IAM Whitepaper
By Dima Bulatov

A Sociology of Big Pictures: Network Strategy for a 21st Century Worldview

The Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM) presents “A Sociology of Big Pictures: Network Strategy for a 21st Century Worldview” by Robb Smith, an in-depth exploration of how major idea frameworks emerge, compete, and evolve within the historic attentional landscape. As we enter the Transformation Age—marked by rapid geopolitical, technological, ecological, and epistemic shifts—Smith argues that the need for a coherent, Integrative Worldview has never been greater. Drawing from the sociology of philosophy, he examines how intellectual movements throughout history have successfully propagated their ideas, emphasizing the role of networked collaboration, strategic signal amplification, and cultural capital in shaping worldviews capable of addressing the metacrisis.

This white paper outlines a bold “grand strategy” for fostering an “Integrative Worldview Network” that can effectively compete for attention against the Traditional, Modern and Postmodern worldviews in a fragmented media environment. Smith proposes a collaborative protocol among integral, metamodern, and other meta-theoretical movements to amplify their collective impact and establish a resilient knowledge economy suited for 21st-century challenges. Through deep historical analysis and practical insights, “A Sociology of Big Pictures” serves as both a roadmap and a call to action for those seeking to advance a worldview capable of meaningfully engaging with the complexity of our times.

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By Dima Bulatov

IAM Spotlight: The Cultural Complexity Index

How do we measure the depth of human meaning-making across history, traditions, and intellectual paradigms? In this fascinating presentation, Brendan Graham Dempsey introduces the Cultural Complexity Index (CCI) initiative, a pioneering research project launched by the Institute of Applied Metatheory and Sky Meadow Institute that empirically maps how humans structure knowledge, solve problems, and make sense of their world.

Utilizing the Lectical Scale, a highly refined framework for measuring hierarchical complexity, the project analyzes sacred and significant texts from different historical periods. Its early findings suggest fascinating correlations between social complexity and the evolution of meaning-making, while also challenging some common assumptions about cognitive development in different historical eras.

What do we mean by “culture”? While integral theory typically enacts “culture” as representing our collective interiors (LL), the CCI investigates a broader dimension — the complexity of symbolic information processing as a whole. CCI’s use of the term aligns closely with Gregg Henriques’ description of “culture” as representing the human noosphere in general, the sphere of knowledge, symbolic representation, and individual sense-making, rather than the Lower-Left (LL) quadrant of Integral Theory, which focuses on relational, intersubjective, and cultural meaning-making. While the two are connected and often isomorphic with each other, they require distinct methodologies to be properly analyzed.

This is important because, as Brendan points out, he is not making claims about a given culture’s overall developmental center of gravity, but rather on the cognitive performance of certain individuals within a culture, as measured by the Lectical Scale.

Brendan’s presentation covers the theoretical foundations, core methodology, and preliminary results of the study — particularly its examination of texts from forager and archaic societies. In the ensuing discussion, participants explore crucial questions, such as:

  • The origins of the CCI framework and how it measures individual cognitive complexity,
  • How cognitive complexity relates to cultural evolution—but why they are not the same thing,
  • The shift from mythic narratives to rational-scientific models—and how each stage builds upon the last,
  • The hidden structures of symbolic meaning-making and how they shape everything from politics to personal identity,
  • How the CCI helps dispel myths about cultural development, such as challenging the notion that early societies were incapable of producing later-stage artifacts or ideas, and clarifying the sequential-but-nonlinear nature of human evolution

For integral thinkers, the CCI aspires to provide both empirical validation and refinement of existing developmental models. While supporting key developmental insights, it also suggests nuanced updates to conventional correlations between social and cognitive complexity. Most importantly, the findings point toward practical applications — helping to frame new “stories of wholeness” that are adequate to the challenges of our time.

This research represents a significant step in bringing empirical rigor to cultural evolution theories while refining and deepening our understanding. By applying careful measurement and analysis, it enhances our understanding of both our developmental past and the challenges of constructing more complex and integrative meaning systems for the future.

IAM Whitepaper
By Dima Bulatov

Polarization and the Algorithmic Undertow: Integral and Critical Realist Perspectives

The Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM) presents a groundbreaking analysis of digital polarization and its profound impact on our increasingly fragmented social landscape. In “Polarization and the Algorithmic Undertow: Integral and Critical Realist Perspectives,” Bruce Alderman explores how our rapid transition into a globally networked information environment has created unprecedented challenges for human cognition, social cohesion, and collective meaning-making and sensemaking.

Drawing on the complementary big-picture frameworks of Integral Theory and Critical Realism, this white paper introduces the novel concept of “algorithmic undertow”—a subtle but powerful force that shapes our attention, beliefs, and behaviors in digital spaces. Through careful analysis of how these dynamics operate across personal, cultural, and systemic levels, Alderman reveals why traditional approaches to addressing polarization often fall short and offers a more comprehensive pathway forward.

This paper is particularly timely as we grapple with deepening polarization and the emergence of isolated digital “demi-realities.” By combining sophisticated theoretical analysis with practical insights for intervention, it provides valuable guidance for individuals, organizations, and policymakers working to foster healthier digital ecosystems and more integrated forms of collective sense-making.

As part of IAM’s ongoing commitment to applying integrative metatheories to pressing global challenges, this work offers both a deeper understanding of our current predicament and actionable strategies for transformation. Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or concerned citizen, this paper provides essential insights for navigating and healing our increasingly polarized digital landscape. 

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By Dima Bulatov

What We’ve Learned: 2024 Reflections and Looking Ahead to 2025

The Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM) is redefining how we address today’s most complex global challenges by leveraging integrative metatheories—comprehensive frameworks that unify knowledge across disciplines. In this insightful conversation, Robb Smith and Josh Leonard reflect on IAM’s groundbreaking work in 2024, from initiatives like the Metacrisis Mapping Project and the Cultural Complexity Index to innovative tools like Context AI, which revolutionize sense-making and meaning-making at the forefront of epistemology. Discover how leadership, collaboration, and storytelling play pivotal roles in driving transformational change, while exploring the ethical responsibilities that guide this impactful work.

Looking ahead to 2025, Robb and Josh outline an inspiring vision for IAM’s continued evolution. With a renewed focus on building a robust metatheory of change, fostering intergenerational collaboration, and advancing the integration of sense-making and meaning-making, IAM is crafting a new story of wholeness to address the crises of our time. Through this discussion, you’ll gain deeper insights into the transformative potential of integrative metatheories and practical ways to contribute to a more cohesive, resilient, and ethically grounded future.

Media
By Dima Bulatov

SALT for Climate: Redefining Urgency and Transformation in Climate Leadership

The Sensemaking, Action, and Leadership Training (SALT) for Climate initiative tackles a crucial blindspot in today’s climate response: the lack of conscious, integrative sensemaking as a foundation for meaningful action. SALT for Climate brings together cutting-edge psychosocial research, skilled facilitation in human dynamics, and transformative Big Picture metatheories to help climate leaders address the psychological and systemic gaps in existing political, economic, and scientific paradigms.


Through specialized training and coaching, SALT enhances the emotional, social, and consciousness capacities of those leading climate efforts, bridging the divide between climate policies and public understanding—a gap that often stalls progress and drives polarization. This scalable approach complements the scientific and technical aspects of climate action, fostering greater public engagement and supporting more impactful, integrative climate leadership.

In this episode of IAM Insider, host Josh Leonard sits down with Gail Hochachka and Lisa Gibson, leaders of the SALT for Climate initiative, to explore their pioneering approach to climate action. They discuss the often-overlooked psychological and social dimensions of climate work, share insights from their work on collective sensemaking and leadership training, and explain why a focus on human dynamics may be the missing piece in our response to the climate crisis. Listen in to discover how SALT for Climate is helping us rethink what effective climate action looks like.

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By Dima Bulatov

IAM Announces The Strategic Metacrisis Mapping Initiative

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.

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By Dima Bulatov

IAM Announces SALT for Climate

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.

Media
By Dima Bulatov

Introducing the Cultural Complexity Index

Dear friends,

As you may have seen, The Institute of Applied Metatheory recently chose to organize, fund and incubate a significant new Applied Metatheory Initiative called the Cultural Complexity Index, which we see as holding the potential to act as a high-leverage project for long-term social emancipation.

We were looking for proposals that identified deep, long-lasting levers for transformation, demonstrated a strong inherent drive for change, illuminated overlooked dimensions, made a distinctive impact, and had the potential to inspire widespread participation and collective action.

The CCI fit these criteria, and in the spirit of helping our broader community see, understand and learn from IAM efforts to coordinate social action across the emerging Teal movement, we are publishing today the introductory discussion we did with Brendan Graham Dempsey in consideration of the AMI.

We hope it gives you some idea about why we are so excited about supporting this exciting initiative, and I hope you enjoy.

Loving regards,
Robb

About the Cultural Complexity Index Initiative at the Institute of Applied Metatheory
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.

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By Dima Bulatov

IAM Announces the Cultural Complexity Index

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

Media
By Dima Bulatov

How America Got Here: A 50 Year Journey to Polarization

Dear friends,

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is a tragic and cowardly act of political violence that attempts to undermine the functioning of democracy at its heart, which is the peaceful transfer of power bestowed by the legitimacy of popular will.

Sadly, it is also the latest in a cascading sequence of predictable events as we continue to live through The Great Release, that large-scale breakdown in the United States’ power system that I first described in 2017, and since which has seen growing and acute political fractures in the US and around the world.

How did we get here?

Just hours before yesterday’s events, Josh Leonard and I discussed that exact question in great detail in “How America Got Here: A 50 Year Journey to Polarization” for IAM: The Institute of Applied Metatheory.

Based on a tweet thread I published a few months ago examining the wholesale transformation of American socioculture, we look at the deep structures—in the form of actual events, policies and decisions between 1970 and 2024—that radically shifted America from one form of system “regime” and associated equilibrium, that of relative national coherence in the early 1970s, into a new, radically- and qualitatively-different regime and equilibrium of extreme polarized decoherence of 2024.

Let me say this more directly: our current sociopolitical equilibrium is one of fracture, polarization and discord, so the very form and function of the system itself now is such that it will strongly resist moving away from producing more fracture, polarization and discord. Extreme events like January 6’s attempted insurrection, or the attempted assassination of a political leader, are both product and cause of the system naturally-generating the chaos it uses to reproduce itself.

The critical question is how did we generate a system whose equilibrium is extreme polarization? If we’re ever going to make choices that begin to shift our society toward the system reorganization that The Great Release predicts will be necessary, then we have to be able to see the mistakes, deformations, and integral violations that were committed on the way to getting here.

While I highly encourage you to watch our discussion to understand a fuller, more integral story of how we arrived here, I want to remind us that all division begins in the mind and can be ended by the heart.

Political differences are real, but they are nothing in the face of our infinite capacity for expanding our minds and hearts to accommodate new and different realities, lived realities our neighbors desperately want to show us, have us listen to, and have us affirm as real and valid. To reject this principle is to cauterize oneself from the full lifeworld, and what is a polarized society if not two groups who have retreated fully into their preferred barren demirealities?

But there’s another way. Cultivating an integral mind and heart is a path that takes us out of this hollow wasteland, and may indeed be the only one that can. We need integral leaders who can model the language, values, behavior and citizenship that the 21st century demands. Each of us can make that commitment, and renew it every day in the face of the widening gyre ahead.

Warm loving regards,
Robb Smith
Founder & CEO, Integral Life and the Institute of Applied Metatheory

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
02:05 Understanding the Socio-Cultural Shift
19:41 Economic Shifts
29:06 Media Fragmentation
37:28 Political Revolutions
40:57 The Role of Integral Leaders
41:27 The Repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Financial Crisis
44:11 China’s Entry into the World Trade Organization and Outsourcing
48:44 The Rise of Social Media and Identity-Fueled Tribalism
51:47 Donald Trump and the Erosion of Truth
57:52 The Importance of Integrative Leadership
01:04:06 Building a Healthier and More Resilient Society