Beyond Meta-Modernism Part 1: Human Development from the Perspective of Complex, Evolving, Living Systems

I tuned in this morning to a Stoa interview with Dave Snowden which I found stimulating. At the same time, it also highlighted several gaps and the occasional yawning chasm between a variety of philosophies, movements, and perspectives. The fundamental question at hand which popped up at several different points was: what drives beneficial change in humans? And as a rider to that: out of the many approaches to making beneficial change happen, is the most scientific, evidence-based perspective communitarian or individualistic? Or both?

Dave and I have known each other since the late 1990s, when he was down the road from my e-business lab at EY in London, working at IBM in a knowledge management role. If memory serves, I believe that at the time he, like me, was a Fellow at NECSI (the New England Complex Systems Institute based at MIT), though there is a certain fog accompanying my recollection of 25 years of history. We certainly had a number of mentors and colleagues in common, including Max Boisot, Michael Lissack, Hugo Letiche and, in particular, Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute. I’ve always enjoyed Dave’s combination of story-telling peppered with complexity science, and his direct style as a critic of sloppy thinking.

In Part 1 of this article, we will begin by examining some of the critiques and confusions surrounding terms such as “Meta-Modernism”, “Integral” and the vertical development…