a precondition for psychological safety, and fair treatment generates reciprocal organisational commitment. You cannot ask people to expose their thinking, admit errors, and share honest opinions if they are afraid for their positions. This is not a soft benefit; it is an enabling condition for everything else in the learning system.

(Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger)

Groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. The term was introduced by Lave and Wenger in 1991 and fully elaborated by Wenger in his 1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. What is distinctive about this concept is its insistence that learning is fundamentally social — it cannot be separated from the communities and practices in which it takes place. I draw on Wenger's original, descriptive use of the term (rather than the increasingly prescriptive applications that followed) as a theoretical lens for understanding how learning actually works inside organisations.

(Henri Lefebvre)

Lefebvre's distinction between space as it is planned, designed, and represented — conceived by those with the power to shape it — and space as it is actually inhabited, used, and experienced. The gap between the two is not incidental; it is where the consequences of Place decisions are most legible, and it is precisely the gap that the second of the Three Questions — What is this Place for? — is designed to surface. What I find indispensable in Lefebvre's formulation is the insistence that the conceived and the lived are not simply different perspectives on the same thing: they reflect different relations to power, and any account of Place that takes only one of them seriously is an incomplete account.

(Place Thinking)

The six analytical lenses through which attention is organised when reading Place. The Core Elements are not a taxonomy of what Place contains — they do not divide Place into separate parts — but prompts for noticing how different aspects of a relational environment interact. Together they resist the fragmentation of Place into separate non-interacting domains. They are: Form, Life, Material, Activity, Perspective, and Relationality.

Form — the shape, structure, configuration, and physical articulation of built and natural elements: how things are made and how they appear.

Life — the living beings present in a Place — people, animals, plants, ecosystems — and the conditions that sustain or limit them.

Material — what a Place is made of: stone, concrete, water, soil, organic matter, waste, reused and repaired elements.

Activity — what happens: work, care, movement, play, trade, maintenance, conflict, growth, decay, and change.

Perspective — the position from which Place is known, shaped by who you are, what you have experienced, and the role you occupy. What you notice, describe, and claim about Place depends on where you stand. Perspective runs through all the other elements: what you notice in Form, Life, Material, and Activity depends on where you stand.

Relationality — how elements, systems, histories, decisions, and people connect and affect one another across scales and time. Relationality connects all the other elements; it is the lens through which the interaction between them becomes visible.

Perspective and Relationality have a structural status distinct from the other four. They are not parallel lenses but organising ones — each runs through the others rather than sitting alongside them. Flattening this produces a checklist where there should be a relational system.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

Organisational Learning Mechanisms in which learning takes place in a dedicated moment set apart from the task itself: a debrief, a retreat, a post-project review. These map onto what Donald Schön calls reflection-on-action — stepping back from experience in order to examine it. Designated OLMs are easier to implement than dual-purpose OLMs but more fragile: when time is short or priorities shift, the dedicated moment is usually the first thing cut.

(coined within this framework)

The structure through which Place Literacy develops, across three levels: Reading, Understanding, and Accountability. What matters most about this structure is what it is not: the levels are not stages to pass through once and complete, not a ladder with a fixed top, and not a hierarchy in which earlier levels are superseded by later ones. People engage at different levels in different places at the same time, and return to earlier modes of engagement as contexts change. The measure is a capability growing — applied with increasing precision across an expanding range of places and conditions.

Reflexivity runs as a cross-cutting dimension through all three levels, deepening at each: from recognising that where you stand shapes what you notice, to examining how your role and knowledge shape what you can claim, to taking responsibility for the limits of your evidence and the reach of your decisions. It is what gives the Developmental Account its coherence as a structure rather than a sequence.

This term draws on: Nutbeam's health literacy model — whose three-level structure provided the original logic, superseded in naming but retained in structure; and the capabilities approach (Sen / Nussbaum) — which informs the treatment of Place Literacy as something that develops rather than something possessed.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

Organisational Learning Mechanisms in which learning is embedded within the task performance itself rather than extracted from it. The paradigmatic example is the hospital ward round, where patient care and teaching happen simultaneously. These map onto Schön's reflection-in-action. Dual-purpose OLMs are harder to design and more vulnerable to the conditions of the Psychological Facet — they require psychological safety to function honestly — but they represent the highest level of organisational learning because the feedback loop between experience and reflection is immediate and continuous.

(Etienne Wenger)

A structure that arises through the ongoing negotiation of meaning among members rather than being imposed from above. Wenger's formulation is precise and important: emergent structures are simultaneously highly perturbable — open to new elements — and highly resilient — able to assimilate those elements without losing coherence. This is the theoretical foundation for my argument that learning is a privileged path to sustainable change: an organisation whose practice is emergent in Wenger's sense is, by its nature, both adaptable and continuous. As Wenger puts it, "the continuity of an emergent structure derives not from stability but from adaptability."

A term I use to distinguish change that originates from within an organisation — emerging from its own processes of reflection and learning — from exogenous change, which is reactive to external pressures. Sustainable Organisational Change is primarily endogenous: it prioritises the creation of an organisational culture that generates and assimilates change from within, rather than one that simply responds to whatever new circumstances arrive. This is not a denial of external reality but a reorientation of agency.

(Loris Malaguzzi and Carlina Rinaldi — Reggio Emilia tradition)

The principle that the environment is not a neutral container for learning but an active participant in it — shaping what is noticed, what questions are asked, and what can be thought. Malaguzzi named the environment the third teacher, alongside peers and adults in the room. Rinaldi extended this into an argument about listening as a disposition: active, reciprocal, and generative rather than passive or extractive — the environment as something that speaks, if you have developed the capacity to attend.

I draw on both in the third of the Three Questions — What does it need? The question positions the person as someone attending to what Place itself is producing and requiring, rather than arriving with a standard from outside. It is non-normative: it does not say the Place should be better or more inclusive; it asks what the Place needs, and the answer comes from reading the Place.

(Etienne Wenger)

One of the two processes through which identity forms in Wenger's theory. Identification determines which communities, practices, and meanings a person invests themselves in — it is the source of belonging and commitment. But identification alone does not guarantee influence. A person can care deeply about an organisation's mission while having no real power to shape how that mission is interpreted or enacted. For this reason, identification must be understood alongside its complement, negotiability, to give a full picture of what membership actually means.

(Visual Thinking Strategies — Philip Yenawine and Abigail Housen)

The specific facilitation discipline through which the Three Questions are activated: paraphrase, point, and connect. The facilitator paraphrases what a participant has said — accurately and without evaluation — points to the relevant part of the Place or evidence, then connects the contribution to what others have offered. No content is added. No response is corrected. No interpretation is endorsed over another.

What I find most important about this discipline is that it is not a neutral technique — it is a structural commitment. By refusing to evaluate contributions, the facilitator creates the conditions under which participants with different kinds of knowledge — lived, professional, ecological, historical — can offer what their position makes visible without any one account being translated into another's terms first. The facilitation method is, in this sense, the operational expression of the epistemological argument that Place knowledge is distributed and partial, and that no single position makes everything visible. I adapted the method from VTS, extending it from visual analysis to the full relational environment, but the core discipline is retained unchanged — because what made it work there is exactly what Place Thinking requires.

(Core Element within Place Thinking)

One of the six Core Elements through which attention is organised when reading Place. Form draws attention to the shape, structure, configuration, and physical articulation of built and natural elements — how things are made and how they appear. Form covers physical articulation; spatial organisation is the work of the Spatial system within the Structural Systems. The distinction matters: "space" is not a Core Element, and collapsing it into Form absorbs the specificity of both.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman — Cultural Facet)

One of the five normative behaviours of a learning culture. Inquiry means persisting in investigation until full understanding is reached — tolerating uncertainty rather than settling for a reassuring partial explanation. It implies a willingness to suspend judgement and sit with not-knowing for as long as it takes to learn something real. In practice, this is rarer and more demanding than it sounds: organisations under pressure are strongly incentivised toward quick diagnoses and premature closure.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

Organisational Learning Mechanisms in which the performer and the beneficiary of learning are the same people. Those doing the work are the ones who review it, analyse what went wrong or right, and improve from it. The feedback loop is direct and tight. I found the strongest examples of integrated OLMs at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in the team's regular internal review meetings, where staff across functions examined their own work together. Integrated OLMs represent the highest quality of organisational learning but also the most demanding: without psychological safety, they risk becoming forums for self-protection rather than self-examination.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman — Cultural Facet)

One of the five normative behaviours of a learning culture. Integrity means collecting and providing information regardless of its implications — fully, accurately, and even when it costs you. Lipshitz et al define it as preferring the loss of face over the loss of an opportunity to learn. I find this the most morally demanding of the five norms because it requires people to subordinate self-interest to organisational learning — and it requires the organisation, in turn, to make that a safe thing to do.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman — Cultural Facet)

One of the five normative behaviours of a learning culture. Issue orientation is the ability to focus on the relevance of information to the task at hand regardless of the social standing of the person raising it. In practice, this means suspending hierarchy in the service of learning: the junior member's observation is as worth attending to as the director's. Lipshitz et al illustrate this with the Israeli Air Force, where the military's rigid hierarchical system is suspended during after-action reviews so that subordinates can speak honestly to their superiors. The implication for cultural organisations — where hierarchy is often more implicit but no less real — is significant.

(Etienne Wenger — communities of practice)

One of the three defining dimensions of a community of practice: the shared goal or concern that members hold themselves mutually accountable to — not merely a task they happen to be working on together, but something they feel genuine responsibility for. The word "joint" carries weight: it describes an enterprise negotiated collectively rather than handed down, which is what distinguishes a genuine community of practice from a group that shares a workspace or a reporting line. I draw on this concept in the provenance of the second of the Three Questions — What is this Place for? — where the move from describing what is happening in a Place to accounting for what it exists to do, and whether it is achieving that, carries a structurally similar logic.

(minimum vocabulary term — Place Literacy)

The understanding of Place produced through experience, practice, and position. It is distributed and partial — no single account is complete. The definition deliberately broadens what counts as knowledge beyond credentialed or professional forms: knowledge of Place is held across different roles, positions, and forms of experience, and the partiality of any account is not a failure to be corrected but a consequence of what Place is. A relational whole that emerges through the continuous interaction of natural, built, and social environments cannot be fully known from any single position within it.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

A distinction that sits at the heart of my argument. Learning in organisations refers to the learning that takes place within individuals who happen to work in an organisation. It is valuable, but it is not organisational learning — if the individual leaves, the knowledge goes with them. Learning by organisations is the transformation of individual knowledge into something the organisation itself holds: embedded in its structures, processes, shared repertoire, and culture. This transformation — from individual to organisational — is the essential condition for sustainable change, and it is precisely what Organisational Learning Mechanisms are designed to enable.

(Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger)

The concept, from Lave and Wenger's 1991 Situated Learning, that newcomers learn by participating at the edges of a community before moving toward full membership — and that even peripheral participation is already genuine: the newcomer is not merely observing but contributing and being shaped by the community in the process. I draw on this in understanding the scalability of Place Thinking: the Three Questions work with a year 2 class and a planning officer not because the questions change but because what the person can bring to them changes. Entry is always available; what develops is the depth and complexity of engagement.

(Core Element within Place Thinking)

One of the six Core Elements through which attention is organised when reading Place. Life draws attention to the living beings present in a Place — people, animals, plants, ecosystems — and the conditions that sustain or limit them. Its inclusion reflects a deliberate non-anthropocentric commitment: Place is shaped by and for living systems, not only humans, and what those systems need is part of what any adequate account of Place must include. Without it, the framework's most demanding level — Accountability, with its explicit responsibility to all forms of life affected by Place decisions — would have nothing to ground it in practice.

(Don Nutbeam — health literacy model)

The model chosen over awareness, competence, or training as the frame for Place Literacy, and the choice is load-bearing. Literacy describes a capability that develops through use, transfers across contexts, and treats existing knowledge as the starting material rather than a deficit to be corrected. Awareness campaigns raise attention but do not produce capability. Training develops knowledge within specific registers, not fluency across the relational whole. Engagement practice improves processes but does not change the epistemic conditions under which contributions are made and received. None of these is wrong; none is sufficient.

Nutbeam's three-level health literacy model — functional, communicative, critical — provided the structural logic for the Developmental Account, though the names are different and the content is specific to Place. The mechanism Nutbeam identified is the one Place Literacy is designed to replicate: capability develops in individuals, but as it becomes more widely held it changes what institutions are required to provide.

(Core Element within Place Thinking)

One of the six Core Elements through which attention is organised when reading Place. Material draws attention to what a Place is made of: stone, concrete, water, soil, organic matter, waste, reused and repaired elements. Like Activity, Material also names one of the six Structural Systems — where it operates at the scale of resource flows, extraction, production, and waste rather than at the scale of what can be directly observed. The Core Element asks what this Place is made of; the Structural System asks how the movement and transformation of materials produce Place conditions.

(Etienne Wenger)

One of the three defining dimensions of a community of practice. Mutual engagement is not simply proximity or shared interest — it is active, ongoing engagement with one another, through which members discover how to work together, develop relationships, and establish shared ways of knowing who is good at what and how to get things done. It is the social fabric of the community, and it is built through practice over time rather than through organisational charts or team-building exercises.

(Etienne Wenger)

The second and often overlooked half of Wenger's dual process of identity formation. Where identification determines which communities and practices matter to you, negotiability determines the degree to which you have actual power to shape the meanings within them — "the ability, facility, and legitimacy to contribute to, take responsibility for, and shape the meanings that matter within a social configuration." This distinction has profound implications for organisational change: an organisation can generate strong identification (people care deeply about the mission) while denying negotiability (staff have no real say in how that mission is interpreted or enacted). The result is an organisation that feels cohesive on the surface but is brittle underneath. Resilient Learning requires both.

(Etienne Wenger)

Wenger's term for the ongoing, interactional process by which meaning is produced and reproduced — not a one-time agreement but a continuous give-and-take with the past and the present. As he writes: "living is a constant process of negotiation of meaning." I draw on this in understanding how Place knowledge works: the meanings attached to a Place — what it is for, who it belongs to, what it needs — are not fixed but continuously negotiated among the people who inhabit, use, govern, and are affected by it. Place Thinking creates the conditions under which that negotiation can happen on more equitable epistemic ground — where the basis of each contribution is visible and no single account is translated into another's terms first.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

Organisational Learning Mechanisms in which the performer and the beneficiary are separate: one person or group does the work, another reviews and reports on it. Strategic planning units, external consultants, and evaluation reports are all examples. Non-integrated OLMs are the easiest to implement but carry the lowest learning value, because the people most directly positioned to act on the learning — those doing the work — are not the ones generating it.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman — Psychological Facet)

The extent to which members identify with the organisation's goals and values to the point where they no longer distinguish between the organisation's interests and their own. Lipshitz et al note that organisational learning is "crucially dependent on people's willingness to care for and share knowledge with others" — a willingness that cannot be mandated but can be cultivated. I link organisational commitment directly to Wenger's concept of negotiability: people who have genuine ownership of the organisation's meanings and direction are far more likely to commit to its learning processes than those who are merely employed by it.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

Concrete, directly observable structural and procedural arrangements through which individual learning is transformed into organisational learning. Lipshitz et al describe them as a "non-metaphorical analogue for the central nervous system": the actual channels through which an organisation thinks, remembers, and improves. OLMs are classified along two axes — integrated or non-integrated (depending on whether performer and beneficiary are the same) and designated or dual-purpose (depending on whether learning is separated from or embedded in the task). What I find most useful about this framework is that it makes learning designable: you are not hoping that a good culture will spontaneously produce reflection, you are building the structures that make it happen.

(Place Thinking)

The three modes through which a person engages with Place at any moment: Awareness, Understanding, and Engagement. The Orientations serve two distinct functions within Place Thinking, and conflating them produces confusion.

As an organising structure, the Orientations group the Shared Practices into meaningful clusters. Awareness encompasses Observe and Describe; Understanding encompasses Interpret; Engagement encompasses Critique, Engage, and Transform. Reflect operates across all three — recognising how your own position shapes what you perceive, claim, and decide is available at every stage. The Orientations imply a natural sequence but not a fixed one: practitioners loop back, operate at multiple Orientations simultaneously, and re-enter at different points depending on context.

As evidential markers, the Orientations serve a second function outside the methodology: they are the primary lens through which Place Literacy development is inferred. An evaluator asks what orientation to Place a person is demonstrating, and what has shifted from earlier engagements. Evidence of development includes shifts in vocabulary and framing, changes in what participants notice or name, increased complexity of explanation, and changes in how claims are grounded and how responsibility is understood and taken up.

The Orientations are not the developmental levels. Reading, Understanding, and Accountability are the levels of Place Literacy. Awareness, Understanding, and Engagement are the Orientations within Place Thinking that organise practice and provide the evidential lens. The shared name "Understanding" across both systems is intentional and meaningful — it is not an error to be resolved.

(Etienne Wenger)

For Wenger, participation is not a synonym for involvement or attendance — it is the primary mode of learning. We learn by doing, by being with others in practice, by engaging in the ongoing negotiation of meaning that constitutes community life. Participation is also constitutive of identity: who we are is shaped by the communities we participate in. In organisational terms, this means that learning cannot be confined to training programmes or designated sessions; it happens in the flow of work, in the conversations that surround tasks, in the stories people tell about what they do and why.

(minimum vocabulary term — Place Literacy; Core Element within Place Thinking)

The position from which Place is known — shaped by who you are, what you have experienced, and the role you occupy. What you notice, describe, and claim about Place depends on where you stand. The definition carries a specific epistemological commitment: position is not a distortion to be corrected for but a condition of knowing. Every account of Place is produced from somewhere, and making that somewhere visible is part of what it means to make a claim whose basis can be examined.

Perspective has a dual function in this framework. As a minimum vocabulary term, it names the positional nature of all Place knowledge — a precondition for understanding why no single account of Place is complete. As a Core Element within Place Thinking, it has an additional analytical role: it runs through all the other elements rather than sitting alongside them. What you notice in Form, Life, Material, and Activity depends on where you stand. The two functions are related but distinct, and the definition is shared across both.

This term draws on: Situated Knowledges (Haraway) — the epistemological basis for treating position as a condition of knowing rather than a source of bias; Core Elements — the analytical structure within Place Thinking where Perspective has a structural role distinct from the other five elements; and Types of Claims — the framework through which the positional basis of a claim is made visible and open to examination.

(Etienne Wenger)

Wenger's term for the quality of an emergent structure that makes it continuously open to new elements. He presents perturbability and resilience as a complementary pair — not opposites but mutually reinforcing: "the combination of perturbability and resilience is a characteristic of adaptability." An organisation whose practice is perturbable can absorb new people, new ideas, and new challenges without shattering; it integrates them. Understanding this pairing is what led me to learning as the central mechanism of sustainable change: learning is precisely the process by which organisations remain perturbable while staying coherent.

(minimum vocabulary term — Place Literacy)

A relational whole that emerges through the continuous interaction of natural, built, and social environments, shaping the conditions within which living things exist. The definition carries two commitments that distinguish it from common usage. First, Place is produced through continuous interaction — not a location, container, or backdrop but something that emerges and can therefore be changed. The conditions people live in are not natural facts; they are the accumulated result of decisions made by identifiable people through identifiable processes with identifiable consequences. Second, its scope extends to all living things, not only humans: the conditions Place produces are conditions for life in the broadest sense.

Both commitments are load-bearing. The produced nature of Place is what makes agency over it possible — conditions that are contingent and knowable can be changed. The non-anthropocentric scope is what makes Accountability, as a level of Place Literacy, coherent: you cannot take responsibility for the consequences of Place decisions for all forms of life if Place is defined as a human construct.

(Doreen Massey)

Massey's formulation of Place as produced through the intersection of multiple trajectories — social, historical, political, ecological — rather than as a fixed location or bounded territory. What I find essential in this formulation is the insistence that Place is always in process: what it is at any moment is the result of trajectories that have converged there, and understanding it means tracing those trajectories rather than treating what currently exists as given. This is the theoretical ground for the relational definition of Place used throughout this framework. It also underpins one of the more demanding moves Place Thinking asks people to make: that understanding a Place requires looking outward — to history, to systems, to decisions made elsewhere — rather than treating it as self-contained.

(coined within this framework)

The disposition of attending carefully to Place — noticing what is present and absent, slowing down enough to see what first impressions miss, and recognising that different people notice different things from the same Place at the same time. Place Awareness precedes analysis: it is not yet explanation or interpretation, but it is not passive either. It is the active, open quality of attention from which Place Literacy develops.

What Place Awareness makes possible is a shared starting point. When people have attended carefully to the same Place and can articulate what they noticed — separating what they observed from what they assumed — their accounts enter a process in a form that others can examine, question, and build on. Without that foundation, analysis begins from unstated assumptions rather than from what is actually there.

(coined within this framework)

The capability to read, analyse, evaluate, and participate in shaping Place and the conditions of life it produces. The definition is compact but each word carries weight. "Capability" rather than "ability" is a deliberate choice drawn from Sen and Nussbaum: a capability is something that develops through conditions, and whose absence reflects a structural failure rather than a personal one. "Participate in shaping" rather than simply "understand" because Place Literacy is not an end state of knowing — it is the foundation from which action becomes possible. "The conditions of life it produces" because Place is never merely physical; it produces the circumstances within which people and living systems exist, and those circumstances are what is ultimately at stake.

Place Literacy is public and unowned. It is not a programme, a qualification, or a methodology — it is the shared epistemic ground from which decisions about Place can be made more accurately, accountably, and equitably. The analogy I return to is health literacy: it did not emerge from policy, but as it became more widely held it changed what patients could demand from health systems, which changed what policy had to provide. The mechanism runs from capability to policy, not the other way around.

This term draws on: Literacy (Nutbeam) — the model that established capability developing through use as the right frame; Capability (Sen / Nussbaum) — the basis for "capability" rather than "ability"; Place — the defined term whose relational and produced nature the capability is designed to engage; and the Developmental Account — the structure through which Place Literacy develops.

(coined within this framework — Devorah Block)

Place Thinking operates simultaneously as an epistemic lens and as a methodology — not two separate things but two aspects of the same system. As an epistemic lens, it treats Place as relational, systemic, perspectival, and consequential: a set of commitments about what Place is and what matters about it that shapes what can be noticed, described, and claimed. As a methodology, it is operationalised through four interconnected components: the Core Elements, the Structural Systems, the Shared Practices, and the Types of Claims.

Place Thinking Strategies is the full name of the methodology. Place Thinking is the natural shorthand and is used throughout. When Place Thinking spreads through education, planning, or professional practice, it is Place Literacy that is being developed and Place Thinking that is the vehicle — a distinction that matters for how the work is understood and attributed.

This term draws on: Place Literacy — the public civic capability the methodology exists to develop; Visual Thinking Strategies (Yenawine and Housen) — the direct methodological predecessor from which the Three Questions structure and facilitation discipline are adapted; and the Orientations, Shared Practices, Core Elements, Structural Systems, and Types of Claims — the components through which the methodology is operationalised.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

One of the five facets of the Multifacet Model of Organisational Learning, addressing the specific ways that management can facilitate or inhibit learning. The three key policies are: Commitment to Learning, Tolerance for Error, and Commitment to the Workforce. The Policy Facet matters because it makes explicit what is often left implicit in discussions of organisational culture: that the conditions for learning are not self-generating but require active, ongoing decisions by those in positions of authority.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

The baseline definition of effective organisational learning proposed by Lipshitz, Popper and Friedman: learning that is (a) conscious and systematic, (b) yields valid information, and (c) results in actions intended to improve performance. My concept of Resilient Learning builds directly on this definition, extending it in two directions: by rooting learning in a coherent organisational identity, and by specifying that it must be negotiated and negotiable. These additions are not decorative — they are what distinguish learning that can sustain organisational change from learning that simply solves immediate problems.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

One of the five facets of the Multifacet Model, addressing the psychological conditions that must be present for productive learning to occur. The two states are Psychological Safety and Organisational Commitment. Lipshitz et al observe that maintaining both simultaneously is precisely what makes genuine organisational learning so rare: the conditions are demanding, fragile, and — crucially — dependent on decisions made at every level of the organisation, not just at the top.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman; originally Edgar Schein)

The condition under which people feel safe enough to take the risks that learning requires: making errors, surfacing problems, sharing honest opinions, disagreeing with authority. Without psychological safety, all other learning structures become performances. Meetings happen, reviews take place, feedback is solicited — but the actual thinking stays private, because exposing it feels too dangerous. I observed the presence and, at moments, the fragility of psychological safety repeatedly in my case study of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.

(Place Literacy— first developmental level of Place Literacy)

The first level of Place Literacy. At this level, a person attends carefully to Place; notices what is present and absent; describes conditions clearly; distinguishes between what has been observed and what has been inferred or assumed; and recognises that Place is shaped rather than given. What it produces is grounded, clear accounts of Place conditions — the articulation of knowledge previously held implicitly, and a shared starting point for observation and description from which others can examine, question, and build.

Reading is the entry point to Place Literacy, but it is not a simple or trivial one. The discipline of distinguishing what has been observed from what has been assumed is demanding, and the recognition that Place is shaped rather than given — that the conditions people live in are produced through identifiable decisions — is not a small shift. What changes as Place Literacy develops is not that Reading is left behind, but that what a person can bring to it deepens.

This term draws on: Developmental Account — the three-level structure within which Reading sits as the first level; and the capabilities approach (Sen / Nussbaum) — which informs the treatment of Place Literacy as something that develops rather than something possessed.

(cross-cutting dimension — Place Literacy Developmental Account)

The capacity to recognise how your own position, knowledge, and experience shape your understanding of Place and your decisions about it. Reflexivity runs as a cross-cutting dimension through all three levels of the Developmental Account, deepening at each: at Reading, it means recognising that where you stand shapes what you notice; at Understanding, it means examining how your role and knowledge shape what you can claim; at Accountability, it means taking responsibility for the limits of your evidence and the reach of your decisions.

What matters about reflexivity in this framework is that it is not a separate practice or a reflective add-on — it is the thread that runs through the levels and gives the Developmental Account its coherence as a structure rather than a sequence. Without it, movement from Reading to Accountability is a change in analytical complexity but not in the quality of engagement with Place or with one's own position within it.

(Etienne Wenger)

The complementary process to participation: turning experience into objects — documents, procedures, shared terms, representations, routines. Reification fixes meaning and makes it portable across time and people. Without it, knowledge stays locked in individuals and is lost when they leave. But without participation, reified objects become dead letters: forms filled out without understanding, procedures followed without purpose. Wenger insists that practice requires both in balance, and I find this pairing essential for thinking about institutional memory — one of the central vulnerabilities of cultural organisations facing leadership transitions or staff turnover.

(Core Element within Place Thinking)

One of the six Core Elements through which attention is organised when reading Place, and the one with the most distinctive structural status. Relationality draws attention to how elements, systems, histories, decisions, and people connect and affect one another across scales and time. Where the other elements — Form, Life, Material, Activity — organise attention toward specific aspects of Place, Relationality is the lens through which the interaction between all of them becomes visible. It does not sit alongside the others; it runs through them.

Relationality also names the broader epistemological commitment of the framework: that Place cannot be adequately understood by examining its parts in isolation. The continuous interaction of natural, built, and social environments is not background to what happens in Place — it is what Place is.

(minimum vocabulary term — Place Literacy)

The interactions between the parts of Place that produce its conditions and effects. They operate across scales — from the personal and material to the social and systemic. Relationships is one of the five minimum vocabulary terms without which Place Literacy cannot be communicated or practised — terms that are load-bearing rather than decorative. Its inclusion reflects the framework's foundational commitment: that Place is not a collection of separate elements but a relational whole, and that what it produces emerges from how those elements interact rather than from any one of them in isolation.

Relationships as a minimum vocabulary term is distinct from Relationality as a Core Element within Place Thinking, though the two are related. Relationships names the phenomenon — the interactions that produce Place conditions; Relationality names the analytical lens through which those interactions are made visible when reading Place.

(coined in this thesis)

The type of organisational learning that has the characteristics necessary to facilitate Sustainable Organisational Change. Building on Lipshitz, Popper and Friedman's definition of productive learning, I define Resilient Learning as learning that: (a) is rooted in a coherent organisational identity; (b) is conscious and systematic; (c) yields valid information; (d) is negotiated and negotiable; and (e) results in processes intended to assimilate new perceptions, goals, and/or behavioural strategies.

Resilient Learning differs from productive learning in two specific ways. First, it is anchored in identity: learning that is not connected to a shared sense of what the organisation is may solve immediate problems without contributing to any larger continuity. Second, it is negotiated and negotiable — drawn from Wenger's theory of communities of practice — meaning that it arises through genuine give-and-take rather than being handed down. Learning that is imposed rather than negotiated does not become part of the organisational culture in any durable way.

The term emerged from my research at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi as a way of naming what I observed making change sustainable there: not simply that people were learning, but that they were learning together, from within the work, in ways that deepened rather than disrupted their shared identity.

This term draws on: Productive Learning (Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman) — the baseline definition it extends; Negotiation of Meaning and Negotiability (Wenger) — the source of the 'negotiated and negotiable' criterion; Coherent Organisational Identity — the anchor that distinguishes it from productive learning; and Bounce Forward (Walsh) — the underlying orientation toward resilience as emergence rather than recovery.

(Etienne Wenger)

Wenger's description of what communities of practice fundamentally are, understood over time. Not just a group that learns together now, but a living archive of accumulated experience — the stories, the hard-won solutions, the shared references that give current practice its meaning and direction. Wenger writes: "communities of practice can be thought of as shared histories of learning." I draw on this formulation to understand why institutional memory matters so much in cultural organisations: what appears to be a rich, functioning culture is often, underneath, a shared history of learning that no one has made explicit — and that is therefore invisible until it starts to disappear.

(Place Thinking)

The primary developmental mechanism within Place Thinking — the repeatable ways of working with Place through which Place Literacy develops. The practices are: Observe, Describe, Interpret, Critique, Engage, Transform, and Reflect.

Observe — paying careful attention to what is present, absent, and happening in a Place.

Describe — articulating clearly what is perceived, without rushing to judgement or explanation.

Interpret — understanding why a Place functions or feels as it does, drawing on context, history, and systems.

Critique — questioning assumptions, impacts, and uneven effects within a Place, and accounting for consequences.

Engage — participating in a Place in ways that are appropriate to role, context, and responsibility.

Transform — deciding how to respond to a Place: care, change, maintenance, adaptation, or non-intervention.

Reflect — recognising how one's own position, knowledge, and experience shape understanding of a Place and decisions about it.

The practices are non-linear, non-sequential, and transferable across contexts. They are not lesson steps, assessment levels, or a fixed sequence to complete — a single engagement may move through several practices simultaneously or loop between them. What distinguishes them from a checklist is precisely this: they are not items to be completed but modes of working with Place that deepen with repeated use.

(Etienne Wenger)

One of the three defining dimensions of a community of practice: the accumulation, over time, of shared tools, routines, stories, concepts, and ways of doing things. The shared repertoire includes both tangible artefacts (documents, processes, physical arrangements) and the intangible stuff — in-jokes, shorthand references, unspoken agreements about how work is done. It is the deposit of a community's learning history, and it is what gives new members something to enter into and existing members something to build on. When an organisation loses its shared repertoire through staff turnover or poor institutional memory, it loses more than efficiency: it loses the accumulated intelligence of its own experience.

(Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger)

Lave and Wenger’s premise, from their 1991 Situated Learning, that learning is not a cognitive process that happens inside individuals and can be lifted out of context — it is something that takes place within situations, embedded in social practice and shaped by the specific conditions in which it occurs. The implication is significant: what works in one community’s practice may not work in another’s, not because the method is wrong but because learning is inseparable from the situation that produces it.

I draw on this in understanding both the limits and the design requirements of Place Thinking. The Three Questions are not transferable as a content delivery mechanism; they work because they activate what is already present in any Place encounter — the specific material, the specific positions, the specific histories that converge in a particular location at a particular moment. Scalability in this framework does not mean standardisation; it means that the same structural prompts can draw out situated knowledge wherever they are used, precisely because they do not require that knowledge to be identical.

This term draws on: Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger) — the broader theory of which situated learning is the foundational premise; Legitimate Peripheral Participation — the specific mechanism through which entry into Place Thinking is always available regardless of prior knowledge; and the Three Questions — the activation mechanism whose transferability depends on, not despite, situated learning principles.

(Donna Haraway)

Haraway's argument that all knowledge is produced from a particular position — that there is no view from nowhere, no account of the world that is not shaped by where the knower stands, what they have experienced, and the conditions under which they are able to know. The claim is not that knowledge is therefore unreliable, but that its reliability depends on making the position from which it is produced visible and open to examination. Partial, situated knowledge is more honest and ultimately more rigorous than the false objectivity of an account that claims to come from no position at all.

Situated knowledges is the theoretical ground for Perspective as a Core Element in Place Thinking — the insistence that what you notice, describe, and claim about Place depends on where you stand, and that this is not a limitation to be overcome but a condition to be worked with. It also underpins the Types of Claims framework: making the basis of a claim visible is, among other things, making the position from which it was produced visible.

(coined within this framework)

One of the distinctive outputs of Place Literacy at Accountability level — the ongoing capacity to care for Place and its conditions rather than merely act on it. Stewardship names a form of responsibility that is not triggered by a project and does not end when one is complete. It is not management, maintenance, or intervention, though it may involve all three. What distinguishes it is its orientation: toward the conditions Place produces for all forms of life, not only toward the objectives of whoever currently holds decision-making authority over it.

Stewardship becomes possible — and necessary as a concept — because Accountability level extends responsibility beyond the immediate, the human, and the present. Choosing non-intervention is as much a stewardship decision as choosing to act; the question is always whether the conditions of Place are being held in view and whether the decision being made can be accounted for against them. The term is deliberately drawn from land and ecological practice rather than from governance or professional frameworks, because what it names is a relationship to Place, not a role within an institution.

This term draws on: Accountability — the developmental level within which stewardship is named as a distinctive output; the Three Questions — specifically What does it need?, which is the entry point to stewardship as a practice; and Life (Core Element) — the non-anthropocentric commitment that gives stewardship its full scope.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman)

One of the five facets of the Multifacet Model of Organisational Learning, concerned with the processes by which knowledge is assimilated into an organisation. The Structural Facet is operationalised through Organisational Learning Mechanisms. Its core insight is the distinction between learning in organisations and learning by organisations: until individual learning is captured and embedded in the organisation's structures, it remains personal, contingent, and fragile. The Structural Facet is, in some sense, the scaffolding on which everything else depends.

(Place Thinking)

The six systems through which analysis moves from description to explanation — from what is present in a Place to how it works: how it is produced, maintained, governed, experienced, and changed. Where the Core Elements ask what is present, the Structural Systems ask how this Place functions. They are: Living, Material, Spatial, Activity, Institutional, and Meaning.

Living — organisms and biodiversity, life-support conditions, biological production and ecological cycles.

Material — resource flows, extraction, production, waste and reuse.

Spatial — land, structures, networks, and circulation.

Activity — work, daily life, culture, routines, practices, and patterns of use.

Institutional — governance, planning, ownership, property, civic participation, and decision-making.

Meaning — memory, heritage, identity, belonging, symbolism, and perception.

The systems are not separate containers. They interact continuously, and a change in one typically affects the others — which is why the Structural Systems, used well, produce analysis rather than classification. Meaning was settled as a Structural System rather than a Core Element or a sub-category of Relationality: it operates at the scale of how places are understood and valued over time, not at the scale of what can be noticed in a single encounter.

(coined in this thesis)

A model of organisational change developed in response to the specific conditions and constraints of cultural organisations — institutions that must honour the histories that have formed them while working to ensure their future longevity. The term emerged from extended conversations with James M. Bradburne, whose aspiration for the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi was a transformation that would have a life beyond his own tenure: change that was sustainable not merely in economic terms, but in cultural ones.
Sustainable Organisational Change is defined by six attributes. It comes from within the organisation, placing agency in the hands of its members rather than in external pressures. It is proactive rather than reactive — not a response to crisis, but an ongoing orientation toward change as a normal feature of organisational life. It is sustainable over time, meaning that change projects are assimilated deeply enough to survive shifts in staff or leadership. It is reflexive, maintaining a willingness to continue the process of inquiry even after discrete goals have been met. It preserves the organisation's core identity, distinguishing between goals, which should remain reasonably constant, and the means to those goals, which should be continuously subject to reflection and renewal. And it is cohesive — creating the conditions for the organisation to function as a genuine community of practice, where members are mutually engaged in a joint enterprise that gives them a meaningful sense of shared identity.

Sustainable Organisational Change is an aspirational model. In day-to-day practice, it functions as a framework for assessing the processes and principles one brings to change projects — a way of making conscious and informed decisions about whether what you are building has any chance of outlasting the moment in which you are building it.

This term draws on: Emergent Structure and Communities of Practice (Wenger) — for the theory of how cohesive change works; the Multifacet Model of Organisational Learning (Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman) — for the conditions that make it achievable; Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger) — for the insistence that change cannot be transplanted but must grow from within; and Bounce Forward (Walsh) — for the systemic understanding of resilience that underpins the whole model.

(adapted from Visual Thinking Strategies — Philip Yenawine and Abigail Housen)

The core activation mechanism of Place Thinking — the entry point to Place Literacy practice. The three questions are: What's happening here? What is this Place for? What does it need? Two facilitation moves are available throughout: What more do we notice? and What is it that makes you say that?

The questions are scalable from primary school to professional practice, applicable to any Place, and require no prior knowledge of the framework. What changes as Place Literacy develops is not the questions but what a person can bring to them — the same structure produces increasingly complex and grounded answers as capability grows. This is the VTS principle applied to Place: structurally simple, intellectually open.

What's happening here? — adapted from VTS ("What's going on in this picture?"), substituting "happening" for "going on" and "here" for "in this picture." "Happening" presupposes activity, process, and life. "Here" positions the person inside Place rather than outside it. The question is unanswerable wrongly: it opens attention without directing it and requires no prior knowledge or framework familiarity. It activates Observe and Describe, and operates within the Awareness Orientation.

What is this Place for? — drawn from Lefebvre's distinction between conceived and lived space, and Wenger's concept of joint enterprise. The question produces the reframing move: answers to the first question become evidence for this one, so that observation becomes interpretive without the person being asked to interpret. "What" rather than "who" is a deliberate non-anthropocentric choice — "Who is this Place for?" closes the question to humans; "What is this Place for?" opens it to living systems and ecological conditions. It activates Interpret and Critique, and operates within the Understanding Orientation.

What does it need? — drawn from Rinaldi and the Reggio Emilia tradition, and from Wenger's formulation of belonging as a relationship a Place produces or fails to produce. The question is the civic move: it positions the person as someone who might act, without prescribing what action should look like. It does not imply deficit — even a thriving Place needs something. It arrives with the weight of the second question behind it: to answer what the Place needs, you have to have worked through what it is for. It activates Engage, Transform, and Reflect, and operates within the Engagement Orientation.

What more do we notice? — adapted from VTS ("What more can we find?"), substituting "notice" for "find" to accept sensory, embodied, and relational attention as well as visual search. Extends attention rather than grounds a claim; tends toward gaps, absence, the overlooked. Available anywhere attention needs reopening.

What is it that makes you say that? — adapted from VTS ("What do you see that makes you say that?"), removing the visual anchor so the question accepts embodied, historical, and experiential grounds as well as observed ones. The epistemic discipline move: redirects from interpretation back to evidence without challenging the person. Surfaces the Types of Claims distinction — observation, inference, interpretation — without naming it.

This term draws on: Visual Thinking Strategies (Yenawine and Housen) — the direct source for the question structure and facilitation moves; Conceived vs Lived Space (Lefebvre) — provenance of Q2; Joint Enterprise (Wenger) — provenance of Q2; Environment as the Third Teacher (Rinaldi) — provenance of Q3; and Types of Claims — the epistemic framework that the facilitation moves activate without naming.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman — Policy Facet)

Management's "principal contribution to psychological safety": the recognition that learning inevitably generates errors, and that errors made in the service of learning will be met with curiosity and analysis rather than punishment. Lipshitz et al note the delicate balance this requires — rewarding errors committed in genuine service of learning, while holding people accountable for those made through carelessness or deliberate avoidance. The capacity to make that distinction, and to make it consistently and fairly, is one of the most demanding things asked of organisational leadership.

(Lipshitz, Popper & Friedman — Cultural Facet)

One of the five normative behaviours of a learning culture. Transparency is the willingness to expose your thinking and actions to others in order to receive feedback — to make yourself legible enough that learning from you, and with you, becomes possible. Lipshitz et al underline its intimate connection to psychological safety: transparency is only possible where it is safe, and its presence or absence is one of the most reliable indicators of whether genuine learning is taking place in an organisation.

(coined within this framework)

The epistemic framework through which different forms of Place knowledge can be used together without any one being reduced to another's terms. It distinguishes between three bases for a claim about Place: observation — what can be directly perceived and described clearly enough that someone else can check or add to it; inference — a reasonable conclusion drawn from observations, suggested by what has been observed but not directly witnessed; and interpretation — the meaning attributed to observations, shaped by experience, role, and perspective, and open to disagreement and revision.

What matters most about this framework is that it is not primarily a cognitive skill for individuals — it is a shared protocol. Its structural function is to create the conditions under which accounts from different positions can be examined and used together, with the basis of each made visible. A lived account and a technical account of the same Place are not in competition once the basis of each is clear; they become complementary evidence. The facilitation move "What is it that makes you say that?" surfaces this distinction in practice without naming it.

This term draws on: Claims — the minimum vocabulary term that introduces the concept at the level of Place Literacy; Situated Knowledges (Haraway) — the epistemological basis for treating position as shaping what can be known and claimed; and the facilitation discipline — through which the distinction is activated in practice.

(coined within this framework — second developmental level of Place Literacy)

The second level of Place Literacy. At this level, a person relates different forms of Place knowledge; explains why places take the form they do, drawing on context, history, systems, and how decisions get made; makes the basis of claims visible; and recognises that knowledge of Place is held across different roles, positions, and forms of experience. What it produces is analysis that connects observation to wider systems, and dialogue that brings different forms of knowledge into relation — descriptions that communicate what is happening in a Place across different positions and forms of experience.

What becomes possible at this level is significant: the mechanisms through which Place is governed, owned, and changed become visible — and with them, what can actually be changed and how. It becomes harder to avoid responsibility for what a Place is doing to the people and living things in it. Understanding is not a threshold to cross once but a capacity that deepens with each engagement — and it is the level at which the work of Reading becomes genuinely useful to others.

This term draws on: Developmental Account — the three-level structure within which Understanding sits as the second level; and Reading and Accountability — the levels that precede and follow it.