The Inner Development Goals on Trial

Socially Performative or Culturally Transformative?

From October 16-18, there is a large international gathering in Stockholm called The Inner Development Goals Summit. 1500 people will be attending in person and another 5000 online. Many esteemed academics, leading activists, major businesses, and professional schmoozers will be there to listen, learn, party, network, and feast on all the vibes. I will not be there due to family commitments, but my colleagues Ivo, Michael, and Kylen will be. For many in Perspectiva’s networks, next week the IDG Summit is the place to be.

However, just because the IDG Summit is the place to be, that doesn’t necessarily mean the IDGs are where it’s at. This is the tension alluded to in the subtitle. How much of what is going on with the inner development goals is socially performative, and how much is culturally transformative?

I am a critical friend of the IDG project. The court case shared below is fictional and playful, but ultimately serious. The exchange is mostly duplicated from a personal post I wrote last year but with a few tweaks based on feedback. Some see the case below as thinly veiled propaganda for the IDGs; while others see it as a thinly veiled savage critique of the IDGs! I take that mixed reaction as a sign that I succeeded in communicating my mixed feelings.

I admire what the IDGs have achieved and I wish them well. However, the jury is out on whether their apparent success in building enthusiasm for ‘inner work’ in contexts where no such prior enthusiasm was evident is a sign of incipient societal transformation. The enthusiasm might also be a sign that the IDGs are so unthreatening to commercial and political interests that they can easily be co-opted. Few things are better at preserving the deeper patterns of the status quo than surface innovation. Elsewhere I call this phenomenon The H2minus Vortex.

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Perspectiva’s co-founder Tomas Bjorkman has played a major part in building the IDGs and I know many other people involved. My conversations with them have informed what I share below. To their credit, the IDG leadership team welcomes challenging queries about what they are up to, and they now have a large audience to share revisions in their thinking and practice, which keep coming.

I wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge that two leading lights of the IDGs - cool cats that they are - were recently invited to the White House (see more details on Tomas’s LinkedIn update here).

Co-Founder and Chair of The IDGs Tomas Bjorkman and Executive Director of IDGs Jan Artem Henriksson outside The White House just over a week ago.

The White House invitation represents meaningful symbolic recognition of a generative initiative. It is a sign of influence and impact to be asked to join a meeting at a deeply iconic centre of power, a bastion of the free world, a theatre for the ongoing story of democracy and still a place of hope for many; in this sense, it should be a source of pride and encouragement for the IDGs. And yet the White House can also be seen as the epicentre of political sclerosis, it has some dark history, and is now associated with decades of dynastic politics, wars of occupation, lobbying by special interests, government gridlock, gerontocracy, corruption, climate failure, American imperialism, and even support for genocide. All of that is controversial, and none of it is the fault of the IDGs! However, those kinds of shadows of power are relevant in the discussion that follows.

When I think of the IDGs I am reminded of the essay by the German Philosopher Thomas Metzinger, Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty (2014), where he encapsulated the premise of our challenge in memorable terms:

Conceived of as an intellectual challenge for humankind, the increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming clearly seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species. This is the first truly global crisis, experienced by all human beings at the same time and in a single media space, and as we watch it unfold, it will also gradually change our image of ourselves, the conception humankind has of itself as a whole. I predict that during the next decades, we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings.

Failing beings? Maybe. It’s hard to look at the water levels in Asheville North Carolina and now the hurricane hitting Tampa Florida and not fear that climate collapse is quickening. And yet there is some hope in Metzinger’s premise — ‘the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species’. Those abilities of our species are not fixed.

We know, as well as we know anything, that human beings can learn and grow and change for the better. This is the premise of the IDGs, and this is why they are asked to speak at the White House in the context of Climate Week. In many ways, the IDGs are absolutely the right idea and the right movement at the right time. And yet! Are the IDGs sufficiently challenging to incumbent power? How can we avoid losing years we don’t have to lose in inner work that is merely socially performative, rather than figuring out what kinds of inner work might be spiritually, culturally, politically and economically transformative?

Perspectiva likes to encourage perspectives beyond simplistic either/or judgments that do not collapse into mere both/and relativism. The point of the fictional court case below is to tease out the nuance of the IDGs from the perspective of my new favourite composite coinage: ‘BothBothAndAndEitherOr’ (which may be worthy of honorary German citizenship).

In other words, we are keen to know how your ‘yay or nay’ (either/or) judgment about the IDGs is informed or even transformed by some critical perspective and deliberation (both/and). As a newly recruited jury member, your close attention is appreciated. Please let us know what you think in the comments.

Yours Aye,

Jonathan Rowson

Co-founder and CEO of Perspectiva.

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Judge: All rise! In this illustrious digital courtroom with our imaginary red velvet chairs, we are called to consider the case for and against The Inner Development Goals, hereafter called the IDGs. IDGs, state your full name, and tell us who you are.

IDGs: I am the inner development goals. I am well-intentioned, increasingly popular, and sometimes misunderstood. Some think of me as a brand or an agenda, but I identify as a communication device. My purpose is to stimulate and inform communication about a feature of society that is important, difficult, necessary, and timely: our individual and collective interiority, which some might even call our consciousness.

I serve to highlight the importance of understanding our inner lives as something that we can work on, and that we may have to learn to work on better, in order to grow into the challenges of our times. More tangibly, I was created in response to our failure to achieve The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I believe this failure signals an urgent challenge to enhance human capacity, which is the challenge the IDGs seek to meet.

Based on scientific research and other forms of expert input we have identified a range of approximately 23 skills that we call the inner development goals, distilled into human qualities inherent in Being — Relationship to Self, Thinking — Cognitive Skills, Relating — Caring for Others and the World, Collaborating — Social Skills, and Acting — Enabling change.

Judge: Thank you IDG. Please remain standing for now. The Guardians of Civil Society have charged you with five counts of acting against the social good and the gallery needs to hear them as stated by your accusors. Since this is an entirely fictitious situation, I will act on behalf of the submissions written for me by the prosecutors, while trying to be as fair-minded as possible.

Here are the claims against you:

1. The IDGs preach the gospel of a false god.

2. The IDGs are merchants of the growth-to-goodness fallacy.

3. The IDGs are the past pretending to be the future.

4. The IDGs are an accomplice to the world’s assassin.

5. The IDGs promise transformation while reinforcing immunity to change.

How do you plead?

IDG: Not guilty!

Well, at least, not entirely. But you’ll have to explain what all these charges mean. My critical thinking, perspective-taking, and sense-making skills are all in decent shape, but your terminology is a challenge to my sense of BEING, and I want to be sure my inner compass is working normally today.

Why am I even here? I am just back from The White House, I need to take this tie off, but I have another major summit to prepare for, and want to look my best. Thousands of people are coming from all over the world. We have over 650 hubs in over 80 countries now. Everyone seems to be excited and happy about it all. We have major connections with research centres at Harvard and MIT and The Stockholm Resilience Centre - serious people! And we are becoming an international NGO now, like Greenpeace or Amnesty International, but for the inner world. And guess what, we were recently invited to the White House. There’s such a buzz! Don’t you people know that I’m on the side of the angels.

Judge: Well that is the moot point. Are you? You will have a right to state the case in your defence, but the charges are very serious. Please allow me to lay out more fully why, beyond your neatly designed brown, red, orange, beige, and burgundy exterior there is some doubt about your interior, and my goal, is to develop that case.

According to the prosecutor’s submission, beyond the endorsements, the funding, the news stories, and the general sense of stunning success and resonating relevance, some believe you may be part of the problem.

The first charge is that you preach the gospel of a false god. That’s a theological metaphor for the fact that you have knowingly tethered yourself to a comically incoherent and failing framework known as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (hereafter SDGs).

As you have indicated, the IDGs seek not to critique or change that framework but indeed to serve it as a guide to our shared future. The critiques of the SDGs are too numerous to list here, but it is said they are incompatible with each other, siloed, unreflective of the complexity of the world, and almost impossible to measure or achieve - in other words as good as meaningless. The accusors want to know: how could you?

Second…

IDG: Can I answer that, please?

Judge: Very well, let’s take them one at a time.

IDG: We are aware that the SDGs are flawed in many ways. But please remember we are a communication device. The IDGs are not trying to offer a fine-grained, systemic or comprehensive diagnosis of the world situation or even of the human being. No. We are trying to start, hold and improve a conversation that we believe to be necessary and urgent, and that would otherwise be relatively neglected.

To show the relevance of human interiority and individual and collective culture (‘inner’ does not just mean individual - the collective also has an ‘inside’) to our external predicament we need a clear and recognisable target to support our clear message. In this respect, the UN Sustainable Development Goals are one of the very few things the world as a whole has ever been able to agree on, and about three quarters of the global population, apparently, has heard of them.

The SDGs are clear enough and tangible enough for people to rally round. There is a saying that if you shoot for the sun and you hit the moon, you’re doing ok, and the SDGs are a bit like that - their existence is a messy and flawed political totem, with 17 goals and 169 targets they may even be incoherent or deluded in some way, and doubtless they are not true north. But even if you grant all of that, they are still a social fact and truly international, and they are a good enough target to provide the ambition the IDGs need to connect the inner and outer worlds at the scale we seek to.

And there’s a more subtle point too. People can agree on the SDGs in ways they can’t agree on values or human qualities; let’s say the relative importance of punishment and compassion, reflection and action, liberty and equality, or trade-offs between freedom and security. So there is a deep pragmatism at work here. The aim of achieving the SDGs helps avoid those sources of contention and inertia. You might even say the IDGs and the SDGs deserve each other, and I know some will see that as a criticism, but we don’t. We know what we’re doing.

Judge: Do you? Do you indeed?

The second charge is that you trade in the growth-to-goodness assumption that is a fallacy. Whatever your explicit narrative, the ethos of the IDGs, the tacit message, is still a version of the heroic individual myth. You believe personal growth is a good thing to be encouraged, but in what sense of good?

There is no necessary connection between development and virtue, no reason to believe that people who ‘grow’ or ‘develop’ become better human beings in a moral sense that is appropriate to their context or situation or culture. Consider the mental complexity in the strategic nous of Steve Bannon in the US, and Dominic Cummings in the UK for instance, both respectively architects of major attacks on democracy in recent years. Have you considered how narcissists or sociopaths might use the skills under RELATING, for instance, to manipulate people?

You may claim to have a sophisticated theory of what you mean by ‘inner’ and ‘development’ and 'even ‘goal’, but your success depends on appealing to people’s vanity. Your key terms are typically understood in their much more conventional sense of inner as mind and heart, development as self-improvement, and goals as achievements with social status. Most people who like the IDGs do so because they feel they have become part of the select few highly developed people who understand the importance of development and understand it in a way that elevates themselves.

And have you considered that there is an oxymoron of sorts in your name, the inner development goals? What if the kind of inner development we most need today is precisely to move beyond goal-seeking as our primary societal modus operandi?

Finally, what does the devil think of your inner development goals? I am not joking, and not presupposing any metaphysics here, but do the IDGs not appear to be precisely the kind of device Uncle Screwtape might recommend to make people feel they are doing good while they are actually being pulled closer to the dark side?

IDG: Can I call my lawyer?

Forget that, I don’t need one. Integrity and authenticity are important to me, but I’ve been working on my presence. Can I also take a moment to appreciate the effort you are making to understand the IDGs. It brings out humility in me. And for that, I thank you.

Growth to goodness? We don’t say anything about that. If people read that into our work, and I don’t know that they do, is it our responsibility? And how much does it really matter?

Inner development is not moral development as such, granted. However, I suppose, inspired by the Bildung tradition, we do feel that becoming more skilled in being, thinking, relating, collaborating, and acting lead to better people and therefore a better world. It seems pretty intuitive to us. Now, obviously that has a ceteris paribus clause, because contexts change, and the world is unpredictable. There will always be narcissists, sociopaths, and even psychopaths, and there is only so much any of us can do. As for Uncle Screwtape, he’ll never understand love, but we could help him work on his capacity for trust.

Judge: Very well. The third charge is that you are the past pretending to be the future.

This charge is, in effect, that all around us we see the intellectual and spiritual exhaustion of modernity, and the disaster of modernity, but you are modernist to your core. Your vibe is fundamentally cheerleady. It’s all about a pre-tragic ‘we can fix it’ progress narrative that is wilfully blind to the role of such narratives in creating the mess we are in today. Maybe it’s time to see that the spirit of the proposed solution is often the root of the existing problem.

With your saviour theory of progress, you are colonial in your presumptions, imposing what Minna Salami would call a ‘europatriarchial’ way of knowing on the rest of the world.

Moreover, you claim to be for everyone, but in fact, with your emphasis on inner development, you are elitist in your aspirations - seeking ‘the good human’ or ‘the better human’ which is not only elitist, but, on a bad day, even crypto fasc…I don’t want to actually say it, but do we learn nothing from history?

IDG: Ok, you have hurt my feelings now. And it’s time for some communication skills.

Your criticism sounds passionate, but it is based on unfounded presumption and projection. In fact, you sound, with all due respect, like you are literally full of yourself; so much so that you can’t see what the IDGs are about at all. You are so full of critique, actually high on your critical thinking intelligence, but meanwhile you are profoundly lacking in the kinds of optimism and courage we need today.

The IDGs are out there in the world, demonstrating extraordinary co-creation skills, an inclusive mindset and intercultural competence, and we are mobilising at an extraordinary rate. What is it they say: the person who says it can’t be done should not interrupt the person doing it. What are you doing, Judge, other than judging me?

It’s true that we all need to have the self-awareness to understand our own biases, and it’s true that that IDGs arose from thinkers and practitioners in Europe and North America. It’s also true that we need the openness and learning mindset to consider entirely different views of the world, and different pathways to viable futures.

And the IDGs are proactively doing that now. We have interest groups and events in several parts of Africa, in China, and in Japan for instance. There is also a growing interest in the IDGs in several countries in South America.

I will concede that our framing is modernist in its emphasis on problem-solving, institution building and our morale probably does contain aspects of a ‘we can fix it’ progress narrative. It may also be post-modern in its emphasis on perspective-taking, social construction of purpose, reflexivity, inclusivity and the need to shift culture and world-views.

But has it occurred to you that this framing of the IDGs might be a deliberate strategic choice to meet the world where it is to maximise engagement, rather than a reflection of our lack of cultural awareness? Do you think we have no complexity awareness? Do you imagine we are simpletons?

I repeat, we are a communication device that seeks to stimulate public conversation. I accept that the modernist frame might be limiting and self-perpetuating in some ways, but it might also be seen as a wise choice of a familiar kind of thinking to get people on board. You could even call it a kind of marketing, or a gateway drug to deeper forms of psycho-technology and contemplative and spiritual practices. We accept there is deeper insight available and deeper forms of practice and inquiry to be done. However, such things often remain niche, and they only become affordances for larger numbers of people once the very idea of exploring interiority becomes a cultural affordance - and that’s the ground we are preparing.

Judge: Ok, thank you for that full answer. The first critique was about purpose, particularly the limitations of goal-seeking, the second critique was about goodness, particularly the importance of the difference between developing skills and cultivating virtue, the third critique was about your operating ethos being modernist and therefore arguably part of the problem, and now the fourth and the fifth critiques are closely related; they are both about the macroeconomy and global politics at this stage of history.

The fourth charge is that you are the accomplice to the assassin, which is another way of saying that you are a crypto-capitalist. You bask in the glory of the attention and enthusiasm you’ve received recently, but does it not give you pause that you are being supported by so many corporations and legacy institutions, i.e. hegemonic forces of the status quo?

One of the sharper ways to make this charge is in terms of the three-horizons model. The contention is that the IDGs are guilty of being an H2minus phenomenon pretending to be an H2plus phenomenon. You are a form of disruptive innovation that ostensibly seeks to challenge business as usual, but business as usual is delighted to get behind you because you don’t threaten their underlying logic. In the absence of a third horizon vision, and clarity about what has to be allowed not to grow, but to die, it is almost inevitable that the IDGs become a kind of window dressing to disguise the dark heart of capitalism. Some call this ‘The H2minus vortex’, and believe that deactivating it is the fundamental challenge of our time.

IDG: Finally, a charge worthy of its target, thank you. We know capitalism often functions in the way you describe, coopting innovation for its ends. We are also aware of the force of Moloch, and the madness of the human superorganism. But here we are, doing what we can. We did not ever say the IDGs are a panacea, only that they are a kind of precondition; they are necessary, not sufficient. We will never shift the outer structures of society if we do not simultaneously have an interior shift in cultures and individuals.

However, we do advocate Long-term Orientation and Visioning precisely because we see the validity of this particular charge. But we also think long-term orientation and visioning are enriched by a deeper appraisal of our inner lives and a commitment to work on them. This is partly why we admire the work of our friends at Perspectiva who have been making a version of this case ever since the publication of Spiritualise.

The question you should be asking is what we need to learn and change about our relationship to power of all kinds so that we can optimise the chances of disruptive innovations like ours becoming truly transformative - H2plus, and not merely coopted by hegemonic power - H2minus. The IDGs are evolving, we are interested in being H2plus, and I’m grateful for this kind of challenge.

Judge: The fith and final charge is closely related to the fourth, and it questions whether you are indeed truly disruptive and potentially transformative. You have Robert Kegan as a scientific advisor, and he is the co-author of a book on The Immunity to Change, and the theorist behind the practice of overcoming the immunity to change. I share that with the gallery because the contention is that the IDGs are the quintessence of what immunity to change looks like.

In the lexicon of Kegan and Lahey, the IDGs do not contend with competing commitments, for instance, to profit, indefinite economic growth, status-seeking consumption, the rise of AI and synthetic biology. And that may be due to a big assumption that if you speak to matters of systemic risk and structural injustice you could lose most of your allies. But if you don’t speak to that, you cannot solve the H2minus cooption challenge outlined above.

IDG: OK! Well, I’ve used up most of the twenty-three IDG skills already, but I still have a few left in the bag. Let me call upon connectedness to say that I feel you, Judge. It’s a good and deep question and I get it. The hour is late, the planet is on fire, the tech bros have far too much power, and while capitalism had its moment in the sun, we seem to need something fundamentally new now, and the IDGs may not get us there, and may even delay what has to happen.

I feel sad about all that, by the stuckness of it, and the apparent impossibility of it, and the sense that it’s getting worse. Look at the storms and floods hiting North Carolina recently, for instance - a sense of collapse is already with us. So let me draw on some empathy and compassion for myself as a representative of everything and everyone trying to show up to the particularity of this historical moment.

*Starts to weep*.

It’s not easy you know! *Sniffs and wipes away a tear*. We’re going to need all the creativity we can muster to even get properly started on transformation, and then more perseverance than we’ve ever known. I don’t know what more to say. We need to understand our inner lives better and work on them to help deal with our global collective action problems. That’s all I am really saying. If that’s a crime then I don’t want to be innocent.

*Composes herself* (Were you assuming all this time that ‘IDG’ was male?).

Judge: Thank you IDG.

Let me know if you need some tissues, a glass of water, or some life coaching…

Jury!

Yes, that’s you, readers. Thank you for paying attention.

Have you reached a verdict?