An Institute for
Creative Development
Site
The Cultural Maturity site takes on the Institute for Creative Development's most defining think tank task. Its focus is the big-picture question of how we best understand the challenges before us as a species and act in response to them. Its purpose is both to engage the best minds in inquiry about this question and to educate about a particular overarching perspective. That perspective has the deceptively simple name Cultural Maturity.
The concept of Cultural Maturity presents a sophisticated guiding framework for making sense of and addressing the core tasks of our time. It provides a no-nonsense, yet compelling general guiding story, one able to get beyond familiar political, religious, and philosophical ideologies. And it goes further to offer detailed theoretical perspective for confronting the critical personal and cultural challenges ahead and separating wheat from chaff with regard to the kind of thinking the future will require.
This site exists to engage, challenge, and further develop Cultural Maturity as a concept and to confront the more general questions that it raises. Ultimately it exists to support the kind of safe and creatively vital world culturally mature thought and action makes possible. The site incorporates resources materials for learning about the concept more generally and an archive that collects essays, reviews, links and other sources that contribute to the big-picture conversation.
Cultural Maturity
The concept of Cultural Maturity proposes that not only do we today face new and difficult questions, these questions challenge us think and act in some fundamentally new ways. We can understand the concept both as a general notion that helps us get at the crux of what challenges of all sorts today ask of us and as a starting point for an important new complexity and maturity of thought and action. It is pertinent to people from all walks of life committed to a healthy future for humanity and the planet as a whole.
The phrase captures a basic sense of the what is being asked: our times challenge us to a critical kind of "growing up" as a species. Cultural Maturity is not as easy a notion as a phrase like growing up might suggest. But when understood deeply, the concept provides a powerful overarching frame and a way to bring important sophistication and detail to our thinking.
The concept assists us at multiple levels. At a time when familiar cultural guideposts and narratives are loosing their past reliability, it provides a practical and compelling guiding "story" for our time. At a more detailed level it provides focused perspective for making sense of needed changes in the values we hold, in how we relate, and in how we think. And it serves as a powerful tool for critique and analysis, for identifying ideas that can help us with the challenges ahead and understanding why others stop short. (Cultural Maturity proposes that many of the ways of thinking we are most apt to draw on, both traditional and new on the scene, not only leave us short of needed answers, they lack the kind of perspective needed if we are to adequately grasp the questions.)
Culturally mature perspective is not easy. It demands hard-nosed confrontation with the magnitude of the challenges ahead and questions simplistic answers of all sorts. But while demanding, at the same time, the concept of Cultural Maturity provides a powerful antidote to cynicism. At the least it offers hope that the challenges of our time can be met (if we can bring to bear the creativity and commitment the this needed next chapter in our human narrative will require). More than that, it offers the possibility of a future that is not only positive and compelling, but profound.
We can arrive at the thesis of Cultural Maturity simply by looking closely at the questions that today confront us and what they ask of us. We can also arrive at it more theoretically. Cultural Maturity had it origins as a concept in the thinking of Creative Systems Theory, a comprehensive framework for understanding change and interrelationships in human systems developed by psychiatrist and futurist Charles M. Johnston MD in conjunction with ICD colleagues over the last thirty years. CST helps bring nuance to the concept of Cultural Maturity, but its thinking is not needed to make good use of the concept's perspective. (A web site dedicated to the ongoing development of CST can be found at www.CSTHome.org). The concept of Cultural Maturity was introduced with Dr. Johnston's first book, The Creative Imperative (1984). It is most thoroughly developed in his upcoming work Hope and the Future: Understanding the New Creativity and Maturity On Which Our Future Depends.
The Site
Following a FAQ page that uses questions commonly asked by those new to the notion of Cultural Maturity to introduce the concept, the site is divided into three sections. The first presents the concept and it implications. The second applies it to critical emerging questions. The third provides the interactive "think tank" aspect of the page. It includes a blog and an actively evolving collection of essays, articles, book reviews, and links to other sites pertinent to the tasks of Cultural Maturity.
The primary pages in this site include (see links at top of each main page):
The Concept of Cultural Maturity:
Overview: The Overview page addresses why a concept like Cultural Maturity is needed, what exactly Cultural Maturity asks of us, and how the concept differs from more familiar ways of framing the task of our time. It presents a layered inquiry that lets people engage the concept at the depth that they will find most useful.
Creative Systems Theory: The CST page briefly links the concept of Cultural Maturity with the more detailed formulations of Creative Systems Theory.
Tools for Comparison: The Tools page presents a sequence of discernments that can be used for evaluating ideas and approaches. These tools help evaluate whether a contribution succeeds at being culturally mature (both whether a notion gets into culturally mature territory at all and if it does, how far it successfully progresses). They also help identify the biases and outright traps and fallacies an idea or approach (whether culturally mature or not) might be most vulnerable to.
Approaches: Hands-on approaches rather than just discussion often provide the most direct route to culturally mature perspective. They also offer simple ways to understand what cultural mature perspective is about. The Approaches page illustrates a few of the most effective and revealing such hands-on approaches.
Application and Analysis:
Themes and challenges: The Themes page uses dialogues that highlight various of Cultural Maturity's aspects to fill out these more abstract observations. Each dialogue brings culturally mature perspective to one of our time's critical challenges.
Domains: The Domains page applies the lens of Cultural Maturity to the future tasks of various cultural domains--science and technology, business and economics, governance, health care, education, art, and religion.
Big-Picture Questions: The Big-Picture page brings culturally mature perspective to more encompassing questions—such as the future of leadership, the pertinence of culturally mature understanding to questions outside the human sphere, and culturally mature perspective's significance in the broader evolution of human understanding.
Comparative Critique: The Critique page briefly compares and contrasts the conclusions of culturally mature perspective with the work of familiar big-picture social/philosophical thinkers. One of the best ways to grasp what Cultural Maturity is about is to use its perspective to evaluate the contributions and significance of familiar viewpoints.
Cultural Maturity "Think Tank" (the interactive part of the site):
On-going Archive of Conversations, Articles, Reviews, and Links: The Archives page provides an ongoing chronicle of contributions to the cultural conversation made through the lens of Cultural Maturity. Contributions reflected upon, linked to, and archived include essays, articles, books, various forms of artistic expression, and other web-based efforts. This page serves to document culturally mature contribution and also to provide on-going comparative critique. It is driven by questions, articles, books, and links identified by participants of this site.
Advanced Questions: The AQ page provides an on-going forum for addressing more advanced questions about Cultural Maturity and culturally mature leadership presented by people working with the concept. It also archives questions and responses.
Our thinking about how best to structure the interactive parts of this site is in evolution. The goal is clear and specific: to best support culturally mature understanding and policy. But how best to do this is something we will only learn about over time. Our purpose is not simply to document good works—there are a growing number of sites that in various ways take on this task. And it is certainly not just to serve as a forum for anything goes, open-ended discussion. There are, again, other sites for that and our interest is something much more specific.
At least to start, the interactive aspect of the site will happen though people's emails and letters. Contributions can include questions, challenges, brief reflections on current issues, essays and articles (by themselves or others) that engage culturally mature perspective, and suggestions of books or sites for critical review. Conversations page.
Contact Us and Other Learning Opportunities: The Contact page includes additional information about contributing to this site as well as information about person-person learning opportunities.
The Cultural Maturity website is one of series sponsored by the Institute for Creative Development and reflecting its work. ICD is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank and center for advanced leadership training dedicated to clarifying and supporting the kind of understanding and leadership a vital future will require. From 1984 through 2002 it existed as a Seattle-based "bricks and mortar" institution. Today its work is web-based and worldwide. (The Institute's home website can be found at www.creativesystems.org.)
Charles M. Johnston MD, Site coordinator
