Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory; Jonathan (a minister): I want to talk about religion. CJ: Great. What about it? Jonathan: Its future. Does it have one, one that will benefit us? I look at interminable conflict … Read More
Excerpted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: Essential leadership tasks: Given that part of the function of art has always been to give voice to the newly possible, those in the arts have some particularly fascinating roles to … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory; Beth (an environmental activist): I work protecting salmon. We humans have got to accept that we can’t continue to do all sorts of things that in the past we’ve done … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: David: (A social worker): I chose community as my topic. I don’t have much community in my life these days, and I don’t think many people do. This feels like … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Stanley (a university professor): My question also concerns responsibility. I’m interested in how education would change if we made responsibility for a healthy future more overtly its task. What we … Read More
From Cultural Maturity: A guidebook for the Future: Essential leadership tasks: Educators have front-line responsibility in Cultural Maturity’s changes. They must teach the capacities necessary to life in a culturally mature world. They must also inspire the courage and commitment … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future Two related inviolable limits are inextricably tied to the health care delivery crisis: the fact of economic limits and the need for a new relationship to life’s ultimate limit, the … Read More
These two pieces are adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future. Health Care Limits: The current health care delivery crisis presents a particularly good limits-related example, one that for me as a physician touches especially close to home. … Read More
This dialogue of changing realities in governance is adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Amy (A political science major): Enough with this touchy-feely community stuff. I want to talk politics. CJ: Fire away. Amy: I am … Read More
From Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: Essential leadership tasks: It is the job of political leadership to place before us culturally mature images of possibility, to take tough stands in the face of very real limits, and to … Read More
These two pieces are excerpted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: Values and Economics: While having a business Idea and setting it up with the assistance of a business plan expert is easy, but once we step beyond … Read More
These two pieces are excerpted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future. Values and Science: Once we step beyond Cultural Maturity’s threshold, in an important sense every question becomes a moral/ethical question. More commonly, we’ve divided concerns into those … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future The recognition that culturally mature perspective is systemic invites us to make detailed wheat-from-chaff distinctions. We appropriately ask not just about preferred scenarios and polar traps, but also about whether a … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future The recognition that culturally mature perspective “bridges” common polar assumptions points us toward a simple, yet powerful comparison tool. Ideas that don’t successfully “bridge”—and there are lots of ways this can … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future This grouping is made up of thinkers who frame our future task in terms of “changes in consciousnes” or new scientific and spiritual “paradigms.” It includes both efforts that make a … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future Postindustrial/Information Age interpretations treat invention as the fundamental driver of cultural change and emphasize the transforming effects that inventions of the future will have on every aspect of our lives. In … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Matruity: A Guidebook for the Future: Postmodern/Constructivist notions have been highly influential over recent decades in academic circles. Such views emphasize our time’s loss of familiar cultural truths—and final, “essentialist” truths in general. I’ve described how the … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future Advocates of We’ve Gone Astray conclusions believe almost the opposite—that in some significant way humanity has failed. Often the implication is not just that we have made mistakes in judgment or … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A guidebook for the Future: Advocates of We’ve Arrived conclusions regard the present as a cultural end point, as most people through history have done with regard to their particular present. They assume that current institutions … Read More
Adapted from Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions: To fully appreciate how Cultural Maturity alters truth itself, we need at least a basic sense of the cognitive processes that produce Cultural Maturity’s changes. Creative Systems Theory has … 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: Without cultural guideposts to direct us, we must get at what matters more bare-boned, separate from its cultural trappings. We must also get at what matter more systemically, in a way … 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
Our questions on which it all depends span the human experience—they could not be more different. But what each asks of us, both personally and collectively, is remarkably similar. As we’ve seen, each of our questions, to be at … Read More
Today’s crisis of confidence pertains not just to leaders but to the institutions they lead. Nowhere is this more true than in government—with its tired inefficiencies and endless partisan bickering. What lies ahead? The story of governance, from tribal chieftains, … Read More
The future will require that we as tool makers assume a new kind and depth of responsibility for the tools we create. New technologies have always been two-edged. Learning to make fire, while it let us better warm ourselves … Read More
The future will require a new, more mature relationship with death, and through this ultimately with life. Dramatic changes lie ahead in how we relate to death, changes that will present both fascinating new possibilities and wrenching new moral quandaries. … Read More
Many of the past ways we’ve addressed our human need to belong are disappearing. Increased mobility means fewer people live long in one place. Extended families have largely disappeared. And the diversity and complexity of our globalized world, while rich, … Read More
We face today diminishing confidence in most every kind of leadership—that provided by political and religious leaders, by teachers, by doctors, by leaders in business. We simply don’t respect—either honor or fear—leaders in the same way as in times past. … Read More
Since earliest history, culture, like a good parent, has provided clear rules for what it means to be a woman or to be a man and how each sex should relate to the other. The rules have been different at … Read More
Modern civilization’s definition of progress—new inventions and economic growth—has brought untold wonders—from the printing press, to the steam engine, to today’s computer revolution. But projected into the future unaltered, its “onward and upward” imagery becomes questionable at best. We … Read More
Always in times past, cultural belonging has meant having at one’s disposal a set of generally clear moral rules. Culture has served like a parent—telling us what is right and what is not. Suddenly things are not so clear. Moral … Read More
The genie is out of the bottle. Most nations, if not now, then in the very near future, will have ready access to weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, biological. And increasingly, such deadly capability is becoming available not just 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
With this year’a marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton it washard not to be caught up in the romance. Numerous commentators have expressed gratitude that we finally have something positive in the news. But it also provided a moment … Read More
There are a small handful of political commentator’s whose thinking I particularly respect. One is conservative columnist David Brooks who writes for the New York Times and contributes regularly on PBS’s NewsHour. Over time, I’ve come to more and more … Read More
What caused the 2008-2009 financial collapse? Simple greed and incompetence? The unfortunate “perfect storm” confluence of economic cycles, globalization, and other hard-to-predict factors? Yes, yes, and yes. But something deeper was also at work. Understanding this more fundamental ingredient in … Read More
Watching efforts to forestall disaster at Japans’ Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant brought my attention back to Stewart Brand’s recent book Whole Earth Discipline and his call for a new “Ecopragmatism.” I thought of the book first because of the … Read More
A key theme in Cultural Maturity’s “growing up” is a newfound ability to step beyond ideological easy answers. If we think in terms of dangerous consequences, the most dramatic example concerns our past propensity to divide humanity into “chosen people” … Read More
Robert Wright’s 2009 book The Evolution of God is fascinating for what it contributes to our picture of religion’s history. Even more, it is fascinating for the kind of history it represents and the picture of the future it puts … Read More