Meshworking Intelligence

What is Meshworking Intelligence?

Meshworking intelligence creates a “meshwork” by weaving together the best of two operating systems — one that self-organizes, and one that replicates hierarchical structures. The resulting meshwork creates and aligns complex responsive structures and systems that flex and flow.

Meshworking intelligences are triggered in the brain by dissonance (i.e. constraints) in the environment. The brain’s capability of re-organizing itself and releasing new potentials allows for the emergence of new values systems and new capacities. At the same time meshworking intelligence utilizes hierarchical structures and capacities to create sorting and selecting mechanisms that allow the brain to make survival choices. As values systems emerge, a level of complexity develops where our brains can meshwork hierarchies and make hierarchies out of meshworks.

Meshworking intelligence uses imagination, courage and powers of attraction. It articulates designs from the meshing of the diversities in people and thereby releases and reorganizes new intelligences that are currently locked and blocked in silos of sameness.

Meshworking catalyzes a shift in the system, so that new capacities emerge and the system reorganizes itself into something more internally resonant and externally coherent with life conditions.

So What?

Because communities and cities are emergents and artefacts of human life, they are outcomes of the brains that have created them. The meshworks in them seem to be fractal patterns that emerge at all scales of human systems. We can better understand how cities work and evolve by recognizing that their communities reflect evolving capacities to meshwork hierarchies and to make hierarchies of meshworks.

An enormous value of meshworking is that it embraces both the realms of the objective and interobjective space of physical people and built structures, and calls forth the capacities that lie in the subjective and intersubjective zones of the City. These are the inner domains of intention, purpose and culture.

Meshworking intelligences contribute to research, planning and management in the city.

Now What?

Three simple rules for applying Integral City Meshworking Intelligences

1. Catalyze fractal connections within the human hive.
2. Build communication bridges across silos, stovepipes and solitudes.
3. Enable meshes and hierarchies that transform, transcend and transmute capacities.

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

Click here to view video on Marilyn Hamilton talking about Meshworking and innovation.