Introduction: What is Comprehensivity? How it works? Why it works?

1 Introducing an idea to better understand our worlds and their peoples

3Our civilization is so complex that there is a widespread feeling of fragmentation, disorderliness, and incomprehensibility. How can ordinary citizens like you and me redress these major shortcomings in our social worlds?

4 We think that, despite the apparent difficulties, it is possible for groups of people working collaboratively to significantly improve their understanding of our worlds in all their exquisite complexity.

5 We think the ongoing stability and thriving of our civilization depends on such a comprehensively informed citizenry.

6 Buckminster Fuller argued that comprehensivity, an innate-in-children but largely absent-in-schooling proclivity to comprehend the world and each other broadly and deeply, is essential for the general adaptability of humanity. We aim to develop this germ of an idea into a system for improving humanity's comprehensivity.

7 We call for an ongoing initiative with groups of citizens working together to explore our worlds and its peoples.

8 We aim to foster a comprehensivity that understands enough about enough of the vital aspects of how our worlds work and change to make sense of it all and of each other.

9 We aim to establish the vital importance of Bucky's guiding epistemic virtue of comprehensivity, striving toward ‘‘the adequately macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive’’.

10 We aim to foster collaborations where participants engage in dynamic explorations where they whet each other's ideas into sharper more incisive understandings to better learn how it all works.

11 We aim to build a new tradition of inquiry and action focused on our comprehensivity.

12 We aim to unify our worlds both conceptually and physically.

13 Since dynamic, creative experimentation is the wisest way to start any new initiative, this site is just a starting point, some guideposts for the beginning. Please carefully consider this draft schema or outline for creating the new tradition of comprehensive practice that we aspire to bring forth. After reading about the idea and our nascent effort to implement it, let us know how we can improve it and how you can help us build it. Your ongoing input will be essential for it to succeed!

15
16[Humanity] is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy [their] innate ‘‘comprehensivity’’.¹ —R. Buckminster Fuller

17 1R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating manual for spaceship earth, Chapter 3

2 The Vision

19Become a Comprehensivist …Become a better, more aware, more informed citizen

20 Learn how the world works …Examine how change is created … Learn how other people think

21 Explore diverse subjects broadly and deeply …Learn what the world means and what possibilities it holds

22 Understand more of the many traditions of inquiry and action that drive our civilization and our lives

23 Organize and Participate in Explorations to comprehend how the world works and how it changes

24 Become a better, more sensitive listener

25 Become a better, more articulate speaker

26 Practice the art of being a trimtab (small actions that effect big results)

27 Together we can gradually become more and more effective doers and thinkers in addressing the topics that matter in our lives and in the world

28 Engage to more incisively comprehend the whole Universe together!

3 The Benefits

To better understand each other in a world of silos and tribes
To better navigate our lives in a complex global civilization
To better form integrated multi-perspectival views of our worlds
To better team with others to achieve bigger objectives
To better imagine, assess, and communicate ideas and actions that may improve the operation and regenerativity of our global civilization
To become a social trimtab, that is, to better serve, coordinate, and guide associates, colleagues, and fellow-citizens as well as organizations, companies, and governments including our politicians
To improve our collective intelligence to make humanity more robustly adaptable to any and all possible futures
To provide a forum for the deliberation of the vital issues of our times so we can more effectively inform the governance systems of our civilization
To help realize, on an ongoing basis, Buckminster Fuller's great ethical aspiration ‘‘to make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone’’
To unify the world

4 Collaborating Involves Group Explorations

4.1 What is Comprehensivity?

Comprehensivity is our ability to comprehend our worlds broadly and deeply.
It is a facility in questioning, conceptualizing, interpreting, and acting to build a multi-perspectival yet integrated understanding of the world, how it works, and how it changes.
It is the quality of our lives that shapes all we have learned in breadth for context and all we have learned in depth for clarity to form, as Buckminster Fuller put it, ‘‘adequately macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive´´ considerations to better engage our worlds and its peoples with understanding and effectiveness.
It implies developing a large set of subjects about which one can effectively inquire, contextualize, interpret & assess, and creatively re-imagine and re-combine for meaningful insights and the forging of new possibilities.
It entails developing a faculty for helping self and others build a broad range of interests and concerns, comprehensive knowledge, and skills, that is, a faculty for comprehensivity awareness and competency.
It involves recognizing its inherent pathologies including analysis paralysis (an endless accumulation of information), value paralysis (an unrestrained accommodation of everyone's values), and the paralysis of wholism (an unlimited expansion of the whole). So it requires cultivating judgment to stay incisively relevant.

32Since it is impossible for any one person to understand all of humanity's accumulated knowing and doing, comprehensive learning may seem unachievable. The idea is that our individual and collective effectiveness in understanding the vital issues of our times will be improved through the dynamics of groups of people effectively exploring many different topics as broadly and deeply as possible over an extended period of time. Guided by the intention to develop an incisively integrated comprehension of our worlds and how they change, participants will inform and gradually hone their judgment both in the areas specifically explored as well as in gradually acquiring general adaptability. Bit by bit, they will become better prepared to ask more incisive questions and imagine more effective actions on subjects for which they have little prior knowledge or awareness. Their insights, new possibilities, and actions will percolate through society enhancing the collective intelligence and adaptability of our civilization as a whole.

33 Collaborating for comprehensivity welcomes participation from anyone willing to suspend their own certainties to conscientiously explore sensitively, boldly, and collaboratively. Sessions should involve no prerequisite knowledge, beliefs, metaphysical assumptions, or values beyond the communicating systems used to organize and conduct events. We recommend a crowdsourcing model where participants explore their own topics in their own order curated and explored by the participants themselves. At group events, they exchange experiences, interpretations, beliefs, feelings, values, thoughts, models, apprehensions, understandings, and ways of seeing (perceiving), thinking, and doing. That is, we envision building a new tradition that focuses on listening, sharing, and exploration and which accommodates and includes all backgrounds, beliefs, and cultural traditions.

34 Does the idea interest you?

35 What do you like about it? Do you have any concerns?

5 A New Tradition of Inquiry and Action

37Collaborating for comprehensivity aspires to develop, democratize, and institutionalize a new tradition of inquiry and action inspired by the great polymaths of history like Aristotle, Archimedes, Zhang Heng, Hypatia, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Shen Kuo, Omar Khayyám, Acharya Hemachandra, Hildegard of Bingen, Albertus Magnus, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Leonardo, Cornelius Agrippa, Athanasius Kircher, Christina Queen of Sweden, Ben Franklin, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Goethe, William Whewell, Buckminster Fuller, John von Neumann, Jacob Bronowski, Mortimer J. Adler, and Dorothy Dunnett. Although anyone can become a comprehensivist by putting into practice studying, thinking, and acting broadly, currently society produces too few comprehensivists, too few who are able to connect humanity's great traditions and its peoples. Our effort aspires to engage anyone who is interested to participate in and/or organize collaborations with a minimum of background, training, and effort.

38 There are many traditions of inquiry and action that purport to provide initiates with the means to grasp anything (or even everything) including our many spiritual, mystical, and mythological traditions, science and technology, Renaissance humanism, pansophism, the liberal arts, transdisciplinarity, mathesis universalis, universology, consilience, wholism, integral theory, world-systems theory, cultural studies, semiotics, complexity, systemics, cybernetics, and synergetics. While these organizing systems are important cultural resources and should be better understood, none is universally accepted, their assumptions are often controversial, and most involve first learning particular ways of seeing and sophisticated practices of inquiry and action. Instead, collaborating for comprehensivity aims to accommodate the broadest range of people and their traditions in a quest, an exploration, whose direction is clear (toward the broad in scope AND the deeply incisive: toward comprehensivity) but whose destination is unspecified and open-ended.

39 In ‘‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’’, Buckminster Fuller wrote, ‘‘We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total’’. So comprehensive practice is needed to effectively operate our spaceship effectively. It aspires to a planetary or cosmic perspective in both our conceptuality and in our practice.

Figure 1: Our Comprehensivity Evokes A Cosmic Perspective

6 An idea to unify the world

41In ‘‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’’, Buckminster Fuller (‘‘Bucky’’) called for an ‘‘uncompromised, metaphysical initiative of unbiased integrity [to] unify the world’’.² Could attending to our comprehensivity help unify the world? An inspiring model for unification and comprehensivity can be found in the scientific theory of gravity developed by Newton, Einstein, and others. Evidently, every massive particle in the entire physical Universe attracts every other according to an exact mathematical formulation. This expression of universal physical love belies the boundaries and fragmentations of our present-day tribes and silos. It could be that we can similarly develop schemas or models that accommodate every idea and every person in a meticulously comprehensive gestalt despite how daunting it may at first appear?

43 In speaking about Dante's 700-year-old epic poem ‘‘La Commedia’’, Giuseppe Mazzotta said, ‘‘the presence of viewpoints, various viewpoints, which one somehow manages to control, or know, all viewpoints. …Perspective means that…the perception of reality changes according to the position we occupy…. Dante uses this perspectivism [which] really means a way of assembling various points of view.’’ Likewise, our comprehensivity assembles and integrates a broadly informed multi-perspectival view of our worlds. Collaborating with many people of different backgrounds, we can facilitate acquiring such a perspectivism. So our initiative engages groups of people to collaborate to gradually realize a broader and deeper and more integrated conception of our worlds.

44 A collaborative effort to facilitate our comprehensivity inspired by the science of gravity and informed by perspectivism could unify the world. Not only would a comprehensively informed conception of the world be more unified than our fragmented ones, but a side effect of identifying and sharing comprehensivist considerations, insights, possibilities, and actions would tend to help everyone better understand each other and better coordinate their actions which would tend to unify the world. These effects might make our civilization more robustly adaptable to any and all possible futures.

45 Collaborating for comprehensivity is a nascent initiative to engage groups of citizens in diverse explorations to develop comprehensive comprehensions to unify our worlds conceptually and physically.

6.1 How it works

47Our nascent tradition to cultivate our comprehensivity is still inchoate. There are no textbooks. We cannot be sure which of our ideas will work and which may need to be discarded. We welcome your experiments to test our ideas and to try out your ideas so that over time we may learn the best ways to foster our comprehensivity.

48 We have organized more than 300 events that have served to prototype the idea. Based on that experience, we offer these recommendations and suggestions for how collaborative groups might be structured so that we might build an effective community of practice:

Groups would ideally meet face-to-face on a recurring basis for a series of conversations (generally exploratory dialogues, but other activities may sometimes be used) to explore a wide variety of topics. Explorations will be broader and richer if participants have diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and skills. So diversifying your group will be well worth the effort.
Each exploration must ensure the psychological safety of participants so respectful but penetrating probing of strong differences can be effectively engaged and integrated into meaningful outcomes.
Ideally, all participants will contribute their thoughts and feelings about the subject. Event facilitators ought to start each meeting by inviting each participant to introduce themselves and to comment on the topic to get everyone comfortable with sharing their ideas and to provide stepping stones for exploration.
Topics ought to be curated so that with a minimum of preparation, participants with no prior awareness of the subject can effectively explore its nuances. Requiring some preparation will produce richer events. Some events should be based on books, videos, or other resources that require more preparation. Please experiment. If too many events involve too much preparation, participants may not feel prepared and may not contribute to the conversation. Good condensed summaries can make advanced ideas accessible for everyone. Topic curation involves preparing participants to explore a subject deeply even when they have no background.

Our focus on exploration requires that all participants must suspend their certainties so they can fully engage and examine each other's ideas. Participants are encouraged to share their relevant ideas and even their judgments, but certainty derails exploration. Asking someone who is a bit too certain to explain why they hold their beliefs and then asking the rest of the group to share their beliefs and their justifications for them will often facilitate a transition to a deeper exploration. The group must strive get beyond the shallow batting around of opinions and beliefs that we typically witness on TV. By exploring the range of opinion in the group with a suspension of certainty, everyone can feel heard and most people will naturally transition from partisan ‘‘believers’’ to explorers who listen to and collaboratively build on each others'ideas.
Each participant ought to organize topics for the group to explore. This is important: only by assessing what is lacking in your own or your group’s comprehensivity will you be able to steer you and your group to more effective considerations. Groups should compassionately mentor any member who struggles in organizing their topics.
All subjects ought to be ‘‘on the table’’ for exploration. Even seemingly parochial topics can engage our comprehensivity when we recognize that everything is interrelated (witness the physics of gravity!) and we see the challenge of our resistance to a topic as an opportunity to work through our blocks to a more encompassing comprehensivity.
Groups may benefit from exploring meta-issues such as the importance of listening, voicing, respect, suspension of certainty, and other skills for fostering more effective dialogue and exploration.
If participants boldly explore the edges of their knowledge and their differences, the meetings will end without a conclusion and with everyone in a state of cognitive dissonance. That is to be expected: it indicates a successful session! The discomfort of cognitive dissonance may be reduced by ending sessions by asking participants about what they learned, what their takeaways from the dialogue were, and whether they glimpsed further into comprehensivist seeing, thinking, or practice. Participants will then be able to build on these insights later.
Given how complex our worlds are, it can be expected that it will take years to develop a confident comprehensivity. Participants and groups should be patient with their progress yet not shy away from challenging themselves to consider many unfamiliar perspectives. Progress may require confronting and accommodating your biggest intellectual weaknesses, fears, and aversions!

50 Every group will be different. Every topic will be different. Organizers will try experiments. Some won't work. The basic outline above should provide a rough and ready guide for most groups. If you learn something from your practice, please share it with us so we can all learn more quickly.

51 Are you ready to collaborate for comprehensivity? Why? Why not?

52 What do you think of our approach to fostering comprehensivity?

7 Why It Works

53Our approach to collaborating for comprehensivity aligns the interests of citizen-stakeholders through a mutual commitment to understanding each other and how our worlds work and change. This motivation is explained in the Buckminster Fuller quote: ‘‘One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood’’. Furthermore, dynamic, interactive dialogues where each participant is engaged to explore assumptions, to listen sensitively, to speak and be heard, to build ever broader and deeper meanings, and to identify new possibilities in subjects that matter can be thoroughly engaging.

54 One of our key ideas builds on Buckminster Fuller's idea of a trimtab:

56
57Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trimtab.³
—Buckminster Fuller (‘‘Bucky’’)

58 3R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or oblivion: the prospects for humanity

59 Participants are trimtabs helping each other get leverage on their mutual aim to enhance their comprehensivity. That incentivizes contributions to broaden and deepen each exploration. Over time, participants ought to diagnose their own and their group's strengths, weaknesses, possibilities, and concerns for building a more meticulous, comprehensive, and integrated set of models of our worlds. Such navigational assessments will indicate new directions to explore for honing their sense of the world. These group trimtab effects align participants, group, and purpose.

60 At the societal level, each session focuses on aspects of our civilization's vital traditions and issues. These subjects are trimtabs to consider new perspectives and their stakeholder concerns. The insights from many such meetings from many allied groups will percolate through society. If such broadly informed comprehensions strengthen our collective intelligence, they would improve our adaptability and improve the governance of our civilization. Such ideas may help identify and align our interdependent interests producing a more robust, regenerative, and thriving society. These combined societal trimtab effects may even help achieve the ambition of Buckminster Fuller ‘‘to make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone’’.

61 Such an initiative to engage citizen-explorers in collaborating for comprehensivitycould help unify our worlds physically as well as conceptually.

8 Collaborating for Comprehensivity Integrates People, Ideas, and Action

8.1 How To Get Started

64Right now, Comprehensivist Wednesdays is the only group experimenting with the idea of collaborating for comprehensivity anywhere in the world. Unless its format and time work for you, you will need to organize your own group. Since no one is able to organize groups on their own, group organizers will need to find others to help. They will need to find other participants at least, but aides, assistants, partners, and co-organizers would make the workload lighter and more effective. Who can help you get started?

65 The first step is to commit to help organize a collaborative group. Then you can work toward a first session. Spend some time considering: How do you want your group to work? Write out your ideas and your story as you'll need them for recruiting participants and for facilitating sessions.

66 Next, prioritize first things first: choosing a venue, a topic for the first meeting, announcing the first event, how to start the meeting, handling lulls in the conversation, handling conflicting views and personalities, and ending the event. What contingencies can you anticipate and how would you handle them?

67 Getting people to your event will be challenging. A marketing effort will be required. Since large groups are more difficult to organize, starting with a small group of maybe 10 or 12 (or even 5) people will be easier. Meetup.com can bring one or two new people to your events, but their service is very expensive. Facebook and Eventbrite offer some free event organizing services. If you get creative, you may be able to get going with minimal or negligible expenses.

68 What is your draft plan to get started? What kind of help do you need to get started?

8.2 Spontaneous Organizing

70We would like to see this initiative take off as a social contagion where groups spontaneously form all around the world. We are working to imagine what kind of infrastructure would best support that result. Let us know if you have any ideas.

71 You are welcome to just jump in, start organizing a group, and share your results with us.

72 To help folks get started, we have a Resource Center with topical essays that we have used to organize explorations. You can either use them directly or use them as inspiration for forming your own topics and curricula for your initiative.

8.3 Note on the Accessible Design of Our Resources

74These ideas and tools are compiled to support initiatives for collaborative development of our comprehensivity, our inclination for comprehensive inquiry and action to better understand and participate in the world.

75 Our aspiration to be comprehensive means that as we add more and more resources, they tend to iterate more and more deeply into more and more traditions of comprehensive thinking. We aspire to make each of these resources accessible to all participants without prerequisites, without dependencies on other resources. Since the comprehensive approach aspires to integrating and accommodating other subjects some of which are also covered by other resources, there will frequently be overlap and there will sometimes be contradictions among our resources.

76 To eliminate the need to read prerequisites, each summarizes any ideas that were developed in other resources. Generally, there will be links to related resources so that interested readers can dig deeper. Readers should be able to read each resource on its own for an adequate first-cut exploration. Indeed, such cross-references might best be deferred on a first reading.

77 In brief, each resource is designed to be accessible on its own.

78 Some resources highlight a book, essay, video, or other material as the main focus for that resource. In these cases, it is generally recommended that participants read the book, essay, or video first. However, even here we have attempted to summarize the highlighted material so that each resource can be read and understood on its own, but some nuanced allusions to the referenced material may be lost if the highlighted material is not reviewed first.