CSPT is particularly powerful when it come to understanding relationship dynamics. It helps us understand with depth why we might see and react to each other in the particular ways that we do. It also provides immediate guidance for the tasks of collaboration.
This section of the website is one that should grow in fascinating ways in the years ahead. In part this is simply a function of the detail with which CSPT helps us understand how temperaments creatively relate. As much it is how the concept of Cultural Maturity predicts relationships between temperaments should change in the decades and centuries before us. The same capacity for systemic perspective that CST predicts Cultural Maturity will give us more generally, also predicts an ability both to better appreciate and more powerful make use of temperament differences. This should be the case wherever we look—friendships, intimacy, community, organizations, nations, and the planet as a whole.
Each section below describes changes in that particular world of relationships pertinent to the importance of appreciating temperament differences. It also includes descriptions and vignettes illustrating particular challenges and rewards that come from engaging temperament differences within that particular sphere.
This page is only at a beginning stage of development. We are relying on vignettes and reflections sent in by CSPT community members to put meat on these bare conceptual bones.
Love and Intimacy
Appreciation for temperament differences should be increasingly important in the world of love for the simple reason that we should more often find ourselves loving people of temperament different from our own. Traditionally, people rarely dated and married individuals from outside their own temperament axis. We often say opposites attract, but this had generally been opposites within one’s own temperament axis. This is changing. More and more, people, particularly people of high Capacitance, are dating and marrying people from different axis. It is something the concept of Cultural Maturity predicts.
All this requires a stretch. But it is exactly the integrative sort of stretch that creative growth in our time is asking of us. It makes is even more the case that our partner is often beyond us to understand. But it also means we will always have things to learn from them. And what they have to teach us will be exactly that which, in our time, is most important for us to learn. (More)
Families and Parenting
It has always been the case that children often have temperaments different from their parents. This is often a major source of trauma in development. Having more families in which parents differ significantly in temperament will help alleviate some of this trauma by increasing the relationship options. But it will also increase the percentage of such “mixed temperament” parent/child relationships. In times ahead, greater sophistication in our understanding of personality differences will thus be increasingly important to healthy families. It will also be that case that families should serve as increasingly rich crucibles/laboratories for learning first hand about temperament differences. (More)
Group Affiliations
Group associations—in churches, fraternal organizations, political/social advocacy groups—have in times past most always been quite narrow in their temperament diversity. Creative Systems Theory defines Ideology in terms of a view’s identification with one part of the creative entirety. Most all group identities are in some way tied to Ideology in this sense. Today, we are seeing greater gender and racial diversity in all such associations. The concept of Cultural Maturity predicts we should also see greater temperament diversity, particularly in high Capacitance organizations as the need for a more integrative kind of advocacy becomes increasingly widespread. (More)
Business
Businesses have always employed an array of temperaments to carry out different creative functions—Early’s for more R&D, Middles for manufacturing and management, Lates for finance and marketing. But in times past, these various functions have been kept relatively separate. The more global, fast paced businesses of the future will need to be dynamically integrated to function effectively and this is something we are seeing. These changes will require fascinating changes both in how we view our own temperament and how we relate to others. (More)
Leadership
Leadership in times past has been almost exclusively a Middle/Upper or Late/Upper cultural function. And leadership relationships have been largely polar “top-down” leader/follower relationships. Cultural Maturity predicts three kinds of changes, each of which we are seeing. We should find more people of other temperaments taking on leadership roles. We should find leadership relationship defined in more systemic/participatory terms. And we should more and more appreciate how decision’s that involve diverse creative input are most likely to be systemic conceived (in the sense decisions increasingly must be). This means leaders need to be more knowledgeable about temperament differences and more adept in working with groups with temperament diversity. (This applies particularly to leaders with other than the traditional leadership temperaments because leadership will for them will present particular challenges.) It also means that all people involved in collective decision-making processes (and in a world of more participatory leadership that means everyone) need the sophistication of communications skills that can come only with a deep understanding of personality differences. (More)
Nations and the Planet
All the observations about group affiliation are pertinent to our largest human affiliations. Successful large-scale decision-making will similar require greater comfort with temperament diversity a new sophistication in our ability to work in its presence. A few examples:
The concept of Cultural Maturity argues that neither traditionally liberal nor traditionally conservation political positions will be adequate for the question that now confront us. Left and right are Ideologies in the sense of reflecting the world views of particular temperaments and creative partialities. Getting beyond party bickering to achieve truly creative solutions will require this new kind of sophistication.
In Hope and the Future I describe how different cultural stages and different temperaments each bring with them predictably different felt relationships with nature. I describe how the kind of newly sustainable relationships with nature on which our future depends will require contributions from each of these various perspectives.
With increasing frequency, we will need to engage in truly global decision-making. While differences in how the world looks from different cultural stages and different temperaments are not the same, the CSPT describes how some of the same skills and perspectives help with bridging differences in each case. It also describes how nations often exhibit systemic differences very much related to temperament differences. (That George Bush would have trouble with France would not be unexpected given his fairly low Capacitance Middle temperament and the Late/Lower/Inner sensibility that most defines French culture.) (More)
