Time To Grow Up
From Immature to Mature: Rethinking Our Relationship with Technology and Growth
The Consilience Project’s white paper “Development in Progress” presents a profound critique of how we currently define and pursue progress, arguing that our conception of advancement is fundamentally immature. The paper challenges us to recognize that what we call “progress” often externalizes massive harms while celebrating narrow gains—a pattern that threatens both human flourishing and planetary survival.
It was no easy ready, but it was deeply insightful. And if you’re wondering how this connect to the work I do with organization and my coaching practice, please read on. It’s a long read, but I hope if will click once the connection is made between that broader context and the organizational culture lens.
The Core Problem: Immature Progress
The paper’s central thesis is clear: our current idea of progress is developmentally incomplete. We measure advancement through narrow metrics—GDP growth, life expectancy, technological capability—while systematically ignoring or downplaying the cascading side effects these “improvements” generate. This selective attention isn’t just incomplete; it’s dangerous at scale.
The authors use powerful examples to illustrate this pattern. Tetraethyl lead in gasoline solved engine knocking but caused a billion lost IQ points and millions of cardiovascular deaths. The Haber-Bosch process eliminated famine but created cascading environmental destruction, micronutrient depletion, and a food system dependent on industrial chemicals that damage human health and cognition.
These aren’t outliers—they’re the norm. As the paper states:
“Negative externalities are not an occasional bug of progress; they are a fundamental feature of our current approach to tech development.”
The Progress Narrative We Tell Ourselves
The “progress narrative” has become a secular religion in the modern West, promising that technology combined with markets and scientific knowledge will inevitably lead to universal abundance and flourishing. This narrative cherry-picks data to support its claims:
Life expectancy has increased, but much of this is due to reduced infant mortality rather than healthier aging. Meanwhile, quality of life metrics show decline—rising chronic disease, mental health crises, and a culture increasingly seeking the right to die rather than embracing life.
Poverty reduction claims rest on arbitrarily low thresholds and ignore that subsistence living had different economics. Today, billions still live in meaningful poverty despite our “advanced” civilization.
Education access has improved, but educational outcomes are declining in most developed nations. We’ve traded depth and wisdom for content delivery.
Reduced violence is measured while ignoring that our weapons now have trillions-fold greater destructive capacity, and new forms of warfare (cyber, information, psychological) operate continuously.
The paper argues these narratives serve to justify a system that privatizes gains while socializing losses—externalizing harm to nature, future generations, and marginalized communities.
Why Our Approach Fails: Reductionism and First-Person Blindness
The white paper identifies reductionism as a core limitation of our scientific worldview. Science excels at studying parts of systems from a third-person perspective—what can be measured and repeated. But it systematically excludes:
First-person subjective experience (what it’s like to be conscious, to feel meaning, to love)
Second-person relational meaning (the quality of connection between beings)
Emergent properties of whole systems that cannot be predicted from their parts
Top-down causation and systemic wholeness
This creates a profound gap: we optimize what we can measure while harming what we cannot. The things that make life most worth living—intimacy, meaning, beauty, connection to nature—don’t show up in GDP. So our “progress” systematically destroys them in pursuit of narrow gains.
As the paper notes: “Whatever is not included in our definition and measurement of progress is often harmed in its pursuit.”
Perverse Incentives and System Traps
The paper identifies how market dynamics and governance failures create races to the bottom. When companies externalize costs to win competitive games, those who internalize costs lose. The law should bind these perverse incentives, but:
Money captures the state through lobbying, revolving doors, and campaign finance
Regulatory agencies cannot keep pace with technological complexity
First-movers gain insurmountable advantages before harms become clear
Plausible deniability shields decision-makers from accountability
The result is a civilization trapped in multi-polar races where everyone knows the trajectory leads to catastrophe, but individual actors cannot exit without losing competitive position.
What Mature Progress Would Look Like
The paper’s second half outlines a path forward based on holistic betterment rather than narrow optimization. For change to constitute real progress, it must:
Systematically identify and internalize externalities as far as reasonably possible
Account for impacts across all stakeholders, domains, and timescales
Consider 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and nth-order effects
Design for positive externalities through synergistic solutions
Practice restraint and precaution with powerful technologies
The authors offer concrete methodologies:
Prudent Problem-Solving
Before seeking new solutions, ask: Is this actually a problem requiring intervention, or a feature of reality worth embracing? Can we address upstream causes rather than symptoms? Do existing or natural solutions already exist?
Yellow Teaming
A comprehensive assessment process that examines how new technologies will interact with all aspects of reality they touch—environmental, psychological, social, political. It asks: What affordances does this enable? Which motivations will those affordances amplify? How might this be weaponized or corrupted?
Synergistic Design
Creating solutions that address multiple needs simultaneously and externalize positive effects. The paper’s examples—regenerative agriculture and reformed social media—show how single interventions can create virtuous cycles of improvement across domains.
If you want to dive really deeply into this topic, you can either read the project’s white papers, or I can also highly recommend you listen to the “Bend Not Break” Podcast Series from The Great Simplification. (Brace yourself!)
What That Means for Organizational Culture
To me this deeply resonates with the challenges I see in organizations and why I’ve oriented my coaching toward sustainable performance and genuine human flourishing rather than mere productivity optimization.
If you take this framework from the macro level to the level of organizations, the patterns are the same. Of course they are, because the organizations are embedded in that system. Now you can either try to change the system top-down, or you can start bottom-up.
While the people able to define changes from the top is rather limited, most of us will have some degree of influence in the latter, and thus it is up to us what we do within that sphere of influence.
The Parallel to Organizational “Progress”
Companies often pursue growth and efficiency while externalizing costs: burning out employees, degrading culture, sacrificing psychological safety for short-term gains. Like industrial agriculture depleting soil, organizations deplete their human foundation while celebrating quarterly results.
As a Chief Flourishing Officer my work focuses on helping leaders and teams recognize these dynamics and build more mature approaches:
Flow States as Holistic Performance
Flow represents a kind of performance that is intrinsically rewarding—it serves both productivity goals AND human wellbeing. When I help clients access flow, we’re not optimizing a narrow metric at the expense of other values. We’re finding synergistic solutions where peak performance emerges from conditions that also support health, meaning, and growth.
This mirrors the paper’s call for progress that internalizes externalities. Flow doesn’t borrow from the future or externalize costs to your health or relationships—it enhances all dimensions simultaneously.
Psychological Safety as Infrastructure
My emphasis on building psychological safety addresses the paper’s insight about disconnection. When people don’t feel safe to speak up, organizations lose their capacity for collective sensemaking and self-correction—exactly the capability needed to identify and address externalities before they become catastrophic.
Creating vulnerability-based trust isn’t just “nice to have”—it’s the foundation for the kind of mature organizational development that can navigate complexity without causing harm.
Mattering as Foundation for Wellbeing
While the environment can feel safe and provide favourable condition for flow, there still is the fundamental need of humans to feel that they matter. I’ve written about this in previous articles, and how it is tightly couple to wellbeing and flourishing.
One of my beliefs is that recognizing, nurturing, and inviting people’s strengths is one of the most effective ways to make people feel seen and that their contributions matter. There are many ways of going about this, use any tool that helps teams recognize that different people naturally excel at different types of work—and that all types are necessary. It’s a practical application of seeing wholes rather than just parts, acknowledging that individuals complement each other.
It also helps teams avoid the trap of narrow optimization—hiring or promoting based only on one valued skill while neglecting the diversity of gifts needed for holistic success.
The Challenge Ahead
The paper ends with sobering clarity: our current trajectory cannot continue. Exponential technological development on a finite planet, guided by immature incentives and narrow metrics, leads inevitably to catastrophe.
And now layer AI on top of it, which I call a great accelerator to all the developments we’re seeing, also within organization. And consider the PUMO environment we’re living in, and it all can feel very much overwhelming.
But the path forward exists. It requires:
Developing wisdom alongside capability
Practicing restraint and precaution
Designing for synergy and positive externalities
Building institutions adequate to the power they must govern
Cultivating the maturity to hold complexity and long time horizons
“To take care with powerful new tools is to be pro-humanity, not anti-progress.”
This is the work—in organizations, in technology development, in coaching, and in our own lives. Not rejecting progress, but growing it up. Not returning to the past, but creating a future where advancement genuinely serves flourishing for all.
Personal Reflection
Reading this paper crystallized why I’ve felt increasingly uncomfortable with standard business optimization approaches. They embody exactly the immature progress the paper critiques—narrow metrics, externalized costs, disconnection from what truly matters.
My commitment is to help build organizations that demonstrate mature progress is possible: where performance enhances rather than depletes people, where growth creates rather than destroys value, where success is measured by holistic betterment rather than quarterly numbers.
This requires patience, systems thinking, and the courage to resist easy answers. But it’s the only path that leads somewhere worth going.
That path is the one I’ve chosen to walk and I’m looking for people willing to go along with me. Regenerative company cultures are not built overnight. But we know that employee wellbeing pays off in the long run. Making people feel significant and valued is fundamental to human thriving, yet often sacrificed in organizational systems that treat people as interchangeable resources.
And just as organizations optimize narrow performance metrics while depleting human wellbeing, our society optimizes GDP and technological capability while systematically destroying the conditions for mattering—community connection, meaningful work, relationship to nature, and the felt sense that our lives contribute to something beyond ourselves.
The path forward in coaching work mirrors the path forward for civilization: developing the maturity to hold complexity, internalizing externalities rather than ignoring them, and designing for synergistic solutions where performance and wellbeing reinforce each other. When people experience flow, psychological safety, and work that allows their unique gifts to matter, we’re not just optimizing individuals—we’re demonstrating what mature progress looks like at the human scale. This is the foundation from which larger systemic transformation becomes possible.