Dear friends,

I’m thrilled to introduce you to The Strategic Metacrisis Mapping Initiative, the Institute of Applied Metatheory’s newest Applied Metatheory Initiative, led by Nick Hedlund, Ph.D., aiming to “build a big picture of the world’s biggest problem.”

There is an emerging consensus of a profound, global “metacrisis” characterized by entangled, interpenetrating, and co-arising 1. ecosocial (ecological, political-economic, technological), 2. spiritual (meaning-making), 3. ethical, and 4. epistemic (sensemaking) crises, and their interconnected root causes. The Strategic Metacrisis Mapping Initiative will convene novel intellectual and social resources necessary to map and more fully understand the reality of the global metacrisis and its implications for meaning-making. Leveraging a metatheoretically-integrative Visionary Realism—a comprehensive, Complex Integral Realist Big Picture philosophy—the project will use a retroductive method to generate a map of the ecology of causal mechanisms, reality distortions, and symptoms of the global metacrisis’s four primary domains assessed across five major worldviews (i.e., stages of human sensemaking and meaning-making). The project will develop a web-based interactive topology (i.e., big picture) of the metacrisis, convene an innovation lab-style symposia for expert coordination and validation, and one or more papers.

In our view, the metacrisis is best understood not as a coincidental collection of single crises but as a totality that calls out to be seen, evaluated and understood as an emergent holism and one challenging us to improve humanity’s capacity for understanding and meeting higher-order complexity on its own terms. Therefore, this project aims to use a sophisticated, integrative, and comprehensive philosophy to show what is possible when we leverage Big Pictures to support new forms of sensemaking and meta-strategizing about complex, wicked problems.

We aim to show that Big Pictures are emancipatory precisely because they non-reductively ground complex phenomena in the sense that they are tractable and to some degree rationally accessible. If ever there was a critically decisive, numinous, and opportune moment in human history—a kairos, as the ancient Greeks would have it—this is it. The stakes for our future on this planet could not be higher. The process of building a “big picture of the world’s biggest problem” is not only the foundation of a 21st-century orienting praxis for scholars, policymakers, philanthropists, social impact leaders, and others; it is also a living engagement into an emerging, fuller integrative worldview that is capable of re-enchanting questions of ultimate concern with a profound, post-rational sense of faith.

We hope you join us in our excitement to support and foster this critical initiative.

Warmly,
Robb

About Nick Hedlund
Nick Hedlund, Ph.D., is leader of the Strategic Metacrisis Mapping Initiative at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, and founding director of the Eudaimonia Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy & Social Science from University College London and was an exchange scholar at Yale University. Nick’s work explores the intersection of metatheory and the cultural and psychological dimensions of global transformation. As a Ph.D. researcher, Nick studied under Arthur Petersen and Roy Bhaskar to develop a new metatheoretical framework for emancipatory social research known as visionary realism, applying it to address the metacrisis. He served as executive director of the Integral Research Center at the MetaIntegral Foundation and has served as adjunct professor at John F. Kennedy University, associate director of the Integral Ecology Center, associate organizer of the biennial Integral Theory Conference, and organizer of four International Critical Realism & Integral Theory Symposia. His articles have appeared in journals such as the Environment and Public Policy and the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. He edited a book with Roy Bhaskar, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, and Mervyn Hartwig entitled Metatheory for the 21st-Century: Critical Realism and Integral Theory in Dialogue (Routledge, 2016). Its companion volumes, Big-Picture Perspectives on Planetary Flourishing: Metatheory for the Anthropocene, Volume I was published in 2022, and Integrative Responses to the Global Metacrisis: Metatheory for the Anthropocene, Volume II (Routledge) is due out in 2025. Nick holds a Bachelor’s degree (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in Culture, Ecology, and Consciousness from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a Master’s in Integral Psychology from John F. Kennedy University, and a (second) Master’s in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Through the course of his studies, he has received several academic awards and honors including the Jacob Van Ek Scholar Award, the Honors Graduating Senior Scholarship Award for his undergraduate thesis, and the Yale UCL Collaborative Bursary. Currently, he teaches integral philosophy and consciousness studies in the Integral Noetic Sciences Program at the California Institute for Human Science.

Dear friends,

I am excited and humbled to introduce you to SALT for Climate, The Institute of Applied Metatheory’s newest IAM Foundation Incubation Grant recipient, led by Dr. Gail Hochachka, PhD and Lisa Genki Gibson.

The Sensemaking, Action, and Leadership Training (SALT) for Climate initiative addresses a critical blindspot in today’s climate action efforts, which have not put more conscious sensemaking as the core and highest-leverage foundation upon which all climate action must be built.

By drawing on cutting-edge climate research, nuanced facilitation in human interiors, and Big Picture metatheories, SALT for Climate seeks to help climate actors heal the psychosocial blindspots in prevailing technical, scientific and philosophical paradigms. The team at SALT for Climate aims to bridge the disconnect between climate policies and public perception, which often leads to stalled initiatives and societal polarization. By developing and delivering specialized sensemaking and leadership training and coaching that can be scaled globally, the climate sensemaking initiative enhances the emotional, social, and consciousness capacities of climate leaders. This scalable approach is a long lever that can unleash liberating praxis and leadership skill at every level of the climate action spiral, not only complementing the scientific and technical aspects of climate action but also fostering deeper public engagement and support.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Gail Hochachka, PhD and Lisa Genki Gibson to the Institute of Applied Metatheory (fuller biographies below).

If you believe humanity needs to apply integrative Big Pictures to our most pressing social-evolutionary leverage points, and are passionate about supporting concrete initiatives like SALT for Climate, please consider supporting the IAM Foundation.

We will share more exciting developments from the IAM network soon, but thank you to all of you who have reached out to join IAM or support our work.

Loving regards,
Robb Smith

Gail Hochachka
Dr. Gail Hochachka, PhD, is a researcher, thought-catalyzer, facilitator, and coach. She has pursued a unique area of research on the human dimensions of climate change: on the diverse ways people make meaning about climate change, on how to find shared meaning in diverse settings, and on how to accelerate climate action in a transformative manner. She does speaking events and convenes novel conversations amongst experts, inviting collaborative wayfinding on the climate challenge. Gail also teaches graduate courses at UBC, such as on Climate Communications and Engagement, and she is an associate-level Integral Coach. With SALT for Climate, she seeks to move research into practice, at the very leverage points where greater climate action can happen.

Lisa Gibson
Lisa Genki Gibson is a systems change consultant, educator, facilitator, and coach, with a background in social justice, gender and development, and community engagement across multiple, complex issues. She specializes in working with individuals, organizations and multistakeholder spaces to embed systemic change, transform belief systems, and construct alliances across diversity towards clarified action. As a Zen teacher in the Soto Zen lineage, Lisa also brings invaluable dexterity and nuance in working with human interiority to the project team.

Dear friends,

I am absolutely thrilled to begin to introduce you to our newest members of the IAM Network, which we’ll be doing over the coming weeks as we announce the awardees of the first IAM Foundation Incubation Grants. Many of these people are well-known experts and luminaries in the integrative metatheory field, and we have been grateful and extremely enthused to select these projects from the more than 50 proposals we received from around the world.

Over the coming months, you will see an acceleration of the activity and knowledge flow through the Institute after the relative quiet of foundation-building we’ve been doing, and I’m excited to be able to announce more of our Applied Metatheory Initiatives (AMIs) in the coming weeks and months. Needless to say, each AMI we’ve chosen meets the criteria we set out when we began, holding the potential to make an extremely transformational impact to a critical dimension of the modern lifeworld—with the possibility to grow from a small, incubated idea into a toolkit into a program and perhaps even into a full-blown institution—while also being led by exceptional, mature and embodied leaders in their respective domains.

With that, please join me in welcoming Brendan Graham Dempsey to IAM. Brendan will be leading the Cultural Complexity Index project, a vision that, like Brendan, I’d been dreaming about for years and was eager to help support:

The Cultural Complexity Index (CCI) targets the significant yet under-researched issue of human cultural complexification by offering quantifiable data to support theories and visibility of cultural evolution and civilizational analysis. This project addresses the need for sophisticated, integrative metatheoretical models to tackle today’s complex global challenges, aiming to move cultural complexification theories from speculative sociology to a robust social science. Utilizing the Computerized Lectical Assessment System (CLAS) to analyze hierarchical complexity in historical and contemporary texts, the CCI will produce reliable data to inform academic discourse, promote integrative thinking, and challenge the prevailing academic paradigms rooted in cultural relativism. The failure to consider the non-arbitrary relationships among cultural systems and their potential for coordinated integration has led to confusion around values and meaning in pluralistic societies. This well-intentioned relativism fuels nihilism, radical post-truth ideologies, social decoherence, and political tribalism. To address these issues and advance complex, integrative perspectives essential for tackling today’s complex problems, it is crucial to shift knowledge-generating paradigms toward a quantifiable understanding of cultural complexification. By generating multiple academic papers and a comprehensive book, the project aims to catalyze a paradigm shift in how cultural evolution is understood and valued, providing essential insights for addressing the complex problems of our time.

About Brendan:
Brendan is a writer, poet, farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. He holds a BA in religious studies from the University of Vermont and a master’s in religion and art from Yale University. He is the author of the 7-volume Metamodern Spirituality Series and, most recently, Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.

Please join me in welcoming Brendan to the IAM Network. Expect to hear more about the progress of this initiative in the coming months.

If you are inspired by initiatives like the Cultural Complexity Index and want to support IAM’s mission, please consider making a donation to the IAM Foundation. Your financial support directly fuels these groundbreaking projects. To contribute, email us at iam@appliedmetatheory.org.

We look forward to sharing more exciting developments as we work together to advance integrative metatheory and address the complex challenges of our time.

Thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm.

Best regards,
Robb Smith

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – R. Buckminster Fuller

Dear friends,

I’m excited to give you an update on The Institute of Applied Metatheory, where we ended an incredible Q1 of foundation building and catapulted straight into Q2 with an intense focus inside the organization on the understanding and integration of AI into our operating model. Truly it’s been an extraordinary time, and I’m really proud of how the team, now approaching 40 people, has embodied our mission to operate as a Teal organization—with agility, real-time sensemaking, emotional transparency, network intelligence, and distributed innovation—amidst the ontological shock and genuine uncertainty of the emergence of The Transformation Age.    

We spent the past several months in a constant, iterative and transparent process of validation of our core mission hypotheses. They have all validated, so far, with significant progress and accomplishments across every dimension of our operating model:

• We continued to validate and receive an inflow of support for our core mission to build IAM as an Integrative Cooperative Impact Network, an “Integral Mondragon” composed of hundreds of scholars, experts, contributors, innovators, donors, and investors, all of whom collectively co-own the network, its technology platform, its assets, and its outreach and coordination capacity
• We passed the mark of 250 experts who have applied to join the network, and have recently welcomed new co-ownership partners into the network, each of whom will be leading major Applied Metatheory Initiatives (AMIs)
• We built IAM’s architecture of dozens of novel Big Picture lenses and their associated philosophical and methodological metadata
• We released the Alpha version of our Integrative Epistemology platform Context, which we’re designing in an attempt to create a network- and movement-wide, Teal-level platform for the application of Big Picture metatheories for any initiative, organization or government, in any context, at any scale
• The innovation team has built eight different integrative metatheory AI applications in the past 5 months, each of which explore (and often demonstrate) the extraordinary promise of Teal-level AI for transformative education, perspective-taking, and applied metatheory
• We welcomed our first major Big Picture mapping pilot for designing a new transformational theory of change model in the social sector, which is being funded through a major gift to the new IAM Foundation
• Our team of metatheory team scholars continues to grow, with ten new world-class scholars representing critical realism, complex thought, integral metatheory and more
• We’ve begun concepting on major new initiatives with network partners to educate integrative metatheories in foreign languages and to investigate use of a network-native cryptocurrency
• We ran a fast-fail beta test cycle on three of our AMIs (IPTI, ESoM, and SSI), demonstrating the power of cross-functional learning while also refining what will be required of our Transformational Innovation Process, where we translate transformational fulcra into precise, in-context strategic innovations

As we look to the second half of the year, we will continue to stay head-down on the challenging agile-learning cycles on Context, and continue to learn how to apply Big Pictures to any context.  We’ll also begin planning our Teal Consulting Network and recruiting for its leaders (be in touch with us here) and welcome new co-ownership partners into the network (also here). Most importantly, we’ll continue to explore how to release the innate intelligence and energy of the integral movements via a network-based, strategic intercooperation model, in which any major organization or leader in the space can become an active contributing partner within it.

The Transformation Age is here. It is an incredible time to be alive, but if we are going to meet the opportunity and calling of the moment, we need to be organized to do so. 

I truly look forward to your ongoing participation and support.

On behalf of the entire team,
All our love,

Robb Smith
Founder, Executive Team Leader

“As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes”— Astronaut Chris Hadfield

Dear friends,

I’m writing to give you an update on the “first nine minutes” of the launch of the Institute of Applied Metatheory since our founding last month. The launch metaphor is apt, complete with metaphorically sitting atop billions of gallons of rocket fuel, massive acceleration, bone-rattling shaking, and the thrill of a lifetime as we launch dead vertical. It’s been a wild ride.

You responded to our invitation to get involved, with hundreds of people applying to join us to pursue our mission to Liberate transformational potential by applying Big Pictures to Big Problems. We’ve been humbled and deeply-gratified by the response, allowing me to say with great confidence that one of the four meta-hypotheses that I outlined at our founding is being validated: we do indeed have the talent and desire to coordinate action for focused social impact.

I also believe the team has done a good job of balancing the present, still, being qualities of a mature Teal (and Turquoise) team with the passionate, fervent, purpose demands of an urgent global mission. And yet the scope of the mission is ever-present, both humbling and daunting, as we attempt to do multiple hard things all at once:

• Build a true Teal organization, a global, agile learning organization that runs a 24/7 global work cycle with distributed teams currently operating on four continents, run by a diverse group of mature, top-of-craft functional experts
• Design and build an incubation architecture for focused social impact initiatives to address any context, in any problem domain, at any level of scale, and one that helps them iterate toward high-precision, in-context transformational innovations that might effect real change
• Provide alpha-iteration for the commercial initiative to design and develop the world’s first Integrative Epistemology platform for metatheoretical context analysis
• Conceptualize, germinate, recruit and develop a half-dozen multi-year initiatives (with another six in the pipeline), each with their own teams, impact strategies, transformational theses, innovation requirements, and funding models

There are thirty members of the team today, and I expect we’ll continue to grow to meet the demands of the mission. What holds it all together is integral consciousness, a shared worldview, values and sensemaking that allow us to coordinate action quickly, abundantly and with a wide latitude for constant, iterative action-learning (across a wide array of requirements, from integral design thinking to agile task coordination, from Teal organizational-matrix design to our own transformational innovation process, from metatheory to metapraxis design, and so on…).

And we’ve done it all, so far, without a dollar of donor funding. I’ve set out to prove that, done properly, donor gifts can achieve a 100x impact through integral impact design. So I will soon announce the IAM Legacy Circle, a private group designed for those who want to be on the inside of the Institute, who are mission and values-aligned, and who want their expertise and their gifts to leave an integral legacy, an evolutionary impact in a way genuinely unlike anything available in the world today. If you are interested in learning more about the IAM Legacy Circle, you can signal your early interest here.

So that’s the first five weeks. We face an immense challenge to pull this off, but with your continued help, and belief, I think we can; I believe we’re off to a promising start. I’ve been involved with founding a few other ecosystem-level projects in my career. Each one took more than a decade (I’m not that old, LOL… there was some overlap), each had a vision that exceeded its grasp, and each succeeded in incredible ways and came up short in other ones.

And yet this one is the most challenging—and promising—of all. The Institute of Applied Metatheory is, in a deeply spiritual sense, a dance with death, a demand that we surrender to a place where we can move fearlessly because we must, where we ask unreasonable things of our capabilities and our capacity for learning and integration, where we willingly go where we know we’re out of our depth… but only in being right there do we fulfill whatever small contribution we can make to this precious, precious world. This is indeed a rocket ship ride at the leading-edge of what evolution is up to at this very moment (in one tiny part of this infinite kosmos), and despite the challenges and long weeks, there is a sense of fulfillment that leaves no room for regret… kosmic projects, like beautiful families and lifelong love affairs, simply are their own justification.

That’s the dance, and we’ll shuffle until the music stops.

On behalf of the entire team,
All our love,
Robb

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

Dear friends,

I’d like to wish you the most heartfelt blessings for your New Year. I hope it is off to a great start, and represents a time of beautiful stillness and fertile transformation, the latter of which this letter is about. Allow me to start our new year together by recounting A Brief History of a Movement.

When I started my professional journey with the integral movement by co-founding Integral Life with Ken Wilber in 2006, I told Ken I was committing to a 30 year journey. It was clear to me, even in those first weeks of watching the movement as an interested observer, that the three stages of holonic dynamics—Identity, Differentiation, and Integration—fully applied to the integral movement itself.

At that time, The Integral Institute dominated (since 1999) the intellectual, spiritual and energetic milieux of the movement, classic characteristics of the first, Identity Stage of a holon’s growth—in this case, a social holon, and one that was tightly fused with the brilliance and living legend of the movement founder Ken Wilber himself. And yet, to his eternal credit, from day one Ken told me he never wanted the movement to be about him, rather he always wanted it to be about the ideas, committed to the richness of integrative love and ethic of inclusive compassion that grows rather naturally from the integral mind.

We entered the second, Differentiation Stage of the integral movement on the back of two events as we approached the end of the aughts. First, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2010 was both a blessing and a curse. It upended industries, thrashed organizations the world over, and reorganized social efforts of all kinds, ours included. While we’d already been thinking for several years that the movement needed to mature into its Differentiation Stage, the GFC provided the perfect set of real-world catalysts to mark the end of the Identity Stage and push a natural diversification of new entities and efforts.

The second event was the explosion of social/media technologies and models that dramatically diversified the noosphere, including the rise of Facebook, iPhone, YouTube, Twitter and others. It was a time of change, and I’m proud of our attendance to the whole during this period, as we actively supported the launch of more than a half-dozen “competitive” organizations across the landscape. We didn’t have a crystal ball, but we did believe that the movement would benefit from a diversifying encounter with the real-world in the form of differing points of views, strategies, organizations, and sustainability models.

Since then, the last ten years has seen the fragmentation of social media meetup with the birth of what I’ve called Emergent Teal, a set of voices, movements, organizations and media efforts that are all feeling into the contours of Teal consciousness. It’s been noisy, fragmented, and rich, and would not have been possible without leveraging the First Stage of the movement as its launchpad. And while it has been beautiful and liberating (even for us, as thankfully we are no longer a centerpiece of attention), it’s suffered from what all Stage 2 dynamics do: what it has gained in its liberating individuation, it has given up in its ability to cohere focused social action. Stage 2 has exchanged directed movement for uncoordinated motion.

If the first, Identity Stage of the integral movement lasted roughly a long decade (1999-2010), and the second, Differentiation Stage has also lasted roughly a decade (2010-2020, with a few years of deep pause for everyone due to a global pandemic), then 2023 marks what we discuss internally as the beginning of a third, Integration Stage, a time when we invite individuated, mature, committed members of the movement to join us to recohere around renewed social action. For the past two years, we’ve quietly prepared for the launch of a new, and what may end up being quite different, strategy for moving the movement forward.

In forthcoming announcements, I’m going to describe the seeds we’re planting at the dawn of this third, Integration Stage of the movement. The efforts will include a new think tank, new social action initiatives, new ways for you to become directly involved, and an ambitious new vision for how technology might help us overcome the terrible sensemaking fragmentation plaguing not just the dominant Green world-emergent but also even Emergent Teal.

Happy new year. And perhaps, a happy new stage.

Love,

Robb