Our 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?

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.

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

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.

We call for an on-going initiative with groups of citizens working together to explore our worlds and its peoples.

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.

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

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.

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

We aim to unify our worlds both conceptually and physically.

Since dynamic, creative experimentation is the wisest way to start any new initiative, this site is just a starting point, some guideposts for 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 on-going input will be essential for it to succeed!

Collaborating 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.

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.

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.

Our 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.

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 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!

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.

Our approach for 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.

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

Something 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. — Buckminster Fuller (“Bucky”)

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.

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”.

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