Phase 2, 2022: Validate Four Hypotheses

Initial validation of the core operating model.

Phase 2 started in Summer, 2022 with a significant expansion of the Institute into several new teams, continued design/development of the IE platform and protocol, and preparation for the Institute's first public communications. Phase 2 is specifically targeting the validation of four key questions (and associated hypotheses) that constitute the core of the Institute's creation:

1. Does metatheory make the impact we believe it does? Do integrative metatheories adequately and usefully index real-world situations and suggest novel and useful insights? How do we drive value from metatheory into the real-world and vice versa?

2. Do we have the leaders? What we're doing is complex, and while we have a lot of experience with integrative metatheory, its use in analysis, and its application in real-world settings, the Institute represents the vision of a paradigm-upleveling of the sophistication of each of those areas. Are there people capable of leading this work? Do the necessary skills exist in integrative communities? What education systems do we need to build the next generation of integrative experts?

3. Are we willing to coordinate action? How do we craft rationally-legitimated consensus for social action? Given the theory-of-anything nature of its knowledge domain, we represent a space with high social cohesion but low task cohesion, and by nature late-stage developmental action-logics tend to towards autonomy and resist social coordination.

4. Do we have the tools? Is an integrative epistemological protocol a viable and useful contribution to this challenge? We have already determined that the economic requirement of developing such a technology-enabled protocol will require commercialization, but alongside that we need to validate our strategy's minimum viability: its capability, usefulness and usability.

It's critical to stress that each of these four areas—impact, leadership, coordination and tools—will always be evolving action-learning domains of the Institute's core model, well past Phase 2 and into the future. There will never be a final validation of each hypothesis, but an ongoing exploration and iteration of movement through these categories of effort. But the end of phase 2 will be marked by some minimally-sufficient validation of each domain as defined by the people working directly in those areas, and will signal readiness to expand and attempt further scale up.

We expect Phase 2 to take five years.