About the Blog

Cultural Maturity—A Blog for the Future—is a contribution of the Institute for Creative Development, a Seattle-based, non-profit, non-partisan, think tank and center for advanced leadership training. The blog’s purpose is to support a mature understanding of the times in which we live and the sophistication of decision-making needed for a vital and creative human future.

The Institute’s work centers around the recognition that the future will require not just fresh ideas, but a fundamental kind of “growing up” as a species, a new Cultural Maturity. The concept of Cultural Maturity provides a big-picture lens for engaging the most critical questions of our time—from the most intimate of personal concerns to the most encompassing questions of global wellbeing. The Cultural Maturity blog presents an ongoing conversation about this greater human maturity—what it looks like, how it might be possible, what it asks of us, and how it is beginning to manifest in the best of contemporary thought and action.

Posts are of Four types. Some address concerns of a Front Page News sort. Others step back for a more Big-Picture Perspective. There are also Reviews—of books, music and contributions from on-line media. You will also find posts that address Cultural Immaturity, actions that today put us particularly at risks and beliefs that stop short of what is needed in particularly informative ways.

We see this blog as an evolving endeavor. At first it will primarily present posts by Charles Johnston, comments from readers, and the conversations that result. Later it bring aboard guest contributors and include on-going online “think tanks” around particularly critical topics. Our hope is that it will eventually serve as an important antidote both to the traditional media’s tendency to focus on the immediate and the on-line world’s current tendency to provide endless information, but to leave us without the big picture context and depth of deliberation needed for information to translate into wise and effective action. We would like people to see it the Cultural Maturity site as a trusted place to come to for the depth, complexity, and sophistication of perspective our future depends on.

Cultural Maturity is a formal concept within Creative Systems Theory. We will endeavor to avoid overly theoretical language. But CST provides particularly sophisticated and precise perspective for addressing human concerns. Posts will often be followed by a brief paragraph that applies CST notions for people familiar with the theory. Now and then Big Picture Topic posts will focus on a particularly helpful CST concept.