research for action

These concepts are not yet formal patterns in Pattern Sphere, but reflect resonant ideas that share the ethos of this toolkit:

• Invite the Unsaid: creating space for what is felt but not yet articulated in organisational life
• Fiction as Ethical Mirror: using imagined or altered narratives to reflect and reframe ethical dilemmas
• Holding the Tension: remaining with discomfort or ambiguity rather than resolving it too quickly
• Emergent Practice over Prescription: privileging context-sensitive, evolving approaches over standardised models
• Story as Provocation: employing narrative to challenge, disrupt, and invite reimagining of entrenched beliefs

Organisations frequently seek tools to improve culture, inclusion, and leadership, but traditional approaches are often overly prescriptive or disconnected from the emotional, ethical, and lived complexities of practice. This can flatten different voices, ignore discomfort, and obscure subtle dynamics of power, bias, and change.

Relevant to leadership teams, educators, and practitioners in the health, disability, education, and community development sectors. Particularly useful in situations where teams face recurring challenges related to equity, cultural differences, neurodiversity, vulnerable spaces, gendered expectations, taboo subjects, ethical quandaries, and organisational transformation.

The Fictomorphs were developed through a diffractive, narrative inquiry process during a Doctor of Professional Practice thesis. Rather than testing predetermined interventions, the author’s experiences were retold as stories from their practice in health and disability support, and community settings. These accounts revealed recurring tensions, ethical provocations, and transformative moments, which were then transformed into reflective concepts. These became the Fictomorphs: emergent insights made visible through a post-qualitative method Fictomorphosis that was sensitive to nuance, discomfort, and generative ambiguity, rather than experimental validation results.

The method that enabled this emergence was Fictomorphosis, a creative, ethical storytelling process created specifically for this study. Fictomorphosis was developed to safely navigate complex and emotionally charged leadership and organisational narratives without reducing them to fixed categories or predetermined outcomes. It uses fictionalisation, diffractive analysis, crystallisation and narrative retelling to reveal hidden or marginalised dynamics in professional practice. By transforming real-life experiences into evocative story fragments, the method enables practitioners to engage with uncomfortable or ethically sensitive material from a distance, allowing for new insights, empathy, and transformation.

Each Fictomorph centres on a conspicuous theme, such as:

• Breaking Traditional Norms: rethinking inherited assumptions and dominant expectations
• Emotional Intelligence and Leadership: understanding and navigating affective dynamics
• Inclusivity of Neurodiverse Individuals: recognising non-normative contributions and needs
• Unlearning and Relearning: loosening entrenched beliefs and opening new conceptual space
• Empowerment and Active Participation: valuing voice, contribution, and shared ownership

These patterns can be deployed in leadership workshops, reflection sessions, and practice-based research settings. They invite dialogue rather than closure, multiplicity over singular truths, and collective inquiry over hierarchical instruction.

Use Fictomorphs as:

• Reflective prompts during leadership or management retreats
• Catalysts in professional development or coaching conversations
• Story-generators or reframing tools for teams facing ethical tensions, resistance, or stagnation
• Anchors in supervision, governance discussions, or inclusive strategic planning

Each Fictomorph can be used independently or in combination. They can also be extended through storytelling, group dialogue, or creative writing as part of a broader Fictomorphosis process.

Linking social and environmental factors should be inherent in the work of the LIMITS community—and to virtually any other project concerned about social justice and/or environmentalism. This pattern should be useful, both implicitly or explicitly, whenever analyzing or designing for environmental or social amelioration.

Social and environmental issues are inextricably intertwined. Neither can be addressed without addressing the other. This pattern focuses on how those linkages manifest and what can be done to address both effectively and simultaneously.

A Citizens’ Assembly brings together people from all walks of life into one space, in person or online, to learn about, discuss, and deliberate on a topic, and then provide recommendations to their government and their fellow citizens.

Without coercion or wage labor how can people work together to help build a better world?

Gardeners can come from any background, and as such have a wide variety of access to existing technology. Access to technology refers to whether an audience has a particular gadget or service, and their ability or willingness to use it as part of gardening practice.

This problem applies to individuals and communities, whenever the intent is to design interactive technology. The context varies depending on the available resources of a community, and the target demographic of design.

When designing for a known person or group, infrastructure and access to technology may be prescribed. Typically the context must be understood in order to know what is suitable. For example Australia has a high level of smartphone market penetration, and if targeting residential gardens, there are a likelihood of highcspeed Internet access. This would allow for the use of rich media and high levels of interconnectivity.

Communities on the other hand, such as Northey Street City Farm or Permablitz Brisbane, are limited in time and money to invest in additional technology or infrastructure. In these instances it is important to understand what technology community members already use or what infrastructure is already in place, and how is it currently used. With this understanding, the ability to repurpose, or make use of technology as part of a design, will become clear. Understanding the role technology plays in the lives of gardeners, and when they have access to technology, will result in a more inclusive design (Heitlinger et al., 2013).

Designers need to consider: the existing infrastructure; time and money to invest in new technology; and attitudes of gardeners to different technologies, and incorporate these preferences accordingly.

Role Playing Games (RPGS) such a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) combine storytelling with a set of rules that determine the abilities of the players and govern the interactions between the players and their environment. Essentially, RPGs allow the players to simulate imaginary scenarios and act them out. There are many elements of RPGs that are similar to elements of Civic Intelligence (CI). The development of a CI-RPG could allow roleplaying game methods to be applied for practical social justice problem solving and team building.

At the start of a game, the players in an RPG gather together to form a team which is usually called a “party.” Then they are often presented with a mission, a quest which the party will attempt to complete. Before each game, each player develops the character they will play, and determines the Skills and Attributes they will have. This is similar to the Capabilities found in Civic Intelligence.

In D&D there are six Attributes every player’s character has: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. For each character each of these Attributes will have a number value assigned to it (randomly), which measures how much of that particular Attribute the character has. Characters also have Skills, such as Concentration or Diplomacy, which correspond to certain Attributes. For example, a character with high Dexterity who has the Use Rope Skill will be very good at that Skill. The higher the corresponding Attribute the better a character will be at a particular skill.

Different characters will have different Skills and Attributes and a party must work together and combine their capabilities to be successful. A Civic Intelligence Roleplaying Game could allow a group of civic-minded people to explore ways to improve their individual operations and cooperative interactions by simulating problems and imagining potential solutions. Where traditional RPGs often serve as escapism, a CI-RPG would seek to replicate the real world and experiment in ways that might be too difficult or dangerous to perform in real life without rehearsal.

Heraclitus of Ephesus wrote that of all the things in the world, "change is the only constant." As time goes on, circumstances beyond controlling will occur and and communities will be required to adapt to new conditions, but the nature of some types of change and/or how rapidly the transition occurs isn't always our favor. There also usually exists a correlation between the speed with which change occurs and the amount of supporting systems disrupted by this change, most often to their detriment. Many factors and situations are beyond our individual control while the end-state of change is uncertain at best, so when we recognize the process of change beginning to occur we do what we can to influence the factors we actually can control. If it is decided that action is needed to mitigate change then the nature of that action must be determined first; as Kwama Nkrumah wrote "action without thought is empty, [and] thought without action is blind.” Great care must be taken to avoid unnecessary disruption, and a balance must be found between planning and execution, ensuring that appropriate steps are taken while ensuring they are taken before control of a given situation is lost.

Changing times will require communities to change with them, but top-tier objectives, e.g. ensuring basic survival, rarely change, if ever, and what constitutes top-tier objective(s) must be identified by the community in question. That said, communities must remain flexible in their goals and be willing to adjust for new information and situations, e.g. recognizing when a lower tier objective is no longer feasible or when one method can achieve an objective better than another. Additionally, communities may often identify critical points of failure or obvious challenges within their own system(s) and develop contingencies accordingly. Intentional avoidance of "load-bearing" positions, e.g. having one person without whom the system cannot function, goes a long way towards ensuring stability, as do maintaining standardized communications, including documentation, language and data formatting, to ensure that the correct information can be found by those seeking it. Perhaps most importantly, communities must adopt the mindset of survival, of finding a balance between flexibility to go with some change and the rigidity to resist other, the willingness to "make it happen" in spite of external influence.Solution: Changing times will require communities to change with them, but top-tier objectives, e.g. ensuring basic survival, rarely change, if ever, and what constitutes top-tier objective(s) must be identified by the community in question. That said, communities must remain flexible in their goals and be willing to adjust for new information and situations, e.g. recognizing when a lower tier objective is no longer feasible or when one method can achieve an objective better than another. Additionally, communities may often identify critical points of failure or obvious challenges within their own system(s) and develop contingencies accordingly. Intentional avoidance of "load-bearing" positions, e.g. having one person without whom the system cannot function, goes a long way towards ensuring stability, as do maintaining standardized communications, including documentation, language and data formatting, to ensure that the correct information can be found by those seeking it. Perhaps most importantly, communities must adopt the mindset of survival, of finding a balance between flexibility to go with some change and the rigidity to resist other, the willingness to "make it happen" in spite of external influence.

We place civic ignorance at the top of our anti-patterns collection because civic ignorance is at the core of everything that human beings do to each other that is harmful.

Civic ignorance takes different forms; it is their sum total and the perfidious interaction among the various forms that creates the Agnosphere, the ubiquitous shroud that fights civic intelligence on all fronts.

It is often quite “natural” and occurs in all of us to some degree. It is most menacing in its professional varieties, when well-resourced and self-serving elites intentionally cultivate ignorance. Historically, in the United States, the tobacco companies were the most treacherous and whose campaigns can be credited with thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths. Currently the climate change denial campaign is the most prominent and much of the intentionally spread misinformation can be traced back to a handful of dedicated billionaires.

How it Works

Civic ignorance is assured in many ways — in general, that's what we're trying to show with our project. Fixating on certain hard-and-fast "truisms" is important. Blaming the other person is important. On an individual level, not even listening to a argument that runs counter to your own is effective since that avoids any real consideration of the issue. From an institutional level, access to information and communication should be controlled by elites. The items on the public agenda should be restricted — but it should not seem like this is the case. Finally, critics of the system should be marginalized or ignored.

Evidence

Links

All of the anti-patterns are related to this!

References

Agnotology book

Civic ignorance describes how well a group or person ignores the civic ideas, problems, or solutions of those surrounding them. The need to solve problems intelligently and taking account of all solutions is cast away in favor of the quick, the easy, and the brutal. Maybe the problem will just go away? Critics of this should be marginalized, ignored or otherwise disabled or destroyed.