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.Community validation: Do the necessary skills exist in integrative communities, and are we willing to coordinate action? 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 doing this work? What education systems do we need to build the next generation of integrative experts?
- 2.Sensemaking validation: How do we craft rationally-legitimated consensus for social action? 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.
- 3.Metatheory validation: Does metatheory work the way we believe it does? We need to validate our philosophical-mapping hypothesis: do integrative metatheory maps adequately and usefully index real-world situations and suggest true transformational fulcra? Are those insights novel and useful?
- 4.Economic validation: How do we drive value from metatheory into the real-world and vice versa? What form and function need initiatives take to do so? We need to begin to validate our initiative strategy, including how they interface with sponsoring partners, institutional demonstration sites, and communication with the broader public. Are they meeting their own context-specific goals?
It's critical to stress that each of these four areas—in other words, people, technology, our transformational thesis, and real-world engagement—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.