Foundational Keys
Our guiding framework for co-evolving a bright future
In this post, I'll introduce the core concepts that guide our journey toward a bright future for ourselves and for the world.
First, a bit of background: My original focus many decades ago was on cultural change but I came to understand that personal change and cultural change are inextricably linked. Indeed, the future can best be shaped by those who consciously co-evolve -- evolving themselves while they are helping the culture evolve. They are best positioned to stay ahead of the curve, to continue to be creative and proactively adaptive while developing new cultural patterns in the midst of a time of great change.
The Foundational Keys express this deep weaving of the personal and the cultural into a single whole fabric.
In this overview, here's what I'll cover:
The seven items in bold are the mutually-supportive Foundational Keys. They are distilled from Context Institute's 40+ years of work on supporting the transition to a humane and sustainable culture -- one that supports our full human potential in partnership with the needs of all life. The Foundational Keys unlock that potential.
I'm delighted to share the following "tip of the iceberg" introduction with you now and then invite you to journey with me as I use other posts on this site to dive deeper into how they can guide us. Subscribe now to discover how to move from anxiety to agency as you get out of old boxes and discover new possibilities for yourself and for the world.
The Context: Beyond Modern Culture
We need to know where we are now before we can chart a path to something better.
Our starting point is today's dominant culture, which started in Europe after the 18th century Age of Enlightenment. I'll refer to it as ‘modern culture’ and as ‘modernity’. It's sometimes called Western culture although by now it's a strong influence in many countries around the world.
It has, in many ways, been quite successful, bringing many improvements over the feudal and autocratic cultures that preceded it, although also bringing its own set of challenges. Overall, it's had a profound impact on humanity and the planet over the past 250 years.
Since World War II, modern culture has enabled many powerful changes, such as:
the human population growing by almost 4 times in 80 years
the huge expansion of the human impact on the natural environment
the rapid development of many new technologies.
These changes have now created a world beyond the culture’s capacity to cope, as illustrated by the many crises we face that just seem to proliferate and grow.
What can be done? There is wisdom in the idea, often attributed to Einstein, that you can't solve problems with the same type of thinking that created them in the first place. The limitations, dysfunctions and blindspots of modern culture have caught up with us.
The limitations in modern culture that I've found to be most significant, beneath the many symptoms and crises, are:
Being clueless about the underlying psychological dynamics (psychodynamics) that shape personality, behavior and motivation
Using narrow modes of perceiving and thinking (cognition), too focused on a fragmented perception of the world that ignores connections and context and too dependent on language-based categorical thinking
Using an outmoded strategy for success based on power struggles and dominance hierarchies that fails to tap the benefits of collaboration.
These are the deep issues that drive the many crises. How? Think about things like climate change, the threat of nuclear war, extreme wealth concentration, species extinction and many more. What they have in common is that they all have practical technical solutions. The obstacles to using those solutions are purely human:
Most people's choices are shaped by defense patterns that got started in the dim past of their childhoods – defense patterns they’re largely unconscious of and that they have few if any skills to constructively influence. By being clueless about their own psychodynamics, they make choices that aren't actually in their best interests or the interests of the whole.
Most people see themselves (or their family or subgroup) as more separate from others than they really are, often in a categorical, absolute way. This sense of separation is deeply inaccurate and again leads them to make poor choices.
That sense of separation, colored by defensive psychodynamics, leads many people to seek what they distortedly see as their own relative advantage. This then leads to a power-struggle-based world in which too many people don't want to collaboratively solve the world's crises. They would rather have the crises continue if they can't dictate the solutions. They are happy to "play chicken" with the fate of the world in the hopes of "winning" or at least retaining what they see as their relative advantage for as long as possible.
These issues affect the vast majority, from top government officials, CEOs of big corporations and political activists to the most grassroots of us, regardless of political orientation.
How can we go beyond these human limitations? This overall framework is a response to that question.
It's all part of a strategy that weaves together
Einstein's observation of the need for a new mode of thinking
Mahatma Gandhi's encouragement to "Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
Bucky Fuller's observation that "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
In CI's Bright Future Initiative, we’re weaving these into a practical pathway to meaningful personal and cultural change. Think of it as a two-step process.
First, we’re living into new ways of thinking, doing and being that go beyond modernity’s limitations.
Second, we’re using that fresh perspective and the experience this gives us to develop sharable new cultural patterns.
Here's how:
The Knowledge: Foundational Literacies
To go beyond the limitations and blindspots of mainstream culture, we need to build an explicit common ground of shared core concepts and the terminology that goes with them. What follows are the conceptual territories that have proven to be essential for this work.
Systems
Systems literacy is an antidote to modern culture’s over-dependence on reductionist perception and categorical thinking. It sees relationships and contexts as just as important as individual parts. It can easily handle the kind of nuance and complexity that the modern mind struggles with. More than just "systems thinking," I experience this as systems consciousness, using both the right and left sides of the brain.
The literacy that supports systems consciousness includes a working understanding of both complex adaptive systems and mechanistic systems. This illustration (from my 2021 presentation, Being A Cultural Co-Evolver) gives you a sense of both.
In mainstream culture these and related systems concepts tend to be used primarily in specialized, compartmentalized situations. The number of people who have integrated them fluently into their daily lives are few. Yet the concepts are easily learned and with both types in our toolkit, the world becomes much more understandable and our challenges more solvable.
HumanOS
Human Operating System literacy gives us the means to transcend both the old notions of human nature and the naive rationalism of modern culture. It's a new approach, informed by neuroscience, human biology and related fields, that looks at the dynamics beneath behavior.
By connecting our felt experience with these underlying processes, HumanOS literacy enables us to develop direct and effective ways to intelligently collaborate with the body and subconscious, rather than fighting against them or being unconsciously driven by them.
It’s also a better guide to the full territory of possible human behavior than the ideas of human nature, which are generalizations based on surface observations of human behavior. This is especially true since the cultures of the past few thousand years tended to produce heavily traumatized people. Thus the human nature we are familiar with is traumatized human nature, making it hard to imagine the human nature of the non-traumatized.
The HumanOS approach can explore the full territory of possible human behavior, which is why it's such a valuable literacy for co-evolving a bright future.
An important component of HumanOS literacy involves understanding the autonomic nervous system, its effect on our behavior and how we can partner with it. Here's one facet of that understanding (from my 2023 presentation, Optimal Zone Resilience):
Your Optimal Zone is the set of autonomic nervous system states where you feel inwardly safe. In contrast, your Defensive Zone is where you’re in a triggered, react-to-a-threat state or in a state of chronic anxiety, stress, worry, discouragement or depression.
Not only is your Optimal Zone a more pleasant state but it’s also where you have the greatest ability to be creative, confident, compassionate and courageous. It’s where you are best able to have fun and get things done.
Your Defensive Zone also has its gifts. If you use it as a place for learning about yourself, it can be a great support for healing old wounds. There are even times when your defensive reaction is appropriate to the situation. Unfortunately, many people get stuck in their Defensive Zone and act defensively in unhelpful ways.
Overall, the HumanOS is getting better understood in the worlds of both neuroscience and individual therapy but it still hasn't penetrated meaningfully into mainstream culture. Yet its insights are valuable for everyone, as I’ll describe more under Psychodynamics below.
Culture
Cultural-Evolution literacy focuses on culture (in the broad, anthropological sense) as an evolving complex adaptive system with a primary focus on cultural patterns and their evolution. We seek to know both the actual evolutionary history of human culture (so we can learn from it) and the process of cultural evolution (so we can influence it).
The big picture is where we start. As I developed in detail in my 2014 presentation, What Time Is It?, the long arc of cultural history shows:
two main, largely stable, cultural patterns – the first based on small hunting and gathering bands (Tribal Era) and the second based on agriculture and cities (Empire Era)
a transition between those two starting about 13,000 years ago
lots of indications that we’re now in a comparably profound second cultural transition
the implication that we may be headed toward a third major cultural pattern, appropriate for living on a small, highly interconnected planet (Planetary Era).
Our current transition has been going on for a few hundred years already and we're clearly not done yet. It's a time of great opportunity to shape the cultural patterns still to come.
Mainstream culture doesn't see this bigger picture, so people are easily and unduly frightened by the pace of change, which in turn makes the process more difficult, painful and slower. Good cultural-evolution literacy, supported by Systems literacy and HumanOS literacy, helps us see the opportunities for positive change and can make the process faster, less harmful and more graceful.
The Practices and Skills: Essential Capabilities
Real cultural change requires more than new knowledge. We need to build on our expanded literacy with new skills, practices and behaviors. We need to build new cultural DNA.
The following Essential Capabilities do this by building on the Foundational Literacies to directly address modernity’s limitations.
Each capability is a broad territory that can potentially include a great many specific skills, practices, behaviors and frameworks, some we know about and likely many still to be discovered. In CI's Bright Future Initiative, we’ve already gotten good results from enough of these to know from experience that the capabilities are learnable and practical. And what we've experienced whets our appetite to discover more.
Indeed, a major focus for the Bright Future Initiative going forward will be on developing and spreading new skills, practices and behaviors for these capabilities and new cultural patterns built on them.
Savvy about Psychodynamics
This capability builds on HumanOS literacy by adding direct personal awareness of our underlying motivations, the state of our nervous system and our cognitive biases. Based on that awareness, we can then develop the skills and habits to collaborate with our body and mind so we can navigate through life being less driven and more at choice and effective.
We start by becoming savvy about our own psychodynamics. However, once we've gained this experience we can use it to compassionately understand the deeper dynamics going on in others.
A good example of a set of skills for being savvy about your own psychodynamics is what I call Optimal Zone Resilience. This is a set of skills that enables you to get the most learning and healing out of the times you are triggered and then be able to move back toward your Optimal Zone. You can find out more about Optimal Zone Resilience in my 2023 presentation.
Most people are more driven by fears and unresolved traumas than they realize. This diminishes their ability to be constructive, generative and collaborative – and collectively contributes profoundly to the world's crises. Being savvy about psychodynamics offers us a pathway to a better personal quality of life and enables us to make better contributions to the world around us.
Skillful with Diverse Modes of Cognition
Cognition refers to the combination of perceiving and thinking. Modes of cognition include things like object perception, language-based categorical thinking, system consciousness, gestalt perception, visual thinking, contextual awareness, kinesthetic thinking, somatic awareness and intuition. The goals here are to be
skillful with each mode
able to get them to support each other
know when each is appropriate
able to move smoothly from one to another as the situation changes.
This capability enables us to have a richer, nuanced and thus more accurate understanding of the world. For example, visual thinking can easily handle more complexity than language-based categorical thinking. With this capability, when we encounter an obstacle, we can see more options for responding to it and more possibilities for a better solution. Thus it helps us navigate more skillfully through life's challenges.
It's also key to improving our ability to communicate. Language takes us only so far and often leads to misunderstandings. Witness how language struggles to communicate shared meaning in polarized, partisan settings. Multi-sensory communications and shared experiences can be richer, clearer and more capable of bridging.
Finally, navigating and communicating with the help of diverse modes of cognition is enormously helpful for collaborating, which ties into the next capability.
Adept at Win-Win-Win Collaboration
Much of society around the world is run by dominators. Their strategy for success is to seek power over others, which then leads to a win-lose, power-struggle-based world. The human and natural waste and damage from all this is enormous.
The Age of Enlightenment and the modern culture that followed attempted to soften the worst of the totalitarianism of the agricultural empires that preceded it by replacing the "rule of men" with the "rule of law" but it was always only a half-measure. Modern culture has included slavery, colonialism, the brutal treatment of workers and other types of power-over. Society has remained stratified by gender, race, class and in many other ways. The system has been gamed to make sure the rules are more beneficial to some than others.
While there have been incremental improvements, we still default to dominator hierarchies for business organizations and many other types of groups. Even when we have intentions to do better, we still default to using the familiar patterns because we don't yet have well-developed viable, practical alternatives.
This third Essential Capability addresses that challenge. It provides the frameworks, skills and practices that can make dominator hierarchies obsolete.
It also addresses the need, in these times of rapid change, for creative and effective collaborative efforts – efforts that are proactive rather than reactive as they use a new mode of thinking and being to respond to challenges and help the culture evolve toward a bright future.
We begin with a fundamental redefinition of success as win-win-win ( three wins), which benefits both of the immediate parties as well as the broader system. While a win-win (two wins) strategy is an improvement over win-lose, it’s not sufficient since it’s often accomplished by the direct parties pushing the losses out to others in the form of “externalities.” From a systems point of view, this is often win-win-lose with still a lot of collateral damage.
Win-win-win may seem like a naively idealistic strategy but in our highly-interconnected world, where the ripple effects of our actions come back to us quickly and strongly, it has actually become the smart strategy for all the direct parties as well as the wider world. This is an important area where our cultural patterns haven't caught up with the deep changes around us. That disparity makes it a ripe area for change.
To collaborate effectively, we also need to be able to deal with dominator behavior, which is currently so woven into the fabric of the culture – everything from the messages we give to children to the way we organize society. As collaborators, we need to neutralize it and make it obsolete. This is essential if we are to move beyond the limitations of modern culture.
Shifting to effective win-win-win collaboration hasn't been easy because it requires many new patterns all working together. Partial solutions get subverted by the parts that haven't changed and the results have often been disappointing. We need a whole-system approach, like the overall framework in this post, to guide us to better outcomes.
Among other things, win-win-win collaborators need to be
savvy about psychodynamics, especially their own
skillful with diverse modes of cognition, especially system consciousness
able to use differences of perspective as a contribution to designing better outcomes rather than relating to them as conflicts
able to recognize and neutralize dominator behavior, whether in themselves, in their groups or external to that
skilled as a team member, including as a design-team member
appreciative of leadership as service to the whole and able to offer it and support it in others
adept at using various structures, group practices and technologies that support their collaboration
These skills and orientations are all learnable, especially if we start with the other two Essential Capabilities. They're valuable even as personal learning but they become especially valuable when learned and shared by a collaborating group.
"No regrets" Actions
Becoming more skilled in the Essential Capabilities is a "no regrets" way to work toward a bright future. You get personal benefits as soon as you start developing these capabilities regardless of how long it takes for changes to emerge in the world around you.
Then, while every individual situation is different, our experience so far is that as your behavior changes, it has a positive co-evolutionary effect on those around you, which sets up for a ripple effect beyond your immediate circle. This creates a win for you, a win for those you know and a win for the world.
If you want to amplify your impact on the wider culture even more, you can work with others who are skilled in the Essential Capabilities to develop and spread new cultural patterns built on these Foundational Keys. That’s what the next stage of CI’s Bright Future Initiative is all about.
The Dynamic Outcome: Embodied Harmony
In the crown of the tree, enabled by the Essential Capabilities, is Embodied Harmony.
Why harmony?
I'm using harmony as a defining characteristic of the bright future we're working towards, but it's not just any harmony. Rather, it's a robust, resilient, dynamic and very alive harmony. Let me explain:
Harmony describes the character of a relationship, whether that's a relationship between musical notes, people or, more generally, parts in a system. Indeed, harmony is fundamentally a systems concept. It denotes a system state in which the parts are in a mutually supportive relationship, enabling the system to function at its best, effectively and efficiently.
The harmony we’re after can't be a superficial harmony or the appearance of harmony created by enforced conformity. It must be authentic, emerging as a natural consequence of the wholeness of our lives.
And, just as in a good piece of music, it needs to be able to be dynamic, robust and resilient, evolving even through places of tension to a new harmony as the underlying system evolves.
Humanity needs this kind of harmony if we are to have any future that could be called bright. It is essential that we learn to function more effectively and efficiently as we come to terms with living on a small, highly interconnected planet. We can no longer afford or tolerate the colossal human and natural waste of a power-struggle-based world. Harmony may have always been desirable but now it's required. I'm naming it as the core characteristic not as a matter of personal preference but because, really, we have no choice.
Fortunately, our experience in CI’s Bright Future Initiative suggests that this kind of harmony is more realistically attainable than many people may imagine.
Whole-System Harmony
To be effective, this kind of harmony needs to be part of our beingness, a normal part of our daily lives and expressed through our habits. In other words, it needs to be embodied.
It also can't be compartmentalized to only part of our lives. This grid from my 2020 presentation, Embracing the 3 Harmonies, gives a sense of the full territory that, at least eventually, needs to be covered to enable a truly bright future.
For most of us, the place to start is with ourselves and our own harmony within. We are each the part of the larger system where we have the most influence. What we've found in CI’s Bright Future Initiative is that becoming savvy about our own psychodynamics – in behaviors and habits as well as our understandings – leads naturally to the harmony within at the personal level.
Yet that's only a first step. We are social beings and much of our distress in life is connected to our disharmonious relationships with others – be they family members, intimate partners, competitors at work or political opponents. Harmony with others builds on harmony within but requires its own set of skills, such as those in being adept at win-win-win collaboration.
We can't stop there. We're also living beings sustained by the natural world, which has its limits. Each of us needs a practical, functional harmony with nature, built with the help of the three capacities. For example, if we are savvy about our own psychodynamics, we won’t be trying to satisfy psychological needs through excessive material consumption. If we develop our systems consciousness, we will experience ourselves as part of nature. And through win-win-win collaboration we can develop and implement lifestyles and norms that enable us to truly partner with nature.
It’s wonderful to develop the Essential Capabilities to the level where we can personally experience the harmony within, with others and with nature. But if we approach this purely as personal growth, we are still stuck in the individualistic consciousness of modern culture. We need to bring the Essential Capabilities into our groups and into the culture.
With our personal ability to be a source of authentic harmony, we can then influence the groups we are part of – be they a household, a workplaces or any other type of group – so the three harmonies are embodied in the group as a whole, in its members and in the group's relationship with the wider world.
And eventually, in the culture at large, we need to embody and support the three harmonies for the culture's members, in the culture's institutions and in the culture's relationships with other cultures and with the natural world.
We can get there through a persistent co-evolution built on these Foundational Keys.
The Strategy
I’d like to now return to the strategy I mentioned near the start of this post and give it more depth with the help of the concepts I’ve described.
The Foundational Literacies and the Essential Capabilities give us Einstein’s new mode of thinking and Gandhi’s new mode of being. Together, they give us an overall consciousness and the practical tools to go beyond the limitations of modern culture. They enable us to begin to experience now what I would call Planetary Era culture.
The new tools and new consciousness also give us both the means and the experiential basis to create Fuller’s new cultural patterns that can make the old patterns obsolete.
Subscribe now to access these tools and frameworks so that they can equip you to live more joyfully and work more effectively toward reaching a bright future for yourself and the world .
I look forward to sharing this journey with you!
Thanks so much, Robert, for sharing your brilliant thinking-and-feeling with the world!