Secrets of the Honey Bee: Spiral Dynamics of Association Change

August 15, 2006, © Marilyn Hamilton PhD CGA

What can Professional Associations learn from the habits of the honey bee and the spiral dynamics of human emergence?

Over the past decade, Professional Associations have been transforming themselves. Most started as organizations who set standards of practice.  Then they committed to  developing and maintaining professional competencies.  Now many organizations are nurturing networks of relationships in a community of practice and even incubating  change and innovation at the global level.   

Have associations just been flitting from flower to flower seemingly as unintentional as the lone honey bee?  Or is there some deeper pattern that underlies the sustainability and natural evolution of associations? Are associations on a never ending quest?  

Clare W. Graves was the psychologist who researched and discovered the system of human values, change and leadership, co-developed by Don Beck into what is now called Spiral Dynamics Integral.  Graves discovered that humans tend to alternate between “express” self stages of existence (where the individual has the locus of control) and “sacrifice” self stages of development (where the group has the locus of control). The dominance of self or group is what gives each culture and/or era its characteristic values, behaviors, rituals and practices. The underlying reason for the change of cultures across time turns out to be the changes of the life conditions supporting the human culture. History teaches us that as those conditions have complexified over time, people have responded by creating more and more complex cultures, ranging from families, clans, kingdoms, city-states, nations, multi-national treaties/pacts/leagues, right up to global organizations/alliances.  (It should be noted that on an individual level, within an individual life cycle the same pattern of progressive complexity emerges, alternating between express self and sacrifice self stages of individual development.) Spiral Dynamics Integral uses a set of colour codes to identify the different stages of cultural emergence.   

Life conditions change, because of the interaction of the culture with landscape, climate, ecology, and/or other groups of people (ie. cultures).  Ironically in order to survive, the culture is forced to adapt or die.  Survival is each culture’s (and species) ultimate goal.  Perhaps survival is also a clue to why Associations change?

 Returning to our friend the honey bee, we can really only understand the bee’s behavior, and discern its lessons for associations, if we grasp that the beehive has a survival strategy.  A beehive must produce 40 pounds of honey per year in order to survive. The survival strategy that the beehive has evolved depends on the performance of five roles: conformity enforcer, diversity generator, inner judge, resource shifter and intergroup tournament player.

It turns out that about 90% of the bee hive are conformity enforcers (CE).  They tend to fly to the same patch of flowers where they find abundant pollen. When these CE bees return to the hive with a full load of pollen, “dancing the directions” to the patch of flowers so other CE bees can match their productivity, the inner judges reward them with bee fuel (fill up their bee “gas tanks”) so they can return to the field for another load.

Meanwhile, it is the nature of diversity generator (DG) bees (only 5% of the hive) to fly to other sources of pollen.  They return to the hive where they are equally refueled for achieving their goals (but notice the DG’s are successful because they demonstrate behavioral flexibility -- they use a multiplicity of  bee “maps” different than those used by the CE bees).

Given that any patch of flowers, has a limited amount of pollen, eventually the CE bees return with less and less of a full load.  The inner judges recognize this lower production by withholding bee fuel; ie. they shift resources. This changes the state of the CE bees so that they no longer dance with sufficient energy to signal their CE siblings to return to the depleted field of flowers. In this “depressed state” the CE bees finally notice the only bees who are “fully charged” are their DG peers – who, fully fuelled, energetically “dance” directions to the new source of supply.  Finally the CE bees, whose life conditions have changed sufficiently to motivate them to change their behavior, fly in the direction indicated by the DG bees.   

Thus, in the bee community, both conformity enforcers and diversity generators are vital to survival.  Additionally, it should be noted that the hives in other fields are engaged in the same survival strategies and are co-creating competitive life conditions that amount to intergroup tournaments amongst the hives. This is the way that bees have naturally evolved to ensure the survival of their hives and their species. 

The pattern of emergence in human communities seems to follow a similar sequence.  We might think of the conformity enforcers as similar to cultures, eras or stages where the values of the group are enforced; and the diversity generators as similar to the cultures when the values of individuals are enforced.  Over time, we realize that both the human stages influenced by DG’s and those influenced by CE’s are vital to the long term survival of the human species. We can also see, in response to the increasing complexity of life conditions, that each culture emerges a greater complexity of community expression.  The culture’s rules, laws, rituals, structures, roles, learning competencies, assets and physical capacities are integral outcomes and expressions of the relationship between the group and the individual, as complexity increases.  The relationship is dynamic, because life conditions are dynamic.  And the work of our inner judges and resource shifters responds to life’s complexities and changes. 

The insights from Spiral Dynamics Integral give us a metaview that allows us to see patterns in the human condition that seem similar to patterns in other living systems, like the honey bees. Taking both contexts back to our Professional Associations what can we learn about the nature of change, values and leadership? 

Firstly we can see that Professional Associations emerge when a group of individual practitioners recognize, that life conditions have evolved where they can protect the standards of their practices, more effectively by forming an association, than by remaining as fragmented individuals. The purpose of the association is to maintain professional standards; ie. enforce conformity to standards. (In Spiral Dynamics Integral this is called the “blue” stage.) 

As life conditions change, the association generally must evolve to develop professional competencies; ensure that quality standards change to match new discoveries, technologies, territories and customer demands; and shift the association’s orientation from just establishing norms to seeking results and realizing bottom line objectives.  So associations create professional development opportunities for members and expand the association’s structure through the creation of committees, hiring staff and/or out sourcing of responsibilities. They invite diversity generators to share their new practices, discoveries, theories, ideas, etc.  (In Spiral Dynamics Integral this is called the “orange” stage.) 

Increasing emphasis on results oriented development can often create the conditions in an association for individuals to emerge as leaders, stars and/or strategists (even manipulators).  Also associations may discover that tensions arise between conformity enforcers (who guard the purpose and intentions from the early history of the association) and the diversity generators, who have expanded territory, introduced a competitive spirit and who want change that allows individuals to flourish.

 At this stage it is typical for associations, to experience the conflicts of two “paradigms” co-existing under the same roof – the one supporting the group, the other championing the individual. This tension will then cause the evolution of the next phase of the association’s life, which will be to embrace the plurality of rules, relationships and opportunities by calling a truce to intra-association conflicts. This stage is often characterized by egalitarian elimination of hierarchies, a profusion of meetings, events, compromises and lack of direction or strategy. (In Spiral Dynamics Integral this is called the “green” stage.) 

Eventually, if the association does not die from ineffectiveness or inefficiency (because the “green” way of doing business can often imperil its financial assets and/or stability) the diversity generators in the association, who value the association both as a bench marker of quality and competence, and as a cross-roads for leading edge practitioners, cause the shifting of resources so that new systems support a collection of individuals, networked by technology, committed to excellence and highly ethical practice, all of whom recognize such a loose/tight association is in their own best interests as globally connected practitioners. (In Spiral Dynamics Integral this is called the “yellow” stage.) 

At this stage, where some of the more progressive associations have arrived today, the values from all four “paradigms” have self-organized so that they co-exist – supporting group performance, promoting individual development, and often starting to develop regional interconnections and/or alliances with complementary associations.  

When we look at the patterns of human emergence, we can surmise that the association is no doubt on a never ending quest.  The emergence of alliances (occurring with a few leading edge associations) seems eventually to create conditions where the regional communities of practice merge into global alliances. (In Spiral Dynamics Integral this is called the “turquoise” stage.) 

So what can associations learn from the spiral dynamic patterns of bees and humans? They can seek the answers to questions like these: 

• What is the association’s purpose? (What is its 40 pounds of honey?)
• How is the purpose translated into the association’s survival goals?
• What roles does the association ask of its members? Who are the conformity enforcers, diversity generators, inner judges, resource shifters? Where are the intergroup tournaments?
• What does the association require members to conform to? What are the standards for performance, participation? What percentage are conformity enforcers?
• How does the association ensure diversity generation? How does it incubate diversity and bring it back to the association’s core to aid sustainability and survival? What percentage are diversity generators?
• Who/where are the inner judges in the Association?
• What are the triggers in the Association that cause judges to shift resources? What are the times, places, seasons for this to happen?

Ultimately , the Association should discover where its learning edge is. With key stakeholders (including conformity enforcers, diversity generators, inner judges and resource shifters) it should assess its cultural values from its blue, orange, green, yellow, or even turquoise stages.  With the lessons of Spiral Dynamics Integral a healthy association can learn from the patterns that  have made it successful, and identify the new capacities it needs to develop for future emergence.

Sense in the City Archives

Home

World Planners Take a Momentous Leap: Reinventing Planning

September, 2006, © Marilyn Hamilton PhD CGA

Planning professionals at the World Planners Congress took a momentous leap into the 21C, by reinventing planning in June 2006 at their Vancouver convention. The world's professional planning bodies collectively endorsed the Vancouver Declaration, committing planning professionals around the world to tackle the challenges of rapid urbanization. Simply looking at three major challenges addressed by the planners -- climate change, poverty and HIV-AIDS – we see that they are momentous in scope, interconnected in cause and only addressable with an integral whole systems approach. 

1. Planners recognized their role in combating climate change (exacerbated by urban heat sinks) and avoiding risks posed by natural disasters. Stating that, "unless urban areas can be made more sustainable, and rural life more tolerable, the legacy of negative environmental and social costs will become irreversible" if current trends go unchecked. 

Combating climate change requires not only addressing the objective causes: the burning of more fossil fuel than the environment can recycle without building up levels of CO2 that accumulate in the atmosphere as greenhouse gas. Combating climate change requires engaging with the subjective reasons that people choose to engage in the harmful behaviour.  When we scan the globe, we see that the reasons for behaviours stem from simple needs to survive (warmth and cooking fires) to complicated commercial endeavours (to supply the industrial complex) to complex research projects (to conquer outer space). It becomes apparent that planners will not be able to address climate change with a single argument, message or strategy. As Dennis Mileti made apparent with his new book “Disasters by Design”, planners need the perspectives of 30,000 feet and the innovative practices from a whole new paradigm of capacity, capability and delivery that are as appropriate for emergency response as they are for everyday living.  

David Johnston, of “What’s Working” advocates that planners will need skills that combine complex technical capacity with sophisticated (Spiral Dynamics Integral) communications competency. 

2. Planners committed to address the urbanization of poverty -- it is estimated by 2020, that 50% of the world's urban population will live in poverty.  

As the world’s population continues to urbanize, planners may find the very name of their profession to be an oxymoron. Urbanization is a paradox where even the definition of “urban” varies from country to country – some defining it by population size, others by infrastructure build-out, others by space covered. How can the profession “plan” when the objectives and criteria have no standards? 

It is estimated, before 2020, that planners need to respond to and/or plan for the equivalent of seven new mega-cities (total additional urban population of 70 million people) whose residents will be largely poor.  They will need to understand why people prefer the life conditions of poverty in the city, over life conditions of poverty in rural settings.  Planners will have to consider how to address and engage human consciousness, capabilities and capacities to aid them in their momentous planning tasks.

Only by taking an intersubjective (eg. our beliefs about happiness, consumerism, relationships) as well as interobjective approach (eg. shelter, food, water, waste , economic systems)  to poverty, will planners be able to design complex approaches sufficient to meet the multiple habitats, climates and cultures on earth.  Moreover, in addressing the needs of poverty and creating new mega-cities, planners will need to recognize the interconnection of new cities that contribute to global warming.  Whole new technologies and design principles will need to be discovered to make the old unworkable solutions obsolete (thank you Buckminster Fuller). 

The whole profession of planning will need to learn quickly, share widely and develop a broad spectrum of complex adaptive responses in order to avoid the pitfalls described by Jared Diamond (“Collapse”) and Ronald Wright (“A Short History of Progress”).  By taking a complex adaptive approach to their work, planners will have a framework that allows them to “Plan for the Unplanned” (Inam) as a way of life.

3. The third issue identified at the Congress, corroborated the vital role that planners will need to play in the human health issue of HIV-AIDS. In achieving global sustainability, Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa, reminded planners they have important ethical contributions to make in alleviating the social, economic and ecological imbalances rapidly resulting from the AIDS pandemic.  

Planners, whose roles have been traditionally answerable to political mandates, must vigorously counteract political erosion of systematic and systemic policies and action. This new role for planners will no doubt cause considerable discomfort to those whose professional training has relied more on technical and structural design, rather  than knowledge of human subjective and intersubjective systems (ie. how people think; how we develop relationships; the power of culture).  

Lewis knows well that it is human values, beliefs and worldviews that underlie the global attitude and strategies to address HIV-AIDS. Once again, with this issue, planners are being asked to step outside the comfort zone of tradition, training and practice. Like the interconnection of poverty and climate change, the issue of HIV-AIDS is intimately and intricately linked to poverty (the poorest nations of the world have the highest rates; and with globalization (the rest of the world’s is inevitably threatened directly and indirectly).  Also HIV-AIDS is affected by climate change as many of the countries most threatened by rising sea levels, drought and/or severe weather are the same countries where the incidence of the disease is highest.  

Thus, planners cannot address one of these three issues, without facing the challenges of the others. Planners will need leadership, capacity development and a community of practice to provide support for such a major and vital shift in professional paradigm.

The New Urban Planning rejects the technocratic model of social change and professionalism and embraces the need for skills, expertise, inclusive entrepreneurial and cultural involvement and evidence-based policy making. It reinvents planning by combining long term awareness with short term practical actions. It can only be achieved by courage, commitment, vision and integral whole system approaches that engage subjective, intersubjective, objective and interobjective capacities. 

For Integral information and action:

AQAL - Link to Flex and Flo for Personal Actions on Climate Change.

UL/LL - Click here to read a draft of The Vancouver Declaration.

UL - Go see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” about climate change.

LL/LR - Read “Collapse” by Jared Diamond.

LL/LR - Read "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright

LL/LR - Read “Planning for the Unplanned” by Aseem Inam.

LR - Read “Disasters by Design” by Dennis Mileti.

AQAL - Check out: www.whatsworking.com

 

Sense in the City Archives

Home

Sustainable Beehives: Lessons and Strategies for Sustainable Cities?

July 15, 2006, © Marilyn Hamilton PhD CGA

The honey bee has lessons for understanding human systems – including sustainable cities.

To understand the bee’s behavior, and discern its lessons for human systems, we first must grasp that the beehive has a survival goal.  A beehive must produce 40 pounds of honey per year in order to survive. The survival strategy that the beehive has evolved depends on the performance of five roles (Bloom, 2000): conformity enforcer, diversity generator, inner judge, resource shifter and intergroup tournament player.

 It turns out that about 90% of the beehive are conformity enforcers (CE).  They tend to fly to the same patch of flowers where they find abundant pollen. When these CE bees return to the hive with a full load of pollen, “dancing the directions” to the patch of flowers so other CE bees can match their productivity, the inner judges reward them with bee fuel (fill up their bee “gas tanks”) so they can return to the field for another load.  

Meanwhile, it is the nature of diversity generator (DG) bees (only 5% of the hive) to fly to other sources of pollen.  They return to the hive where they are equally refueled for achieving their goals (but notice the DG’s are successful because they demonstrate behavioral flexibility -- they use a multiplicity of  bee “maps” different than those used by the CE bees). 

Given that any patch of flowers, has a limited amount of pollen, eventually the CE bees return with less and less of a full load.  The inner judges recognize this lower production by instructing the resource allocators to withhold bee fuel; ie. they shift resources. This changes the state of the CE bees so that they no longer dance with sufficient energy to signal their CE siblings to return to the depleted field of flowers. In this “depressed state” the CE bees finally notice the only bees who are “fully charged” are their DG peers – who, fully fuelled, energetically “dance” directions to the new source of supply.  Finally the CE bees, whose life conditions have changed sufficiently to motivate them to change their behavior, fly in the direction indicated by the DG bees. 

 Thus, in the bee community, both conformity enforcers and diversity generators are vital to survival.  Additionally, it should be noted that the hives in other fields are engaged in the same survival strategies and are co-creating competitive life conditions that amount to intergroup tournaments amongst the hives. This is the way that bees have naturally evolved to ensure the survival of their hives, their species and the environment (which they pollinate for sustainable future resourcing).

The pattern of emergence in human communities seems to follow a similar sequence.  We might think of the conformity enforcers as similar to cultures, eras or stages where the values of the group are enforced; and the diversity generators as similar to the cultures, eras or stages when the values of individuals are enforced. In any given culture, era or stage there is a survival goal that is defined explicitly and implicitly as the key survival value (see Figure 1).

Over time, we realize that both the human stages influenced by DG’s and those influenced by CE’s are vital to the long term survival of the human species. We can also see, in response to the increasing complexity of life conditions, that each culture, era and stage emerges a greater complexity of community expression.  The rules, laws, rituals, structures, roles, learning competencies, assets and physical capacities are integral outcomes and expressions of the relationship between the group and the individual, as complexity increases.  The relationship is dynamic, because life conditions are dynamic.  And the work of our inner judges and resource shifters responds to life’s complexities and changes in order to keep us focused on the key organizing principle or “on goal”. 

The insights from Spiral Dynamics Integral give us a metaview that allows us to see patterns in the human condition that seem similar to patterns in other living systems, like the honey bees. 

Several decades before Bloom contemplated the wisdom of bees, Clare Graves (2003) in the 1960’s and 1970’s conducted an 18 year study that ended in a theory that explained the “evolutionary complex levels of human existence”.  Graves’ research, showed that human behaviors arising out of one set of conditions created problems of existence that could not be solved at that level. As a result new adaptive behaviors are called into existence. Graves identified a group-centric cluster of behaviors he called “sacrifice self” values; and an individual-centric cluster of behaviors he called “express self” values.  Moreover, his research showed that these behaviors adapted and alternated with one another at an ever increasing levels of complexity, as life conditions changed. Graves used a set of identifiers to represent life conditions (designated by letters from the first half of the alphabet) and bio-psycho-cultural-social human existence (designated by letters from the second half of the alphabet) (see Figure 1). Beck and Cowan (1996) and Beck (2002) have devised the Spiral Dynamics system of colour codes to identify each level of complexity: beige, red, orange, yellow (ie. warm colours) relate to “express self” versions of existence; purples, blue, green, turquoise (ie. cool colours) relate to “sacrifice self” versions of existence.

Figure 1: Levels of Complexity (adapted from Beck, 2002)

Express Self	Organizing Principle Of Life Condition	Sacrifice Self	Organizing Principle Of Life Condition
AN - Beige	Survival
		BO- Purple	Belonging
CP - Red	Command & Control
		DQ - Blue	Authoritarian Structure
ER - Orange	Economic Success
		FS - Green	Humanitarian Equality
GT - Yellow	Systemic Flex & Flow
		HU - Turquoise	Planetary Commons

Holling (2001) suggests that humans as complex adaptive living systems are evolving a “panarchy” of capacities. He explains that a panarchy is the “hierarchical structure in which systems of nature … and humans … as well as combined human-nature systems … and social-ecological systems are interlinked in never-ending adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring and renewal”. Like Wilber (1996) and Graves (2003), Holling proposes that these transformational cycles are nested at ever-increasing scales of complexity.  He suggests that wealth (potential), controllability (connectedness) and adaptive capacity (resilience) are the “properties that shape the responses of ecosystems, agencies and people to crisis”. 

The basic resilience loop in Holling’s model describes two separate objectives: maximizing production and accumulation (stages 1 and 2 – and similar to Bloom’s conformity enforcement) followed by maximizing invention and reassortment (stages 3 and 4 – similar to Bloom’s diversity generation).  Holling proposes that the success at achieving one objective sets the stage for success at achieving the next objective in an endless figure 8 “panarchic” cycle. The functioning of those cycles and the communication between them determines the sustainability of a system.” (p. 396)

Because the dominant behaviors in human systems, like cities, arise in response to life conditions each level of existence behaves with increasing levels of complexity in order to maximize the organizing principle (or value) of the current life condition.  This behaviour results in a tendency to protect the status quo at its current level of complexity. In Bloom’s terms this could be interpreted as conformity enforcement (of the organizing principle / value). 

Thus a tension in favour of the values and behaviour that is most coherent with the current life conditions, will be demonstrated as conformity enforcement.  The flip side of this behavior is that the dominant culture, like the beehive, will also ignore and/or protect itself against diversity generation, until such time as life conditions require the solutions that diversity generation can offer to the problems created by maximizing the values and organizing principles in play at any level of existence. This very natural process can set up the conditions for the healthy, evolutionary, upshifting emergence of the integral city (like Vancouver or Seattle) or the unhealthy, chaotic, downshifting degeneration of the urban human system (like New Orleans).

Indeed the recent exploration  by Jared Diamond (2005, p. 11) of the conditions for sustainable human existence, details a long history of failure by humans to understand that their societies, cities, homes and very lives depend on goals embedded in the deep and tangled interconnections of five factors: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners and society’s response.  Diamond cites the repeated blindness of societies to grasp the implications of their short term behaviours as the ultimate price paid for their long term survivability.  He describes in horrific detail the histories of societal “Collapse” from the south Pacific to the north Atlantic to Latin America. He warns that these historical instances of goal blindness may be more than metaphorical warnings for the continuation of life on earth. 

Likewise, Laszlo (2006), a worthy inner judge for the human condition, reminds us that “No new chapter in human civilization will ever emerge if we just sit around with our hands in our laps waiting for a holistic convergence that will foster a new way of thinking [aka an appropriate new goal]. A critical mass of people in society must stand up to make it happen [ie. change the goal to suit the life conditions]. That means you and me, and many others around the planet. And now is the time to get started.”

It seems that Laszlo, Graves, Bloom, Holling and Diamond have come to similar conclusions. Life conditions change, because of the interaction of the bio-psycho-cultural-social human systems with landscape, climate, ecology, and/or other groups of people (ie. cultures).  Ironically in order to survive, both individuals and groups in the global human system must now pay attention to the diversity generators who are pointing us to new sustainable behaviours if our cities, societies and planet are to survive – our ultimate goal.  We must make some conscious choices about the appropriate goal orientation for human systems before our current enforcement of old conformities forces us to adapt or die. 

Perhaps the lessons of the honey bee can inform us of the simple rules to which we need to pay attention in order to prevent the collapse of human systems and understand the principles of sustainability for our cities?  Perhaps, like the bees, the strategy that human systems need to adopt is to contribute to the thriving of the environment which supports us and by doing so we will naturally contribute to the thriving of our cities?

Ervin Laszlo (2006) provides us life giving “bee-inspired” directions (parenthetical comments added):

1. Let go of old beliefs that no longer make sense (discard linear mechanistic worldviews and embrace the wisdom of natural systems for survival).
2. Think globally, act morally (– both individuals and collectives at all stages of development need to live with a whole systems awareness).
3. Dream—and take your dreams seriously  (to generate life-saving diversity and life-respecting sustainable conformity)

4. Evolve your consciousness. (If the intelligence of bees enables thriving of their hives, species and environment, surely the intelligence of humans can enable the thriving of our cities, species and environment.)

 

REFERENCES

Beck D., Natural Designs and MeshWORKS™: Creating our Region’s Tomorrow through Second Tier Leadership, Organizational Foresight and Integral Alliances, The Spiral Dynamics Group, 2004

Beck, D., Spiral Dynamics in the Integral Age, 2002a, p. 3

Beck, D., The Color of Constellations: A Spiral Dynamics Perspective on Human Drama, 2002b 

Beck, D., Stages of Social Development: The Cultural Dynamics that Spark Violence, Spread Prosperity and Shape Globalization, 2001 

Beck, D., Cowan, C., Spiral Dynamics,  Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 1996 

Bloom H., The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, John Wiley & Son Inc., New York, 2000 

Capra, Web of Life, Anchor Book, Doubleday, New York, 1996 

Diamond, J., Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking - The Penguin Group, New York, 2005 

Graves, C.W., Levels of Human Existence, Eclet Publishing, Santa Barbara, 2003  

Hamilton, Marilyn and Barry Stevenson, How Does Complexity Inform Community?  How does Community Inform Complexity?, (Emergence, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2001, pp.57 – 77) 

Holling, C.S.  Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems, Ecosystems (2001). Vol. 4,  pp. 390-405 

Laszlo, Ervin. (2006), The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads, Hampton Roads 

Wilber, K, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, Shambhala Publications Inc., 1996

Sense in the City Archives

Home

City Wellbeing Indicators Well Served by the Integral Framework: Recommendation to WUF3

October, 2006, © Marilyn Hamilton PhD CGA

Introduction

At the World Urban Forum 3 (WUF3) in Vancouver in June 2006, the World Bank, UN-Habitat and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities presented their report on the current state of development of city indicators (From Now to Nanjing). They divulged the plethora of indicators they had identified, related to objective and interobjective data and they even argued in favour of a new set of indicators related to subjective wellbeing.  However, none of their frameworks offered the possibility of merging and comparing the subjective/intersubjective data with objective/interobjective data. And none of their data analysis approaches had derived a set of meta-indicators that would enable them to do so.

The Integral Framework offers the power and flexibility of providing a basis for comprehensively developing and measuring the wellbeing of all human systems in the urban (and rural) setting.  The Integral Framework has the capacity to integrate multiple databases, benchmarks, values and intentions into a system that transcends and includes both subjective/intersubjective and objective/interobjective data.

 

Why Do We Need Meta-Frameworks for City Indicators?

When a developer, governance authority, or elected official makes a promise to citizens, he/she relies on others (the local municipal manager, officials and technical and administrative staff) to implement the promise.  Often with the greatest commitment and resources available, goals do not turn into the intended results.   

Integral Geographer, Brian Eddy’s (2005) research has shown how people 'think' about regions and places, and what we 'say' about them (i.e. whether things are good, bad, or otherwise) -  depends in part, on what 'boundaries' we use to define them - both physically in the exterior world, conceptually in our mental models, and existentially in our values, worldviews and projections of reality. Eddy’s research suggests that many sustainability and development issues are a continuation of 'boundary-conflicts' among projections of various levels of consciousness and cultural development.   Eddy notes that, “These cognitive and existential  boundary conflicts manifest in the exterior world in a variety of complex ways - so much so that only an integral approach can begin to adequately  address issues of sustainability with development in geopolitical contexts at different scales of interaction.”  This important insight, combined with 20 years professional experience in working with a vast array of geoinformation, allows Eddy to assess well being, sustainability and development on regional to global scales.   

Policy, strategy or planning, gives rise to management and organizational structures, infrastructures and service provision, all of which have a positive or negative impact on the economy, environment, culture, social structure as well as on worldviews and behaviours of people. These can be measured with a variety of methods through quantitative and qualitative measurements and converted into indicators using appropriate frameworks. 

At the same time in order to evaluate and benchmark local development it is necessary to measure also the effectiveness and efficiency of service provision, management structures, policies etc against objectives and outcomes (performance indicators, outcome mapping, etc.. 

Given the complexity of the measured reality and the large number of possible economic, environmental, socio-cultural indicators at local and regional level, a limited number of key- or meta-indicators have to be developed and chosen as well as internal and external benchmarks. From these meta-indicators and the results from benchmarking, policy recommendation can be drawn up.  

As outlined below the use of the integral approach would ideally give rise to indicators, benchmarks and policy recommendations that point to a more integral view of the situation in the communities and cities in any given region.

This comprehensive information on the state of community and city development can facilitate trend analysis and make the interconnectedness tangible for the different economic, socio-cultural and environmental phenomena arising from the implementation of sectoral policies.  

What is the Integral Framework?

"Integral" means "inclusive, balanced, comprehensive."  Integral proposes that everyone is right some of the time!! However, the Integral approach recognizes that all “rightness” is partial and therefore offers only piecemeal approaches to complex problems that are ineffective. Partial and fragmented approaches need to be replaced by solutions that are more comprehensive, systematic, and encompassing—in other words “integral”.  This premise applies to both individual issues of meaning and transformation or increasingly complex social problems such as unemployment, over-population, housing, ecology, and education.

The integral framework is a type of comprehensive map of human capacities[1] created by an extensive cross-cultural comparison of human capacities. By learning to use this map any researcher,  practitioner or decision-maker can fairly easily adopt a more comprehensive, effective, and integrally informed approach to specific problems and their solutions—from business to politics, from health to education, psychology to ecology

An integral framework utilizes four quadrants as lenses to examine individual, social and environmental phenomena.  The quadrants are grounded in all human experience and action.

Figure 1 shows the multiple dimensions of individual, family and social systems. These dimensions have been investigated through analysis, implementation and evaluation in hundreds of paradigms, methodologies and forms of inquiry such as:

Upper Left/Subjective (aesthetic): phenomenology, psychotherapy, meditation, emotional intelligence, personal transformation
Upper Right/Objective (natural sciences): empiricism, scientific analysis, quality control, behavioural modification
Lower Left/Intersubjective (humanities): multiculturalism, postmodernism, worldviews, corporate culture, collective values
Lower Right/Interobjective (hard sciences): systems theory, social systems analysis, techno-economic modes, communication networks, systems analysis

Figure 1: Integral Framework [2]

 

(It should also be noted that all major human languages recognize the integral, with first-, second-, and third-person perspectives (for example the pronouns: I, you/we, it, its/those). These four basic dimensions of reality show up in human  knowledge systems as aesthetics or fine arts, humanities, natural sciences and hard sciences.)

Thus, the Integral approach attempts to identify all of the important variables that are contributing to any situation in each of the four Quadrants 

How Does the Integral Framework Recognize Complexity?

An Integral framework can reflect multiple levels of complexity in living systems at all the scales in  the following human systems: 

• Individual
• Family
• Workplace / Healthcare Systems / Education Systems
• Community
• Greater Municipal Region
• Eco-Region
• Province
• Nation
• Globe

The key point to recognize with human systems (such as workplaces, communities and cities) is that they tend to be holonic and fractal and as they develop they tend to become increasingly:

• supportive of individual diversity, traits & behaviour (Upper Right: actions)

• empowering of individual and group intentions & development (Upper  and Lower Left: experience)

• economically connected, with potentials to become increasingly effective and efficient (Lower Right: productive actions)

• mutuality-seeking thus broadening moral, cultural and relationship span (Lower Left: relational experiences)

• self-generating, self-renewing and innovative

• encompassing of a longer time horizon

• impactful over a longer time span

• able to act locally while influencing a progressively larger spatial horizon

• impactful of a larger and more spatially distributed population

• interconnected in their capacities (within the local landscape and to distant places)

Thus more complex levels of organization/community/city transcend and include less complex levels of organization/community/city. Moreover these shifts are measurable and comparable across the quadrants. 

The Integral framework makes possible the Integral Scorecard (discussed below) and recognizes the fractal nature of  scaled development of communities and cities in the way that it rolls up data vertically and relates data horizontally across all quadrants.  Thus the Integral model is often referred to as AQAL (all quadrants, all levels). (Wilber, 1996, 2000; Hamilton, 2005, 2006a, 2006b) 

How Does the Integral Model Reframe the Frameworks ?

The Integral Model reframes most of the models used to present and measure the relationships of economics, social and environmental factors within sustainability (Hamilton 2006a). 

Firstly the Integral Model recontexts the traditional sustainability model by placing the social and economic factors within the context of the environment as in Figure 2. This basically allows us to see the relationship of the I/WE cultural social experiences in relationship to the IT/ITS economic actions. Furthermore we can see that they are BOTH governed by the larger context of the environmental life conditions. The direction of growth and complexity for both human experiences and human actions is outward from the centre of the quadrants – as shown by the arrows.

Figure 2: Integral Sustainability Framework

 

What are the Benefits of the Integral Framework ?

An Integral approach recognizes the plurality of developmental capacities of all individual and collective stakeholders. This plurality can be described in many layers (3, 4, 8, etc.), but one of the most concise recognizes the four levels of development (or complexity) represented by the Traditional, Modern, Post-Modern and Integral perspectives. As Figure 3 shows these levels of complexity are present in all four quadrants .  In creating an Integral Scorecard all these four quadrants and levels can be honoured and incorporated into measures of sustainability. At the same time no indicator needs to be abandonned or omitted – instead all of the indicators can be situated within the framework to show more or less detail (granularity) depending on the scale of observation. 

Each of these developmental levels has its own patterns of worldviews, values, healthy expressions and unhealthy resistances to supporting sustainability or wellbeing as shown in Table 1.  As a result each has its own set of measures.  An Integral Scorekeeper would recognize the value of each measure because he/she would relate them to the appropriate: habitats; systematic structures; rational, scientific, economies; diverse cultures and peoples; and complex, systemic, adaptive,dynamics. In doing so he/she would be able to see the patterns related to the healthy expressions of sustainability and as well as the unhealthy blocks to sustainabiblity.

Figure 3: Levels of Development in Four Quadrants

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 1: Integral Approach to Frameworks for Measuring Sustainable Well Being at Key levels of Complexity [3]

Level of Complexity	Motivation for Sustainable Well Being	Sample Measures: Healthy Expression	Sample Measures: Unhealthy Blocks
Traditional	·    Over consumption today will affect people we know and care about including children and grandchildren. ·    We have a responsibility to care for our world and the world we’ll leave them	·    Defined structures. ·    Stability and order. ·    Upholding family values. ·    Recognizing greater good. ·    Belonging is important. ·    Responsibility and good organization.	·    Rigidity ·    Excessive control ·    Overly bureaucratic ·    Inflexible policies
Modern	·    We can master the technical challenge of environmental damage. ·    There is a competitive advantage and opportunities in sustainability. Others value and want well being. ·    We can prevent damage by managing climate change, overpopulation, resource scarcity. ·    It’s rational to care for environment, and support human rights. ·    We can influence policy development. ·    We can minimize future risks.	·    Enhancing living through planning and technology. ·    Dedicatatioin to success. ·    Logical policies and development. ·    Development and use of best practices.	·    Aggressive competition for limited resources. ·    Political gamesmanship. ·    Over consumption.
Postmodern	·    Consider how our actions will affect 7 generations from now. ·    Community partnerships make sense to solve problems together. ·    We have a responsibility to the community, and each other. ·    We owe the future.