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HOME >> Glossary
Glossary of Terms Used in ARINA's Website
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Complex issues: Contrary to common thinking, complex issues are far more than big topics such as economic development, health care, education, crime, corruption, governance, etc. Such big topics are not really complex issues at all; they are labels we use to refer to the complicated tangle of numerous real complex issues. ARINA has a body of methods and thinking that help people understand what complex issues are and what they need to be worked on. We understand complex issues as "discrete sets of conditions that require complex attention."
Developmental: People and their social systems, and the dynamic relationships among them, are alive and responsive to their environments. They develop as they adapt to life's conditions (and sometimes they regress to adapt, too). Positive experiences of any kind are developmental. ARINA's developmental approaches work with two broad understandings of this term. (1) Translative development refers to getting better at what we are already doing, by increasing our capacity within a given set of existing competencies, views or attitudes (2) Transformative development refers to evolving entirely new, more complex sets of competencies, views or attitudes that have a fundamentally greater capacity for handling complex situations.
Discrete: Identifiable as an entity, having a recognizable boundary that enables us to work in and on a system. In ARINA's approach to complex issues, identifying the discrete sets of conditions that represent a distinct system of doing things is the first step in recognizing and knowing how to address any complex issue. Overall, this process re-frames our perception of issues in integral ways.
Integral: A dictionary definition of integral is "essential to completeness." The following short descriptions serve as brief overview of some of the dimensions that require inclusion for any effort to be integral.
What integral means for human contexts is a big subject (beyond the scope of a glossary, and a good reason to browse our website). It is developmental attention to individuals, groups of all kinds, socio-cultural settings and constraints, and interrelations of all these with other human systems. It is understanding the processes of change and healthy development and recognizing why health and vibrant new capacities are liberated or stymied. In ARINA's approach to integral completeness, it also means knowing and using practical methods to address individual and social development needs.
To understand a comparatively simple system, like the mechanical system of a car, there are already-available, humanly-designed assembly diagrams that explain exactly what is essential for a car to be a complete car. To understand the very dynamic, complex systems of individuals, social groupings and their interactions, etc., there are no assembly-diagrams because nothing is static, but rather always in dynamic interaction, and therefore always changing in some way. To know how to take all this into account, is integral. Our journal Integral Review is accumulating a transdisciplinary range of treatments of things integral.
Integral approaches: No matter how well we think we understand what is happening, or what needs to change, it is almost always far more complex than we can recognize from its surface appearances. This is because it involves diverse, complicated human beings and institutions, their complex socio-cultural and natural environments, their development, their history, and the immediate context. To take all this into consideration is at the center core of integral approaches. Yet it is only the core. It is one thing to understand or analyze, and quite another thing to build all that into practical methods for effective individual and social processes.
In fact, it is a whole additional step or process to "get to the how's" of converting such understandings into practical ways of doing things that are essential to the completeness of a particular effort. Thus, ARINA has a focus on how individual and social change develop so that practical methods can be offered, additional methods can be researched, and the learning and methods can be shared widely. Since no single person (that we know of) can possibly know all of this information about even one event or situation, there are major demands on integral approaches to work at a "meta level." Our Find Your Interests page has some examples of meta-attention to common human experiences. Our peer-reviewed, open-access electronic journal, Integral Review publishes works that convey a range of integral approaches across disciplines.
Paradigmatic: An entirely new way of understanding and doing what is necessary to accomplish complex, previously-impossible objectives. ARINA's hallmark approaches to address complex issues are paradigmatic because they foster healthy change and development in individuals and groups while and by addressing their pressing concerns.
inta decima. Eodem modo typi, qui nunc nobis
videntur parum clari, fiant sollemnes in futurum.