Navigating Intelligence

What is Navigating Intelligence?

tile_navigatingNavigating intelligence monitors and discloses the wellbeing or general condition of the city.

It uses a vital signs monitor as a reporting mechanism or protocol which monitors and discloses the health of the city.

It includes five key indicators for an integral dashboard:

  1. Climate change
  2. Environmental health
  3. Society’s responses to environmental problems
  4. Positive economic relationships
  5. Incongruent neighbours (Integral City, Hamilton, 2008, p. 11)

So What?

Navigating intelligence allows us to scan the environment and make decisions about our course corrections using Integral Vital Signs Monitors (IVSM). An IVSM is a reporting system whose design is based on an integral framework. It utilizes life sustaining indicators and communicates its results in a universal language. An IVSM system mines existing databases, gathers new data and reports observations in a global graphic language that is accessible to all (in multiple versions and multiple translations). Its purpose is for providing life-giving data for making decisions that develop, maintain and emerge the health of local and global systems of interest, for the current generations and the generations to come. IVSM’s can exist on any scale of the human system, and are designed so that they can scale up and down from the individual to the planet.

Navigating intelligence develops a vital signs monitor with indicators and benchmarks that recognize:

  • climate systems that affect natural and human sustainability (e.g. rainfall, water tables)
  • the limits of carrying capacity for the basic resources of air, land and water
  • bio-psycho-cultural-social health indicators for individuals, families, workplaces, neighborhoods, and city systems.
  • sustainable economies
  • sustainable infrastructures for transportation, health, education and commercial development
  • congruent and incongruent neighbours that affect the health of the natural and human systems (e.g. air shed, water quality, transportation systems, human movement, communicable diseases, etc.)
  • physical, psychological, cultural and social boundaries

Navigating intelligence that uses IVSM adds value in four ways:

  1. The essential design elements of the IVSM provide a framework, indicator organizer and common language to communicate results across cultures.
  2. We can see the investment of resources that we have made in each quadrant and level; i.e. we can track energy, matter and information. We can translate the investments into terms of traditional financial management; strategic financial investment; density of social networks; or sustainability vectors such as carbon-based resources (or all).
  3. By the use of hyper linking, we can see the linkage between realities (four quadrants); levels of complexity (eight plus levels); time (development/evolution); and scale.
  4. It allows us to compare results internally within urban systems and externally between urban systems.

From an Integral Vital Signs Monitor is designed, the Integral Scorecard can become the reporting vehicle for informing all the stakeholders of the city. It tells us whether we are achieving the purpose and objectives of the city in a sustainable way. It reveals to us if we are amassing the energy, matter and information that we need to sustain ourselves. It is a way of mapping capacity and potential and has the power to reveal imbalances that indicate unsustainable practices.

Navigating intelligence using IVSM works hand in hand with Meshworking intelligence to design new governance systems that research, plan and manage the city.

Now What?

Three simple rules for applying Integral City Navigating Intelligences

  1. Select the future destination of the city based on its vision.
  2. Design and implement integral dashboards, using integral indicators of wellbeing for the city.
  3. Notice outcomes and make course corrections to enable progress naturally.

Click here to listen to a podcast on this intelligence from the book Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences in the Human Hive.

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