To fully grasp what culturally mature awareness and leadership ask of us, it is important to appreciate what ultimate defines it. We can think of Cultural Maturity in terms of today’s increasingly demanding challenges and the greater sophistication needed to … Read More
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
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Cultural Maturity confronts us repeatedly with limits inherent to what any kind of system can be for another. Such limits are themselves not new, but Whole-Person/Whole-System relationship requires a level of conscious … 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 Today we see technologies that are increasingly dynamic, complex, and richly networked. Are such new technologies producing today’s new ways of thinking or does the causality go the other way around. The … 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 The goal of getting beyond partisan pettiness in the political arena would strike many people as impossible to achieve. Most people would find even more surprising the fact that the relationship between … Read More
From Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Before Ray Suarez moved to television’s “The News Hour,” he did a noontime interview/current issues show on National Public Radio. I enjoyed it immensely and tried not to miss it. Ray would choose … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future We also witness important individual instances of leadership able to hold complexity with the needed maturity of perspective. Political leadership thus far has most often stopped short, but there have been striking … Read More
From Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Articulating culturally mature concepts present us with a dilemma that might initially seem like a showstopper. When addressing mature perspective’s more “complexly complex” realities, both images and words present difficulties. In part, the … 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 happen—necessarily … Read More
Sarah Stanwood asks; “This may be an inappropriate question, but I’m interested in who you supported in the presidential election. I know Cultural Maturity doesn’t take sides as far as the political left and political right. But you also make … Read More
From Tom Able: “I’m interested in what the concept of Cultural Maturity and Creative Systems Theory can tell us about what we should expect going forward from changes in the Middle East. Clearly these changes are important. But the results … Read More
People often ask me how I see the relationship between Cultural Maturity and the digital revolution. It is a multifaceted and informative relationship. On one hand, the relationship is close and mutually positive. No sphere of technical advancement is likely … Read More
Excerpted from Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions The most precise language for talking about where Integrative Meta-perspective takes us draws on the concept of systems. Systems thinking emphasizes the need to consider all the pieces; … Read More
Excerpted from Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions The changes that come with Transition in any formative process involves more than just letting go of one stage and moving to another—they bring into question the whole … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future Capacitance is the second of Creative Systems Theory primary Whole System patterning concepts (the first being the Questions of Referent). It refers to a person’s overall capacity to take in, … Read More
Adapted from a draft of the Creative Systems Theory manuscript “Pull out, pull out, you’ve hit an artery” —caption on a Gary Larson cartoon (depicting a mosquito, eyes wide and desperate, approaching the shape of a balloon). Some Creative … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future The new picture we see with culturally mature perspective reflects not just changes in what we think, or even just how we think, but in the very mechanisms of cognition. … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future The specific way polar dynamics evolve invites sophisticated understanding of formative process more generally and also Cultural Maturity’s particular changes. Answering the question of why we think in polar terms … Read More
Identity and relationship in times past have been systemically partial, based on projection and mythologized perception. Cultural Maturity offers the possibility of more systemic complete, Whole Person/Whole System identity and relationship. This change takes its most encompassing form in … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future Identity and relationship in times past have been of a specifically two-halves-makes-a whole sort. By giving parts of ourselves away for safekeeping, we’ve protected ourselves from the full complexity of natures … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future Identity and relationship in times past have been of a specifically two-halves-makes-a whole sort. By giving parts of ourselves away for safekeeping, we’ve protected ourselves from the full complexity of natures … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future The notion of a needed new human maturity—especially when filled out with more theoretical distinctions—is unusual as much for the specifically developmental/evolutionary kind of idea it reflects as for its … Read More
Adapted from Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions: If culturally mature perspective involves being able to more consciously apply our toolmaking, meaning-making—creative—natures, then it must entail using our human intelligence in more consciously creative ways. In … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future The most specific language for talking about our complex natures draws on the concept of systems. Systems thinking emphasizes the need to consider all the pieces; that connections are as … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future How do best talk about how culturally mature perspective alters understanding? Most simply, such perspective lets us more directly address life’s bigness. But we need more precise ways to speak … Read More
Adapted from draft of Creative Systems Theory: “We select the illusion which appeals to our temperament….” —Cyril Connolly Creative Systems Theory describes how human systems pattern creatively not just over time but also in the here and … Read More
Questions of Referent (Aliveness)—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 … Read More
Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future Transitional Absurdity refers to a dynamic that for quite a while I questioned. Only recently have I written about it. I now think in fact it is quite important. It … Read More
Culturally mature perspective—particularly with the inclusion of the concept of Reengagement—makes possible a deeper and more meaning-filled understanding of history. Reengagement invites us to revisit not just certain of history’s facts, but also modern notions of what constitutes history. Oscar … Read More
These two pieces are adapted from Cultural Maturity: A guidebook for the Future The Selling of Pseudo-Significance: When I talk to groups about the double-edged potential consequences of new technologies, I am often asked where I think the greatest future … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory Vivian (a social worker): Tom and I teamed up—which was fascinating. We chose the same basic question, but the backgrounds and political beliefs we brought to it couldn’t be more … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Ruth (a parent): My concern is pretty different from what I’ve heard so far—more personal, about being a parent. But I think much is related. Being a responsible parent today … Read More
Adapted from a manuscript draft of Creative Systems Theory: Gary (CEO of a small manufacturing company). The topic of uncertainty ties directly to my question. I’m interested in leadership—what it takes today. I think quite exceptional leadership will be … Read More
Excerpted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: Essential leadership tasks: Religious leaders need to firmly denounce doctrinal polarizations, help us step beyond outdated moral absolutism, and challenge us to engage the larger questions of purpose and well-being that … Read More
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