Dear friends,

Last Saturday I explained that, with the start of 2023, the team at Integral Life hopes to kick off a third, Integration Stage of the integral movement. Today, I’m very pleased to announce the launch of The Institute of Applied Metatheory, a social action think tank founded on a focused, singular mission: to use Big Picture, “integrative metatheories” to map difficult problems, issues and contexts in order to help us identify promising targets for social action, evolutionary acupuncture points (i.e., “Transformational Fulcrums”) where good metatheory suggests action-learning experiments might unleash new forms of progress.

The Institute will aim to use the most comprehensive maps of reality that are available to translate wicked contexts into transformational experiments, and in doing so, to rationalize consensus for social action.

This mission grows out of our belief that the real complexity of society—and, broadly speaking, that of a global, interpenetrating “metacrisis” in education, meaning making, economics, environment and leadership—has outrun the complexity of the worldviews trying to navigate it. We believe this problem has been made far worse by the fragmentation of sensemaking at the intersection of social media, disciplinary silos, political tribalism, and non-integrative mindsets.

We see these two pillars, of overwhelming real complexity and outmatched sensemaking, as underpinning all other challenges we face in the 21st century. They simply demand much more of us around metapractical social innovation. They demand we transcend our narrower ideological biases, our personal silos and our institutional incentives to work in a more open, cooperative and socially-reflexive way. In a very real sense, IAM is an example of its own medicine in action: a social experiment founded to explore and experiment with a speculative hypothesis of a novel way to convene metatheorists, funders, subject-matter experts, leaders and others to collectively learn toward better transformational praxis.

And we invite you to join us. As a social action think tank, we can’t succeed without galvanizing a diverse community of dedicated and talented people to take action. Here’s how to get involved:

1. Visit the IAM website to learn more about the Institute
2. On the website, view and consider funding the Initiatives we’re rolling out (each will be explained in much greater detail in the coming months)
3. Request an invite to join the Institute as a volunteer contributor, leader, expert or funder
4. If you represent an institution and would like to explore partnering with us on a new or existing Initiative, email us at makeanhistoricimpact at integrallife.com

Thank you for your support.

Loving regards,

Robb