Worldview Pattern
An Essential Pattern to guide sustainability practitioners to identify participant worldviews and to understand their influence on transformation
All experience is subjective.
Gregory Bateson1
Challenge: How can you open your transformation process to accommodate the interacting worldviews of participants?
Cluster: Participant Practice Patterns
Type: Essential Practice Pattern
Purpose
The Worldview Pattern acknowledges that participants in a transformation bring their own unique worldview to the process. The purpose of this Pattern then is to enable greater practitioner and participant understanding of the interacting worldviews in the practice space, and their potential for supporting or resisting transformation.
Pattern Description
“Worldview” is a purposefully general title for this Pattern, because of the need to focus on phenomena that contribute to the internal state of individual participants, without being dogmatic, stereotypical or restrictive, and avoiding use of simplistic mindset concepts. The Elementals represent deeply complicated and often contentious aspects of the intrinsic motivational states of participants. They are not meant to be definitive and complete, rather they are representations of aspects of cognitive complexity that consistently present in practice spaces as well as in the body of knowledge on change and transformation.
The combination of personal worldviews and the demonstrated behaviours emerging from those worldviews have substantial influence on an organization’s capacity to change, and any organizational capacity mapping should comprehensively account for extant participant worldviews.
Elemental Patterns
Psyche: What would we see if we could look inside the mind of any person - to understand the state of their psyche? If we apply a complex systems frame, we would see a field of cognitive complexity emerging from the interactions of our genes, physical neurostructures and neuronal sparking, embodied states, upbringing, socio-cultural interactions and life experience (our own learned and emergent patterns of behaviour). We would also see that it encompasses our personality, values, beliefs and attitudes, all in a fluid state. In real-world practice for change, the emergent psyche of participants in their interactions with others is a core consideration.
Perception: We perceive the world through our senses - sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing - which are amplified or diminished by the response of our emergent psyches to the external world as well as our own internal worlds. We make judgements on those perceptions that inform our conscious and unconscious mind that then shape our actions. For practitioners, it is possible through dialogue and observation with participants to be able to create a rich picture of how participants perceive the transformation challenge; to identify shared perceptions; and frame how to work with those perceptions to pursue change in a way that enables concerted action in a desired direction.
Comprehension: Our psyche and perceptive capacity continually drives us to make sense of the world, yet there can be many aspects of systems at play that may require more learning and engagement. Participants will be called on to comprehend complicated phenomena in different degrees of detail in order to hold a position; consider competing facts; contribute to decision-making; and make nuanced judgements. In a complex system like an organization, not all participants will understand every aspect of the change, especially where expert knowledge is needed. Understanding participant knowledge, skills and capacity can help practitioners shape dialogue and communication processes to ensure deep comprehension as far as possible throughout an organization.
Awareness: Perception and awareness are related, but awareness is a more holistic, self-directed and intentional quality where individuals see dynamics and patterns in the practice space, and are able to synthesize multiple phenomena in a sensemaking process while maintaining reflective self-awareness. Awareness is a higher-order perception that when shared by multiple actors can amplify sensemaking and subsequent actions. It is a particularly important dimension of practitioner and participant capacity.
Values: Values are an expression of culture, both social and personal, and is where much of the sustainability movement is contested. Values are often expressed in terms of “what we value”. However, in the sustainability context, the assumption is that if the majority “value” the environment, implementation of sustainability principles should follow. Our value systems thus do not necessarily help us chart a way when our different values are in conflict, because the discussion about the meaning of values is often too vague to be useful. In change we cannot dismiss the values that people bring: but we can work with the expressed values to discover the motivation behind the expression, and that can be useful in fully engaging people in the action for change.
Attitudes: Individual attitudes are generally considered as significant contributors to change. In social theory, attitudes are regarded as having three dimensions in a complex of feeling, thought and behaviour, in a state of dynamic interplay. Thus, sometimes behaviours drive attitudes, rather than the other way around, enabling people to retain a semblance of personal consistency and to avoid cognitive dissonance. Further, attitudes do not tend to cause behaviour as is popularly held; rather, they signal an intention to perform a behaviour, but the execution is also driven by other factors that affect the individual at any point in time. Therefore, attitudes may not be a strong indicator of likely outcome, with implications for change for sustainability if attitude change becomes a focus. Nevertheless, attitudes are a significant aspect of individual worldviews.
Agency: This term is used in the social sector to describe the capacity of individuals and groups to take action in their own interest. Inherent to this aspect is self-belief, or self-efficacy, where an individual not only has skills and capabilities, they have an internal belief that they can effectively apply their skills to the issues at hand. Self-efficacy can also work the other way around: it can activate individuals to develop skills and capabilities that they perceive they need to engage with those same issues. By extension, in transformations, agency and self-efficacy are key dimensions of a change-oriented worldview. Practitioners should be looking for patterns of agency and self-efficacy in the practice context, and support them.
Loyalties: An individual’s personal and professional loyalties are significant contributors to their worldview, and it may be useful to consider them in the process system mapping for the transformation. Loyalties can be towards ideas, values, people and organizations (especially organization purpose, vision and values). They can also be loyal towards departments and teams as well as towards processes, procedures, rules and regulations. Individuals can also express the primacy of their external loyalties (family, religion, global issues) over their loyalties within their organization. Loyalties can represent zones of system equilibrium, and if deeply embedded, can be difficult to shift. Yet any loyalties that align with the trajectory of transformation can provide islands of stability in an organization’s system. An important aspect of understanding loyalty is that if practitioners ask participants to identify their loyalties, they should be publicly acknowledged with respect.
Fears: People are loss averse and tend to magnify their potential level of risk of “losing” in an uncertain situation and downplay potential “gains”. This is the dynamic at play when people talk about resistance to change. They are often a major influence on an individual’s worldview. Furthermore, fears can live deep in the unconscious, and people may be resisting change without a logical reason and self-awareness. Whether a conscious or unconscious fear, at some stage in the transformation, these should surfaced in a pro-active and empathetic way. Otherewise, fears may surface in reactive and damaging ways. Once surfaced, fears must be acknowledged, and accommodated in the flow of change. If people in a change context have many fears, the pace of change needs to sync with those fears and address them sensitively so that the process can move on.
Salience: This is a worldview factor that can be harder to identify in the practice context. Salience describes the degree to which the proposed change connects with an individual - that is, the individual can make sense of the proposal and find ways to accommodate it in their worldview. If an aspect of a change is not salient to the people participating in change, the flow of change is affected. Salience may manifest itself in a way that appears to be an opposition to the change, but this would be a category error. Apparent resistance may just be a salience issue - focussed engagement is needed to find ways to make the change more salient to struggling participants. On the other hand, if there is a high degree of salience for people, change processes can flow better, and move faster. The challenge for practitioners is to know the difference between salience and fear when identifying resistance.
Habituation: Sometimes participant worldview effects on transformation - such as lack of flow - may seem to be dominated by loyalties, fears and salience issues. However, the reason for a lack of flow may be more due to habituation of organizational process. Participants may not have any particular like or dislike of organizational processes, but rather, have internalized them as deeply embedded habits. In other words, they are just used to the status quo. Behavioural experts often say that the best way to remove a habit is to create a new one to replace it; but a complexity view would see it differently: the habituated process acts as an attractor in a system, so a behaviourist approach may not shift the system. The main challenge for practitioners is to identify where habituation occurs in participant worldviews, and allow the multi-layered systems approach to facilitate space for new emergences and self-organizations around changed processes to create habituation-disrupting attractors.
Atlas Navigation
Go to the Elemental Patterns within the Worldview Pattern:
Psyche Perception Comprehension Awareness Values Attitudes Agency Loyalties Fears Salience Habituation
Go to the Social Entity Pattern within the Participant Patterns Cluster
Go to the Archetypes Pattern within the Participant Patterns Cluster
Version
Version 1.0 - 2 Jun 2024
Version 1.1 - 23 May 2025
Version 1.2 - 17 July 2025
Gregory Bateson (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology p.47, University of Chicago Press.