Addressing the whole development stack

What's good for me, we, and all of us

Part IV in “What's missing in our approach to wicked potentials of our era?” series.

This one was hard for me to write, and I apologize for it’s length, but I need to get it out so I can move on…

Addressing the “Whole Developmental Stack”

The essence of what I want to say here is that to transform wicked problems into potentials, we have to design solutions that appeal to the whole developmental stack—we have to¹ understand what’s good for me, we, and all of us. And to do that we’ve got to be able to understand those drives inside of ourselves.

This is a categorical claim: if these “wicked potentials” didn’t require a new developmental capacity, we’d have already solved resolved them with our existing frameworks and tools. Without addressing the motivations of multiple developmental levels simultaneously, we can’t get the job done.

This is partly why there are no villains: the people standing up current systems are mostly operating from worldviews that cannot see the me, we, and all of us distinction.² In the same way a genius-IQ child can’t take the perspective of the other until they can, genius, open-hearted adults cannot apprehend hyperobjects until they hit a certain developmental capacity.³

Eg: Highly capable people have thrown enormous amounts of resources into climate change, nuclear disarmament, systemic inequality, with little progress. While it’s possible that their persistence indicates something out of our control like generational change, I believe it more likely indicates that we’re missing something.⁴ I hope this writing will help that “something” emerge more in me and all of you, dear readers.

Me, We, All of Us

1. Motivation

We have to hit multiple motivations to get different people to do stuff. This seems intuitive: you don’t get a horse to work harder by offering daycare at the office.

But it can’t be that intuitive, because I think we’re basically always screwing this up and assuming people are “rational self-interested beings,” like us (“rational” describes you when you’re scrolling on instagram and a hypertargeted ad gives you the perfect way to keep avoiding the painful feeling that drove you to your phone in the first place, right?) Climate Change advocacy screws this up—almost all messages sound “all of us” world-centric alarms (eg: species survival, Gaia). A more effective intervention holds multiple perspectives simultaneously rather than polarizing these levels against each other, eg: “Me”: saving money through nuclear, “We”: energy independence, and “all of us” preserving the Earth for the next seven generations.

But this demands a willingness to deeply understand views different from ours. Which demands a perspective taking capacity that can both admit our own egocentricity and stand outside of it. I’ve never met anyone who can do that well who hasn’t deeply engaged their own shadow work—admitting, befriending, and delimiting the entire developmental stack inside themselves. Their desire and ambition for money, power, fame, influence; their ethnocentric belonging; their worldcentric winning, admiration, legacy, etc. So while I can’t quite identity the causal mechanism,⁵ observation shows that facilitating these wicked problems into potentials always goes hand in hand with getting intimate with the whole developmental stack inside of our selves.

2. Self-knowledge, blindspots, and system design

You know how when a guy tries really hard to repress being gay he ends up driving himself crazy and doing a bunch of a crazy shit? Well, when you repress wanting to be powerful or liked or rich or whatever, you drive yourself nuts and do a bunch of crazy shit.

We’ve got to “know ourselves” as our pal Socrates used to say, and we’ve got to be able to admit that we’re walking contradictions with massive unfixable blindspots, so we can guardrail around them, fess up to our mistakes, hire people who counter-balance us, build cultures of feedback, and generally undermine the ego’s ability to project a false sense of stability and demand that others lie to themselves and each other to preserve it.

If we think we’re better than that—more spiritual, more developed, more righteous or more woke, the “me” and “We” motivations will sneak through and drive our efforts into the ground, by collapsing the multi-perspectival multi-stakeholder-ness required for these wicked potentials to blossom into goodness rather than civilizational collapse.

This is classic Freudian psychology—like Oedipus with his tragic fate, whatever we push away is going to leak out in ways we don’t endorse. Eg: Let’s say I’m trying to solve nuclear disarmament, but I’m unwilling to admit that I care about going down in history… (me motivation) I’m more likely to unconsciously overlook solutions that don’t give me credit, than if I’m familiar with that drive for credit in me, and recognize it when it shows up.⁶

Here are some of the specific expressions of different developmental levels that I think need embracing

Here are some examples. As this is getting long, I’m just picking a few to illustrate the point.⁷ Hopefully you can generate a bunch more that you see, for your favorite wicked potential!

“Me” Egocentric

• Conscious power: Consciously using power means yoking to higher purpose—endosymbiotic ethics where individual and collective good align. Unconscious use of power leads to more corruption.⁸ Working effectively with egocentric actors and incumbent power structures requires finding ways the bigger mission can align with their worldviews, not dismissing them.⁹ Idealists who can’t recognize, use, or limit power get beaten by those who can. This is an unfortunate trope of social activists—unable to admit that they want the power, they seek to remove power from others, and end up categorically ineffective.

Eg: UpTrust avoids direct confrontation by building its own ecosystem where new incentive structures can evolve free from corruption, then uses that leverage to influence broader systems. Our mechanics are such that bot-rings and sybil attacks isolate themselves and have no effect on the broader network.

• Including black markets: Black markets are inevitable, better to "own" these and design protocols so it’s easier to be prosocial than to game the systems. This is essentially the idea behind police having a monopoly on violence, with strict rules governing use and oversight processes (when it works right).
  

“We” Ethnocentric

• Belonging / Us v Them: If we aren’t consciously creating ethnocentric tribes with characteristics we endorse, they’ll form randomly, and some will encode “destroy other tribes” into their memetic DNA.

• Policies and regulation

Eg: Nuclear disarmament: current approaches tend to ignore national interests (world-centric only) or get stuck in security competition (ethnocentric only). I don’t know the answer, but I know it’s got to honor both.

“All of us” Worldcentric

• The value of working hard balanced with living a good life, embracing pluralism and diversity, etc.

• Money & status must be loved (and boundaried): Similar to power, people who aren’t able to recognize their own desire for money and status will be (a) letting those motivations run them unconsciously, and (b) unable to use this motivation strategically, in pursuit of the larger endosymbiotic mission (what’s good for the individual is good for the whole, and vice versa). Money and status can be seen as neutral; if they’re not then people push away helpful resources or get corrupted by unconscious profit-optimization forces. Just being aware of this helps, but it’s just a start; we’ll eventually want Long Term Stock Exchanges and other such systemic creations to support this awareness.

Eg: BrightGreens attempts to value living systems—rather than considering the value of a tree as a commodity when it’s dead, for example, these digital tokens represent value that farmers have created by restoring and enhancing ecosystem vitality, prove the provenance of the work. Who knows if it will work, but it’s a move in the right direction: making financial well-being and ecological well-being into one things, rather than having to choose one against the other.

Kosmocentric (Teal+)

• Synthesis — “yes, and…”

• No false dichotomies (technical and cultural, central and decentralized)

• Multi-perspectival: Embrace imperfection while hitting all four quadrants

• Embracing uncertainty

• Embracing imperfection in all four quadrants (mindset, behavior, culture and systems). The point here is that the energy cost of perfection isn’t included in modeling the pareto frontier, so we have to be willing to go hard toward an ideal but also admit that we’ll never make it.

• Takes time, patience/faith

Eg: AI Safety Coordination failures: Individual actors optimizing locally while preventing collective optimization is precisely the multi-perspective holding problem. Each actor can see their rational choice but can't hold the systemic view simultaneously with their local concerns.

Why can’t we just be purists?

Dialectical synthesis and the implications of needing to “win the old game":

True evolutionary solutions can't position themselves as pure antithesis because that makes them irrelevant to existing systems. Expecting principles-driven organizations to reject all conventional business methods creates the exact failure mode of beautiful visions that can't engage with existing power structures and therefore never achieve systemic influence. They must demonstrate superiority within current measurement frameworks while simultaneously shifting the underlying organizing logic. Our VC funding approach exemplifies this; Conscious Capitalism and impact investing are in the same boat.

Synthesis “transcends and includes:” incorporates previous capacities in addition to going beyond them. This means strategies like power accumulation, competitive positioning, & profit focus can appear identical from the outside but operate from a different internal logic and value structure—systems awareness, multiple perspectives, long-term consequence modeling.

A critical distinction: do these strategies use practical constraints as design principles to enact the deeper vision? Or do the constraints dominate the vision (via addiction or allergy)?

Limitations and next steps

When does an organization have sufficient market power or unique positioning to resist external capture? When do VC incentives, regulatory frameworks, or competitive pressures override internal developmental work regardless of awareness?

Frankly, I don’t know. This framework focuses on developing the capacity to see differently, not mapping the full range of application. I believe these ways of seeing are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the wicked problems we face as a species.

These are great empirical questions, but I don’t know if they’re answerable theoretically; at least not yet. UpTrust represents one datapoint—and we have yet to succeed at scale. More experiments will reveal where the approach works versus where it fails, and what its limitations and mistakes inevitably are.

The “What's missing in our approach to the wicked potentials of our era?” series attempts to uncover some of (un)common ways of seeing that might help us transform the most tricky global problems into something the better version of ourselves in twenty years will say “hell yes” to.

Part 1: No villains (this post)
Part II: Self-organizing systems & incentive landscapes
Part III: Integration of vision and practical in every decision
Part IV: Addressing the whole developmental stack (what’s good for me, we, all of us)
Part V: Culture addressing the problem must embody rare integral values
Part VI: Multiple stakeholder integration

1. Here’s me hedging (aka being a coward or being lazy or both): I’m going to say “we have to” a lot, and what I really mean is “this is a construct/frame that you can try applying to see if it reveals a different world-experience; like all constructs its fake-but-also-made-of-Godstuff and it’s not the only construct and it’s sometimes overly complex but it’s at least authentic from me in that it’s how I’m seeing things, and I do think it’s more accurate than the others I’ve seen and will result in a better world, so I hope you’ll try it on and help me refine and evolve it.” 😂 Feel free to use the previous sentence and “We have to” interchangeably.

2. For fellow integralistas I apologize for insulting your prowess in using only three distinctions, for everyone else I apologize for the inherent arrogance in this claim: this is about as simple as I could get.

3. I don’t think our civilization has a good understanding yet of what makes it so that people can hit that developmental capacity. And those of us with enough confidence to claim that we have, have a lot of proving that it’s worth anything to do 😂

4. A collection of other explanations—entrenched interests, coordination failures, implementation complexity, resource allocation—are all subsets of my larger claim that the developmental capacity to address these has yet to emerge.

5. I can make more lists, but these feel a little empty without grounded examples, and this piece of writing already feels a little long and boring to me. 😬 . That said, Claude did a pretty good job explaining:

New ways of making decisions: Leaders who recognize the inevitability of ego-driven blind spots design decision-making processes to counteract them: through advice processes, transparency on where any decision comes from, cultural norms that support challenging the decisions of higher-ups, etc. Systematic feedback loops surface contradictory data that would otherwise remain unshared.

New ways of allocating resources: Leaders restructure incentive systems to reward outcomes rather than visibility, shift resources from ego-enhancing initiatives to operational necessities, and modify promotion criteria to emphasize collective results over individual attribution. In the spirit of the whole developmental stack, they still acknowledge and work with office politics, loyalty, and status, but balance these realities within a larger metasystemic awareness.

Information flow: Ego-aware leaders understand that willpower alone cannot override psychological drives. They therefore embed counter-ego mechanisms directly into organizational systems, making ego-resistant behavior the path of least resistance rather than requiring constant conscious override of natural tendencies. Think feedback systems, holacratic governance structures, relateful practices, etc.

6. Basically we’re talking inner boundaries here. Following

Hannah Taylor

’s definition of boundaries as how we connect, we can’t connect with what we don’t know.

7. My hunch is that each of the wicked problems has a unique set of developmental layers that need embracing, with a lot of overlap. Eg: it might be the case that some of the wicked potentials don’t need all of the layers addressed, just most of them.

8. Pursuing power instrumentally but abandoning our real task is the plot of a billion fantasy and sci-fi novels, historical revolutions, etc. There’s a lot of nuance—Thanos in Avenger’s Infinity War accumulates and uses power for what he thinks is the greater good, but commits an atrocious mass murder. On the other hand, Bilbo in The Hobbit, steals the powerful Arkenstone from Thorin Oakenshield to give it to the Elvenking; to Thorin it feels like betrayal, but Bilbo does it in service/love/loyalty to his friend, who he can tell is being corrupted by the stone. The point is not to weigh in on when or how the use of power is good, but to note that being more conscious of it will decrease our chances of being corrupted by it.

9. Consider Ned Stark’s demise in Game of Thrones.