Rethinking How We Think - Integrative Meta-Perspective and the Cognitive 'Growing Up' On Which Our Future Depends

Setting the Conceptual Stage

My life’s work as a psychiatrist and futurist has focused on making sense of the times we live in and addressing critical challenges ahead for us as a species. These efforts have included twenty years directing the Institute for Creative Development, a Seattle-based think tank and center for advanced leadership training and, in the many years that followed, writing books about what these essential challenges will require of us. This book addresses one of the most pivotal and ultimately critical insights from these efforts.

My time with the Institute provides an introductory glimpse. The Institute worked to identify the questions that would be most important for future human well-being and brought together the best minds to grapple with them. It also trained people in the leadership abilities needed to engage the challenges presented by these questions.

Over time, a striking recognition became forefront in our efforts. We saw that successfully addressing the most important future questions would require not just making better choices, but developing new kinds of skills and capacities. Much that we did centered around making sense of those new skills and capacities and their implications.

And there was an even more radical and foundational recognition. We saw that deeply understanding those new skills and capacities required thinking in new ways. By “new ways” I don’t mean just being more inventive in one’s conclusions. We saw that understanding and realizing needed new skills and capacities would require thinking in ways that are fundamentally new to our time.

This further recognition had striking consequences. Right off, it confronted us with how demanding what we were attempting to do would necessarily be. We had to face that our task would need to involve more than just teaching ideas and approaches. We would have to engage people in making a major leap in perspective. And we had to accept that very often conclusions we might reach would be ten, twenty, or thirty years ahead of what most people might easily grasp.

But we also saw that there was an important way that this further recognition could make what we were trying to accomplish simpler. If we could help people think in these new ways, the needed new skills and capacities would follow. We also found something else that came from the particular kind of newness these new ways of understanding represented. While for most people they would initially be a stretch— often a considerable stretch—with time they would come to seem almost obvious, like common sense.

This book is equally about the complexity of the challenges ahead for the species and the elegant simplicity of what engaging them effectively can involve.

My two recent books, Hope and the Future: Confronting Today’s Crisis of Purpose and Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future focused primarily on those needed new skills and capacities.1 Rethinking How We Think turns more directly to needed changes in how we understand, to the cognitive reordering on which our future increasingly depends. In doing so, it engages the question of what our times require of us as a species in a manner that is particularly spare and direct.

The specific way I will talk about this cognitive reordering has its roots in Creative Systems Theory (CST), a comprehensive framework for understanding purpose, change, and interrelationship in human systems developed by myself and colleagues at the Institute.2 CST makes important contributions to cognitive science. It delineates how our cognitive mechanisms have worked in fundamentally different ways at different times in culture’s story. It also delineates how these different kinds of cognitive organization produce predictably different kinds of values and worldviews.

For our task in these pages, a particular implication of this evolutionary picture has special significance. CST predicts that our times should be challenging us to take a critical further step in this progression beyond the kind of thinking that gave us the great achievements of our Modern Age. We will look at how the evidence supports this result. We will also see how this new chapter in our human development will be critical if we are to successfully advance as a species—indeed if we are just to have the decisions we make going forward not bring an end to the human experiment. CST calls this necessary “growing up” as a species Cultural Maturity.3

Most immediately, Cultural Maturity’s changes challenge us to step beyond what has been in effect a parent/child relationship with our cultural contexts. We see the beginnings of such change today with how familiar cultural dictates such as traditional gender roles and clear moral codes are becoming less absolute. Our times are demanding that we take a critical new kind of responsibility not just for how we act, but also for how we understand.

More deeply, Cultural Maturity’s changes produce a new kind of cognitive organization. It is this that makes new skills and capacities possible. It is also what allows us to think in more complex and nuanced ways. CST uses the term Integrative Meta-perspective to describe this new kind of cognitive organization. While the term is a bit of a mouthful, I’ve come to deeply appreciate it—and use it often. It quite precisely describes the needed changes.

Integrative Meta-perspective will here have a dual role. It will provide the topic for our inquiry. I will argue that any kind of future we would want to live in will require that we learn to think in the more mature and complete ways that Integrative Meta-perspective makes possible. It will also give us the needed lens for understanding. These reflections will make little sense without at least a beginning capacity for Integrative Meta-perspective.

Over the course of the book, I will describe multiple ways in which Integrative Meta-perspective alters understanding, but one will have particular importance. Integrative Meta-perspective produces thinking that is more specifically “systemic.” And more than this, by taking us beyond more familiar engineering sorts of systemic thinking, it produces a kind of systemic understanding that is itself new. Integrative Meta-perspective offers that we might more directly address the deeper kind of systemic complexity that orders life, and, more specifically, the particular kind of systemic complexity that makes us human. We will look at how this additional step is critical to understanding that can serve us going forward.

I will often draw on a simple image to represent the needed new kind of systemic understanding: a box of crayons with its multiple hues. The various crayons represent various systemic aspects. And the box represents the ability to get our minds around a larger systemic picture. We will see how the image captures dynamics very difficult to depict in other ways. Integrative Meta-perspective, by helping make whole-box-of-crayons systemic understanding possible, offers a sophistication of thought that before now has not been an option. Rethinking How We Think examines both what Integrative Meta-perspective involves and why new, more whole-box-of-crayons ways of thinking have become essential.

Each chapter in the book comes at doing so from a slightly different direction. Chapter One introduces the kind of change process that produces Integrative Meta-perspective and examines how whole-box-of-crayons systemic understanding is the result. It then turns to some of the challenges that today most put the species at risk to illustrate needed new skills and capacities and how they will be critical going forward.

Chapter Two turns more specifically to the cognitive reordering that makes needed new ways of understanding possible. It examines the cognitive structures that gave us modern age beliefs, both why they have been so dramatically successful and also why they cannot continue to serve us in times ahead. It then looks at just what becomes different with Integrative Meta-perspective.

Chapter Three delves more deeply into Cultural Maturity’s changes by examining the workings of human intelligence. It looks at how Integrative Meta-perspective makes it possible to more consciously draw on intelligence’s multiple aspects and how whole-box-of-crayons systemic thinking is a result. It also examines how each of the new capacities that comes with Cultural Maturity’s changes can be understood to follow from this essential new step in intelligence’s evolution.

Chapter Four turns to applications and implications. It touches briefly on how Integrative Meta-perspective alters how we go about making choices. It then addresses how Integrative Meta-perspective brings essential insights for addressing critical collective challenges— from rethinking leadership and love, to recognizing the importance of a new maturity in our relationship to death, to appreciating what will be required if the digital revolution is to benefit us and not instead be our undoing.

Chapter Five takes on the topic of how Integrative Meta-perspective can best be supported and facilitated. Practicing needed new skills and capacities can take us a long way, but it turns out that there are also specific approaches that can be used to more directly generate the needed new cognitive structures. We will give some extended attention to one approach I have found particularly powerful, what CST calls simply Parts Work.

Chapter Six turns to how...