Table 2 Glossary of terms

Adaptation

The capacity to adjust to internal and external circumstances; usually thought of in terms of modifying behaviors over time

Agents

The individual components of a complex system – typically, individuals, whose capacity for sense-making means they can learn and adapt their behaviors across time, or artefacts

Complex Adaptive System

A dynamic, self-similar collectivity of interacting, adaptive agents and their artefacts

Complexity

The behavior embedded in highly composite systems or models of systems with large numbers of interacting components (e.g., agents, artefacts and groups); their ongoing, repeated interactions create local rules and rich, collective behaviors

Culture

The sum of the shared values, attitudes, and beliefs across part of or the whole of an organization (e.g., across the division of medicine, or an entire hospital or health service)

Emergence

Behaviors that are built from smaller or simpler entities, the characteristics or properties of which arise through the interactions of those smaller or simpler entities; the larger entities are one level up in scale, and manifest as social structures, patterns, or properties

Feedback loop

A recursive mechanism creating reciprocal behaviors that reverberate back in on themselves; a positive (self-reinforcing) feedback loop increases the rate of change of a factor, creating more of its own output; in a negative (self-correcting) feedback loop, the output responses dampen the change or modulate its direction

Implementation science

The processes of translating research into practice, understanding what influences translational outcomes, and evaluating the adoption of interventions

Network

An interlocking web of relationships or connections at varying levels of scale in a system; the agents or artefacts are the nodes and the relationships between them are lines or vectors, which together describe the structure of the interactions of the network’s membership

Path dependence

Current events and circumstances are influenced, and can be determined, by prior events and circumstances, harking back to the origins of the entity or system; path dependence underpins the point that ‘history matters’

Perturbation

An internal or external disruption or unexpected event that affects normal patterned behaviors, structures or processes; often thought of as an external disturbance or interruption to the current state-of-affairs

Self-organization

The way in which agents interact to coordinate their own circumstances, workplaces, processes and procedures, such that they order their work and they autonomously, or semi-autonomously, organize their localized behavior; this can occur passively or actively

Sensemaking

Methods by which individuals figure out what is going on around them; a typically social process among agents in which they come to a shared meaning of their experience, and is necessary for action in the face of ambiguity or uncertainty

Social network

A set of people who have relationships, communications, ties, or interactions that connect them

System dynamics

An analytical modelling methodology used for problem solving, which combines qualitative and quantitative data and identifies the fundamental elements of a system, and how they influence one another over time

Tipping point

A critical point in a system in which a kind of radical, potentially irreversible, change may occur, resulting in a different state of system behavior, which can settle into a new equilibrium