Thought Leaders Thinking: Robb Smith

Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic is reorganizing the world, but to what end? According to the human development social innovator Robb Smith, we are in the midst of a “meta-crisis” that predates but includes the pandemic. He recently spoke with Resilient Futures about the origin of this crisis and “the Age of Transformation” that will follow it. 

Smith’s career follows a fascinating trajectory. He was once co-founder and partner in Nevada Ventures, the state's first venture capital fund. He was founder and CEO of Chrysallis, the world's most comprehensive human development app. Most recently, he is the founder, alongside American philosopher Ken Wilber, of Integral Life. This “digital hub [supports] the global trend towards meta-integrative human capacities.” Integral theory, which inspires this hub, integrates a wide diversity of human development models into a single framework.

 For Smith, the meta-crisis we find ourselves in has spiritual (i.e., values oriented), governmental, environmental, economic, and educational dimensions. The Information Age we have occupied since World II is “an operating system…that is no longer up to task. The next major stage of human evolutionary progress, which is the Transformation Age, [will have] a fundamentally different set of requirements.”

 Smith believes that what will be considered a scarce resource in this Transformation Age will evolve.  Following the Industrial Revolution, this scarce resource was “value, [in which] you have a specialization of labor. You have capital flows flowing around you. You have a banking class that pops up.” Then, at the end of the Information Age, with increasing luxury in our lives, “meaning” became the new scarce resource. But in the Transformation Age, “unity and integration” will replace “meaning.”

 “Leaders are emerging right now, as we speak, who—economically, politically, environmentally spiritually, and educationally—are running the experiments, building the skills, and developing the mindsets to be Transformation Age leaders. They're able to integrate all of the prior values and structures within themselves, and create language to help unify people and build coalitions that are more integrated and unified.

“After this period of breakdown, massive diversity, polarization, the power breaking down, what you're going to have is a reintegration and a reorganization.”

But what does enterprise look like in this Transformation Age, in this COVID Economy?

Smith points to the new power of people to convene quickly over the Internet to disrupt and influence institutions and enterprises. This portends a new way of organizing and generating value.

“I think you're going to see cooperatives where power is shared amongst a collective of humans who are all contributing from either inside the building or distributed around the world. In the Transformation Age, you shouldn't see an Uber arise where 10 founders create a platform that extracts most of the economic wealth from 3 million drivers [in a case of] ‘winner takes all’ economics. Value will increasingly [generated from] the world of thoughts, creativity, and ingenuity—and that value will have to be shared.”