Common themes run through Cultural Maturity’s changes wherever we find them, from the most personal to the most encompassing of concerns. While the specifics of today’s new challenges could often not be more different, fundamental similarities exist in what contemporary questions ask of us. Appreciating these similarities provides guidance for confronting the tasks ahead and also supports the conclusion that change of an encompassing sort its afoot. The End of Civilization and Hope and the Future are each in different ways organized around such common change themes.
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Limits and uncertainty link most directly in the critically importance of confronting limits to what we as humans can predict and control. Cultural Maturity alerts us to how the circumstances around an … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future In the end, we confront fundamental limits to knowing itself, at least to knowing absolutely. Modern psychology and psychiatry teach us about the impossibility (and undesirability, even if it were possible) of … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future The pertinent Question of Referent is where we must start when addressing any question from a culturally mature perspective. Without cultural guideposts to direct us, we must get at what matters more … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future We confront one particularly encompassing limit—to our modern notion of going forward. We can think of other more circumscribed limits as subsets of it. We can come at making sense of it … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Understanding of a more complex sort is not just needed, it is possible. Indeed we already see numerous complexity-related changes. Today’s endlessly multifaceted realities often overwhelm us. But our ability to engage … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Our analogy between Cultural Maturity and maturity when reached in individual development helps clarify what inviolable limits ask of us. It also makes the potential rewards for engaging them more understandable. In … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Grappling with final limits of any sort engages us in a predictable sequence of experiences. That it does provides important guidance and also supports this possibility of ultimately positive consequences. First, we … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Some of the limits we face are just that—concrete inescapabilities. This is the case with physical limits, limits to what one person can be for another, and limits to what we can … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future While Cultural Maturity paints an ultimately affirming picture, for it to help us, we need always keep hopeful conclusions in perspective. Certainly we must not interpret what we see in ways that … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future The language of complexity provides a particularly helpful frame for understanding the gift that confronting inviolable limits ultimately gives us. Confronting limits successfully makes complexity newly visible, and specifically the more “living,” … Read More
From Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future The array of inviolable limits we confront today is sufficiently wide-ranging that a person could legitimately question considering them in one place. Certainly they pertain to very different parts of our lives. They … Read More
From Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Given the great number of easily overwhelming complexities we face and the difficulties making sense of them can present, we could easily seem at an impasse—and one of potential “end of civilization” proportions. … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Cultural Maturity’s implied developmental metaphor helps make more understandable both how what we see with regard to complexity might be possible, and why we are seeing it. The concept of Cultural Maturity … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future No leadership task is more critical for the twenty-first century—and more pertinent to every part of our lives—than learning to bring greater complexity, perspective, and nuance to how we make decisions. Doing … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future A key to understanding the seductions and risks of easy answers concerns what we might call the mythologizing of experience. Mythologizing may be for some an unfamiliar notion, but it is not … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future. Cultural Maturity’s cognitive reordering not only alters how we think and the answers our thinking produces, they alter our understanding of truth itself. This observation provides essential insights for “mapping” … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: Mature perspective’s picture of the future takes us unswervingly forward, but at the same time it implies something new with regard to the past. Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes do more than … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: Below I’ve divided new limits into five broad categories—physical/ environmental limits; economic limits; limits related to leadership and governance; social/psychological limits; and limits inherent to our modern definition of progress. These … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: We like to imagine that life is limitless. This is particularly true today. Television ads and popular culture announce that ours is a time “without limits.” Indeed, more is possible today … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Our world is becoming an ever more complicated place. Globalization makes locales we’ve barely heard of—Azerbaijan, East Timor, Benghazi —suddenly front-page news. Environmental crises remind us of how much we have … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Like it or not, our world refuses to stand still. Between today’s ever accelerating rate of technological innovation, the increasingly transforming presence of globalization, and needed shifts in how we … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Much in how culturally mature responsibility is new has less to do with particular choices—even wise ones—than how we go about making choices, with responsibility as a process. Cultural Maturity reframes … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Cultural Maturity involves a depth of responsibility not before needed and that before now would not have been ours to entertain. Certainly Cultural Maturity is about greater responsibility in our personal … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Effective future leadership—from the most intimate and personal to the most encompassing—hinges on our ability to better understand, tolerate, and manage uncertainty. Our world is becoming not just less certain, but … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: Cultural Maturity challenges us to leave behind easy answer solutions, particularly those of an ideological sort, and think and act in more nuanced ways. Ideology in times past has served to … Read More
The emotional vitriol we’ve witnessed in recent years in the health care delivery debate has startled both politicians and the press. In fact it was totally predicted. Effective and affordable health care in times ahead will require a whole new … Read More