This blog is a first prologue for a keynote at the FreshOutlook Feb. 27, 2012 Building SustainABLE Communities Conference.

Meshworking is an intelligence of the human hive (Hamilton, 2008) that creates a “meshwork” by weaving together the best of two operating systems — one that self-organizes, and one that replicates hierarchical structures.

From an Integral City perspective this operating system connects all four quadrants and recalibrates the levels of development (Hamilton, 1999). The resulting meshwork creates and aligns complex responsive interior and exterior structures and systems in the human hive that flex and flow.

Meshworking intelligences are triggered in the mind/brain (and the “hive-mind”) by dissonance (i.e. constraints) in the environment. The hive-mind/ brain is capable of re-organizing itself and releasing new potentials in the human hive. This allows for the emergence of new meaning making, worldviews, values systems and new capacities. At the same time meshworking intelligence utilizes hierarchical structures and capacities to create sorting and selecting mechanisms that allow the humans in the hive to make survival choices. As structural capacities emerge, new values systems emerge as well, creating a level of complexity that develops where both our individual (and hive) minds and brains can meshwork hierarchies and make hierarchies out of meshworks.

Meshworking intelligence uses imagination, courage and powers of attraction. It articulates designs from the meshing of the diversities in people and thereby releases and reorganizes new intelligences that are currently locked and blocked in silos of sameness.

Meshworking catalyzes a shift in the human hive system, so that new capacities emerge and the city system reorganizes itself into something more internally resonant and externally coherent with life conditions. When this occurs a new level of capacity emerges in the complex hierarchy of city systems and we can solve problems that we never could before.

(excerpt from: Hamilton, M. (2010). Meshworking Integral Intelligences for Resilient Environments; Enabling Order and Creativity in the Human Hive. Paper presented at the Enacting an Integral Future Conference.