noun
a metaphor used in the Systems thinking (ST) community to differentiate between surface-level or superficial details or events and deeper patterns, structures and mental models that underlie these events; In DSRP, the idea is recursive, meaning that we look not only for events, patterns, structures, and mental models in systems, but also in mental models themselves. Information is the superficial level, changes in mental models (I and T) over time are pattern-level, structures are DSRP and its elemental structure, and the mental models are the "meta"-level awareness of one's thinking (i.e., metacognition).
