Western-Centric Thinking is a mode of reasoning that treats Western capitalist democracy as the universal benchmark or endpoint of development.

Directed Improvisation with AI extends Ang’s model of Directed Improvisation to human–AI co-creation by redefining human agency—from humans producing answers on their own to directing how humans and AI produce them together. 

Autocracy with Democratic Characteristics explains why China achieved growth without becoming a Western-style democracy: it substituted political reforms with bureaucratic reforms that injected “democratic characteristics” into an autocracy.

Adaptive Policy Communication is a theory that explains how leaders steer policy implementation by mixing clear and ambiguous directions to selectively enforce discipline and grant flexibility.

Access money refers to high-stakes exchanges in which business actors offer substantial rewards to political elites in order to obtain exclusive, lucrative privileges, and not merely to bypass red tape (in contrast to speed money). 

Variation, Selection & Niche Creation are three adaptive mechanisms that govern how solutions are generated, how success is defined and rewarded, and how heterogeneity across units can be turned into a system advantage.  

Meta-Institutions are higher-order structures and strategies that enable adaptation, learning, and the discovery of solutions under uncertainty.

Enabling Adaptation is a research and policy agenda focused on creating the conditions that make effective adaptation possible, framing it as a series of design problems.

Complex vs. Complicated is an ontological distinction between systems made up of interconnected elements that adapt to one another (complex—like trees), and mechanical objects composed of separate parts whose operations are linear and controllable (complicated—like toasters). 

Ang identifies two key gaps in Douglass North’s concept of Adaptive Efficiency, including his focus on control.

Adaptation refers to a particular type of change in which agents fit themselves to changing environments through mechanisms such as variation and selection, whereas other forms of change—such as shocks or aging—do not involve adaptation.