This is a long and slightly old thread, so apologies if I’ve missed anything above covering this already, but I thought I’d put on my English Theorist hat and try to translate what Robb Smith said since that seemed to be causing some confusion (and understandably so – he should in no way, shape, or form be the public voice of the Integral Movement as he doesn’t exhibit understanding of how to simplify jargonized language). Hopefully I’ll do a good job since it’s commonly my task as a minister to try to break down complex ideas about consciousness into language that can be most broadly understood.
Let me try to handle this bit by bit. I’m probably going to break this into parts because I’m already an hour in and I would very much like to go hiking on my day off today 
"The main problem with Teal org community… inadequate knowledge transparency & coordination of interventions mechanism"
What I think he’s saying here is that Integral knowledge is challenging to communicate. This, I think, points back to one of the major shadow issues with Yellow / Teal, and that is the inability to communicate in language that prior rungs of the ladder can understand and digest. The biggest thing Integral leaders need to remember (and this is covered at length in Beck & Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics text) is that we are presenting not just a completely different paradigm to the Tier 1 worldviews, but a completely different paradigm of worldviews. IE, the whole idea that there are multiple valid worldviews that all offer truth (albeit partial) is not something Tier 1 is good at handling without extensive, simplified explanation. And, of course, the other shadow piece with Tier 2 is that I think we forget that Tier 1 worldviews need to be open to receiving that knowledge (another aspect that Spiral Dynamics teaches well, I think).
"This is a software problem…"
Honestly, not sure how this is a software problem. It’s actually a people problem. I don’t know if he was using software as a metaphor here or if he meant it literally. If he’s thinking about social media or something like it as a means for connecting disparate Integral communities and individual holons, that’s an admirable idea, but he needs to understand that software won’t solve every problem. This very forum is meant to be a place for Integralists to come together and discuss, but we have seen some of the very problems here as well that he is calling out. Forum software isn’t solving our problems (as evidenced by the increase of trolling and lack of a cohesive “Let’s all agree to work on this very important Integral task” mission), and I suspect that’s because a discussion forum (or any other text-focused platform) can’t cover all of AQAL. Our brains also process read text differently than face to face human interactions, and thus the work in a purely software space likely will be more partial than work that includes the human interaction space as well (unless the software could be designed in a way to better include the human side, which I’m not sure is fully possible with current technology).
"Not just a lesson on movements… they need to be downcoded for more simple & concrete enaction…"
I’m going to go into my ego a bit here: Robb needs to take his own advice. The jargon in this Tweet is almost border-lining on the “Hey, I’m erudite, look at my language mastery!”
Ego reactions aside, if I were to break this down (“downcode” it, in Robb’s words), I would say he’s telling us exactly what I mentioned in the previous breakdown – we need to de-jargon Integral and find ways to make it communicable and digestible for the masses that are still living in Tier 1.
"The other super hard problem is the epistemology of goodness… this problem is a monster… Chinese farmer"
Not as much translating needed here. This is, admittedly, a problem philosophy, religion, and the social sciences have been tackling for thousands of years. To assume that progress hasn’t been made, though, I think is a fallacy. The vast majority of people can agree that murder, is bad, for example, and so by inference, not murdering people is a good thing. That’s why most countries have laws making murder the highest crime one can commit.
When approaching “goodness,” I think the best we can do at Integral thinking is to do exactly that – the best we are able to, with the information we have at the Tier of thinking we’re at. Because Integral has a systems based approach to goodness, then that’s the tool we have to use. But flailing over what goodness is is likely going to be more of a distraction than an aid in our movement. Let’s make a map of goodness through an Integral lens and follow it, and bake in “continuous improvement” as a core feature of our map as we discover new aspects of reality.
"Chinese Farmer"
Here is a brief version of this, if my Googling was correct –
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.
“Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“Maybe,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy for what they called his “misfortune.”
“Maybe,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
“Maybe,” said the farmer.
This is postmodern relativism at its core. That’s not Tier 2, and this may be a shadow aspect of Integral in these leaders that hasn’t been dealt with yet. Ken covers how previous rungs of the ladder can fall into our shadow if we don’t evolve to the next rung properly in Religion of Tomorrow. It also ties into what I discussed above about how we seem to fall into analysis paralysis a lot. I especially witnessed this in my information technology work at Chicago Public Schools, where we most often worked at the Green level of flattened egalitarian collaboration, and where I often had to push hard for a decision… otherwise nothing would ever get done.
"Privately… Transformational Thesis… implicate TT [Transformational Thesis]… encourage them to explicate… etc"
So, he’s talking with Teal leaders and trying to get a solid plan. Admirable task, but not something that any one Teal leader is going to have, I think. What we need to understand at Teal is that no one person is going to have the master plan. Hence, the need for Integral leaders to come together and try to find the root paths that will make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time (in my opinion).
He then goes on to say that he asks them to get into specificity given their Integral plans tend to be fuzzy, which is likely, I think, part of the problem with Teal and Tier 2 right now – there is so much to carry in one’s mind with systems thinking that I wonder how well a single human mind can cover it all. Some, like Ken Wilber, do very well (and understandably so, since Ken Wilber has done the most Integral thinking of anyone I know), but the majority of us at this level I think are going to struggle to hold it all in mind. Robb also talks about what seems to be the analysis-paralysis I see with Integral right now, where we’re stuck trying to systems-analyze the whole world in support of making the “Integral-correct” decision, when sometimes you just have to make a decision and see what happens. If the United States had fallen into analysis paralysis in World War 2, for example, we might all be speaking German right now. This is something where the impulsiveness of Red thinking can be good when cultivated in healthy ways, and so I sometimes think Tier 2 needs to be clear of whether or not it’s created an allergy to that aspect of Red.
"The power of them… when viewed through integral pluralism, is vast… precise hypothesized mechanisms of system/holon transformation (or new translation), allowing for prioritization of multifaceted, multilevel, multiquad integral strategies."
Yeah, lots of jargon here. Basically, he’s talking about the power of Integral Transformational Theses, or the idea of basic Integral plans to foster the needed transformation for worldview evolution to Tier 2. The latter half is basically covering AQAL but not calling it AQAL.
"This problem is also emblematic of a movement that has immense identity cohesion–indeed, its primary differentiable asset in a post-Amber world–but, due to the complexity of the worldspace, minimal social cohesion, little to no task cohesion, norcongruent incentive… [I assume it then moves on to the next Tweet as one paragraph… this is why Twitter should *never* be used to try to convey complex ideas, by the way!] …Many maps, many perspectives, many media drops into a Green infoscape… but little group theory-learning that becomes action-coordated interventions based on well-articulated & integrally metatheorized transformational theses."
I’m going to back and say that Robb really needs to learn to get to the root language of his ideas and convey them in a way that isn’t buried in jargon. That said, what I think he’s trying to say here is that because of the complexity of the world – which Integral will see much more clearly than Tier 1 worldviews – there is a danger that we can fall back into Green flat-landing where we can be tempted to homogenize all the various ideas we see in Integral, rather than identifying and prioritizing the ideas that will have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time. It’s possible that he’s calling out that same Green shadow aspect of Tier 2 I mentioned above. In layman’s terms, he’s saying that we need to do our homework, not get caught up in false equanimity of ideas, and then make concrete plans that most (because we won’t all) agree on, and then act on them. He’s basically saying we need to make up our minds at the movement-holon-level and do something.
"In one sense this is understandable… predictable stage 2 (differentiation) of its own social maturation (after leaving stage 1 identity)… needs to move to stage 3… problem of diverse reintegration."
I’m actually quite fond of this analysis, even if it’s still steeped in jargon. What I believe he’s saying is that it’s a natural aspect of evolution from Tier 1 thinking to Tier 2 that we would focus on what makes us different. In many ways, that is exactly how Red ego development differentiates itself from the prior mythical/magical levels. Jacques Lacan, I think, offered some of the best work on the “mirror stage” of human development, most often taking place during early childhood development, where we as little humans start to separate “us” from “the world / the other”. What if this is true for a movement from Tier 1 to Tier 2, as well, and there is a sort of Red-like “mirror stage” where we now are differentiating “us-as-Tier 2-thinking” with “them-as-Tier 1-thinking”? I’ve been pondering this for a while, and it seems that Robb may also have been sensing this.
When he speaks of us evolving to Stage 3, I’m not exactly sure where Stage 3 is referring, but I suspect he’s saying that we need to fully integrate the prior Tier 1 worldviews for us to complete our transition out of analysis paralysis. It’s the idea of moving from differentiation of worldviews to actually choosing to employ the true and useful aspects of those worldviews in decision making. This is what I was talking about above when I said that we may benefit from healthy Red decisiveness and to examine any lingering shadow aspects from Red, Amber, Orange, Green, etc that could be influencing us without our knowledge.
"Instructive to compare to the speed… blockchain, which had high task cohesion…"
Yeah, this is where I disagree. Maybe this was the “software solution” he talked about? Blockchain isn’t really Integral in my mind; it’s a weird mesh of Orange and Green as software, in the sense that it’s only approaching things economically speaking. And not all blockchain development has been successful, or approached even in an Integral way. Some blockchain projects were created by a single person. Blockchain has been successful mainly due to the economic incentive, and doesn’t really do much at all in other quadrants of AQAL.
That said, I think he’s probably trying to communicate that there is an opportunity within the Integral community to get to the “core needs” for advancement. The needs themselves, I suspect, are rather simple (as most human and natural needs are), and where Integral can help best with them is by starting to put the larger puzzle together (rather than looking at all the pieces separately and then trying to analyze in our minds what the puzzle should look like, without actually starting to attach the pieces).
Phew. Okay, looks like I made it all the way through. I hope my analysis was good and my ego didn’t go too nuts on this. I think Robb is onto something here, even if I’m beating him up for trying to be far too overtly erudite in his communication.
