Integral City how do we relate to your constant changes and exchanges? Map 3 reveals the cycles that flow through and around your prolific eco-system.
Integral City Map 3: The Scalar Fractal Relationship of Micro, Meso and Macro Human Systems
In the city, as individuals we grow our capacities. When life conditions trigger us to change, our life’s journey adds new layers of values, worldviews and competencies. Like tree rings we can symbolically map how a person grows capacities that expand from ego-centric to ethnocentric to system-centric to world-centric (Cluster 1 on Map 3).
I have been fortunate enough, teaching at Royal Roads University, to co-create the conditions where individual leaders become high performance teams, where each team member challenges the others to draw on these full set of capacities. This gives them capacities to impact spheres of influence that can grow to global-size, making impacts on and for future generations. This team capacity is represented in Cluster 2 on Map 3.
When these leaders and teams return, with advanced capacities, to their organizations and communities, they encounter other people and groups who do not have the same breadth or depth of competency. In this respect, their capacity becomes diluted (and explains the challenge all high performance teams have interacting with those outside such teams). On the other hand, the advanced capacities of these individuals bring new skills and perspectives to their organizations and communities, positively “infecting” their social and cultural environments, with change. (Cluster 3, in Map 3).
We can see the same paradoxical effects (of dilution and infection) when the high performers interact in even larger scales at nation or global contexts. (Cluster 4, in Map 4).
Integral City Map 3, shows how the human systems are constantly interacting in exchanges that emerge from natural cycles, values exchanges, and complex processes. We can see the role of both agents and collectives and the mesmerizing outcomes of interactions in self-organizing systems of exchange.
I have described the merits of this map in the audio (and printed) book, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences in the Human Hive. I also discussed it with Ken Wilber during our Integral City 2.0 Online Conference (and Integral Life) Interview. Map 3 as a whole captures the Integral Intelligences of the city: Inner, Outer, Cultural and Social, as well as Living and Ecosphere Intelligences).
Map 3 in the Integral City demonstrates strong patterns that relate to the natural designs in Tim Winton’s Pattern Dynamics (TM) Structure , Creativity and Dynamic Patterns. But the Pattern of Exchange seems to capture best the flow of interaction that influences interlocking human systems at micro, meso and macros scales inherent in Map 3. The Pattern of Exchange in the city shows us how human systems produce capacity both for the benefit of themselves and for the benefit of the systems with whom they trade. At its core the Exchange Pattern is the pattern that drives economics, sustainable growth and eco-system balance.
Map 3 captures the relationship patterns of the city at a much more granular level of the city than Map 2′s nested holarchy of holons. It adds to Map 1 the path of emergence and the interrelationship of multiple scales of human systems. Map 3 allows us to peer more closely into the inner life of individuals and the dynamic characteristics of the social holons they belong to. The conditions for generative trade between systems is reinforced, because inequities exist between different individuals and organizations.
Map 3 reveals aspects of the Pattern of Exchange because it reveals seven qualities identified by the language of Pattern Dynamics (TM):
- Cycle: Map 3 shows how individuals grow in natural cycles. Also it implicitly suggests the generational cycles where individuals and groups learn from older more experienced people. Thus a cycle of knowledge exchange occurs.
- Balance: Map 3 conveys how the encounter of team members with differing skills but equally matured capacities creates well-balanced teams, able to give and take as they engage to produce results.
- Capture: Map 3 shows the scales of human systems, that “capture” within their boundaries the skills and competencies needed for their team or organizational system to achieve their goals.
- Trade: Map 3 implies that the reason human systems prosper in the city is because humans trade bio-psycho-cultural-social information, matter and energy. In a healthy economy, such trades improve the life conditions of both traders and provide positive feedback for repeat performances.
- Uniqueness: Map 3 implies that the larger human systems of team, organization, community and city are inevitably unique because no two people express their competencies, capacities or talents in the same way as any other. Thus both the combination of structures, and the emergence of self-organizing creativity can produce uniqueness that offers selling propositions and values exchanges that can only be discovered through trade and exchange.
- Process: Map 3 hides the processes that are better expressed in Map 4 (explained in a future blog). Nevertheless the basic systems frame of input – process- output is essential to the operation of any productive exchange. That can be as “intangible” as a creative thinking brainstorm that results in new ideas for a whole new industry (e.g. the concept of music distribution on the internet); or it can be as tangible as publishing and selling newspapers on the street corner.
- Flow: Map 3 clearly shows the flow of the exchange of the neural network within individual minds (Cluster 1) and the flow between people in teams, organizations, communities and the city (Clusters 2, 3, 4).
Integral City how do we relate to your constant changes and exchanges? Map 3 shows that exchange of energy, information and matter flow through the neural network, of the brain, economy and ecology of human systems. The key to city sustainability is that these exchanges between the human hive and its environment flow in renewing cycles which creates a metabolism where exchanges continuously flow through the entire system.
In future blogs we continue the exploration of Integral City Maps 4 and 5 and show how each adds further depth to Maps 1 , 2 and 3.
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