Cultural Intelligence

What is Cultural (or Storytelling) Intelligence?

Cultural intelligence represents the “We” life of the city. It considers the relationships in the city which transcend boundaries that both contain and separate including: the individual and the group voice; multiple levels of values; and city cultures and rural cultures.

City cultures depend totally on the quality of relationships. The culture of the city represents the lived values of its citizens. It is the perpetual barometer of “what is important around here”? How we prioritize those values at home, work, play or in spiritual practise translates into the quality of our relationships and the intelligence that represents the city’s culture.

So What?

Relationships may be the prime “currency” of the Integral City. Our relationships tell us do we have the capacity to survive together? connect with our environment (including other people)? and reproduce? recreate? regenerate?

In a living system, relationships are the bonds that link identities (holons) and information. Relationships make exchanges possible. The formation of relationships is central to the emergence of new patterns, new intelligence and new complexity.

Relationships can be scaled along a spectrum of: simple (transactional), plural (transformational) and complex (transmutational). Our transactional relationships tend to serve our bio-physical behavioral needs. Our transformational relationships tend to serve our intentional needs. Our transmutational relationships catalyze shifts in meeting collective needs of the whole system.

Subjective and intersubjective experience represents the interior realities of individuals and groups of people. Such experiences are the integral complements of peoples’ objective and interobjective exterior realities. Taken together, all four realities become the basis for perspectives expressed through all languages by the use of pronouns indicating who is speaking their view: I, We/You, Him/Her, Them. These four perspectives are the voices of the four quadrants of the integral model of the city and the four particular voices of: the Citizen, Civil Society, the City Manager, and City Developer. Each of these voices contributes to the intersubjective discourse of the city.