Creative Systems Theory

The Creative Systems Theory website www.CSTHome.org provides a detailed look at Creative Systems Theory and its implications.

A Quick Overview

We can understand the concept of Cultural Maturity as a stand alone general notion, but if we want to be detailed in our understanding, we need appreciate it as a formal notion within Creative Systems Theory.

Creative Systems Theory presents a comprehensive framework for understanding change and interrelationship in human systems with special pertinence to making sense of the times in which we live and the challenges before us. It is significant both for the practical usefulness of its ideas and for the fact that it represents the kind of conceptual perspective that the concept of Cultural argues will be increasingly essential.

CST helps us think rigorously about Cultural Maturity’s mechanisms and implications. It also supports making the needed distinctions between Cultural Maturity and more limited views of the future that can get in the way of what the future requires.

In turn, the concept of Cultural Maturity highlights why frameworks like Creative Systems Theory have become newly critical.  It follows from the concept of Cultural Maturity that the future will require not just new more mature ideas, values, and ways of relating, but that we rethink understanding itself. We will need to think in ways that are more encompassingly systemic—that get beyond polarized beliefs that have relegate parts of ourselves to wholly separate worlds (ally and enemy, mind and body, political right and political left, or masculine and feminine). New ideas must also helps us think in ways that effectively address the fact that we are living systems—that take us beyond the mechanistic assumptions of our most recent chapter in culture’s evolving story. Creative Systems Theory provides a compact set of “pattern language” tools for thinking with the needed new systemic sophistication.

We can think of CST in terms of two related primary focuses. It is interested in how human systems of all sorts—individuals, relationships, families, communities, nations—change and interrelate. And it is about making sense of why human beings think and act in the very different and often odd and contradictory ways that we do at different times and places.  Within CST, the concept of Cultural Maturity describes a particular change point within culture as an evolving system and the kinds of thinking, acting an relating that change point requires and make possible.