We hear the word “intelligence” a lot, yet rarely slow down to ask what it means in practice. Here I offer a humble definition and then turn toward alignment with living systems, collective inquiry, and symbiosis - remembering we live inside ecosystems shaped over millions of years. I name intelligence not as a static trait but as a living process: a relational sequence (sensing → meaning-making → caring → committing → coordinating → learning) where attention and trust flow in ways that help life continue.
Intelligence (definition)
Intelligence is a contested academic term, but a serviceable, humble definition is:
The capacity to model situations, learn from experience, and adaptively achieve goals across changing environments.
This is a synthesis of two widely cited streams:
“Achieve goals across [many] environments”
Shane Legg & Marcus Hutter: “Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.”
“Learn from experience; adapt to environment”
Mainstream psychology / APA tradition (e.g., Gottfredson’s editorial and the APA Dictionary entries). Eg: “…the ability to reason, plan, solve problems… learn from experience…” and “…derive information, learn from experience, adapt to the environment…”
It is not a single trait; it shows up through diverse abilities (reasoning, planning, learning, self-regulation, social attunement, ecological sense-making) that help organisms and communities navigate uncertainty. This definition leaves room for multiple forms (personal, social, ecological) without collapsing them into one metric.
Intelligence as a Living Process
“Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition.” — Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela
Let’s begin with the humble baseline: intelligence is the capacity to model situations, learn from experience, and adaptively achieve goals across changing environments.
Now make one crucial shift: from a goal-agnostic capacity to a living process accountable to life. (i.e. lets align with a goal …. )
That means embedding values, limits, commitments, coordination, and continual learning - so outcomes sustain people, ecologies, and trust, rather than merely optimize anything, anywhere. (Not just any goal …. )
From here, intelligence shows up as a relational loop in practice:
sensing → making meaning → caring → committing → coordinating → learning again.
Sensing: attend to bodies, places, data, testimonies.
Meaning-making: form shared models of what’s happening and what matters.
Caring: surface feelings, needs, limits, trade-offs; include objections as information.
Committing: make promises that can be held to, with clear success criteria and constraints.
Coordinating: align roles, resources, and timing to fulfill the promises.
Learning again: compare intent with outcome; update models, rules, and trust.
In metabolic terms, intelligence routes attention, care, and trust so that life can keep flourishing. It models what matters (sensing + meaning), chooses what to do (care + commitment), organizes how to do it (coordination), and updates itself (learning) across changing environments. It records and refines what works through relational memory (a living memory that evolves non-linearly) and it expresses care.
Seen this way, intelligence is a meta-protocol of many coordinated processes that weave together body, care, awareness, governance, ecology, and economy. The sections that follow offer eight lenses on this living phenomenon. None is the intelligence; together they show how intelligence moves through:
bodies (somatic awareness),
relationships (emotional and transformative practice),
groups (collective sensing and presencing),
governance (consent and feedback),
structures (roles and accountability),
ecologies (reciprocity by design), and
economies (accountable value flows and fulfillment).
What follows is a partial, evolving curation … simply things I appreciate and don’t claim mastery of …. meant to make the process legible enough to invite inquiry and practice.
1. Somatic Intelligence — Embodied Awareness
Practice: Somatic Practice / Tai Chi / Tantra / Trauma-Informed Movement
Purpose: Ground presence, regulate nervous system, sense relational flow
Science: Psychophysiology, interoception, motor learning, biofeedback
Metrics: HRV [define], self-reported calm/connection, co-regulation indicators
HRV (heart rate variability): the moment-to-moment variation in time between heartbeats; higher resting HRV is generally associated with flexible autonomic regulation and better stress adaptability.
2. Emotional Intelligence — Grammar of Care
Practice: Nonviolent / Compassionate Communication (NVC)
Purpose: Cultivate empathy, honesty, mutual understanding
Science: Affective science, empathy studies, conversation analysis
Metrics: Empathy scale, conflict repair time, relational trust
3. Transformative Intelligence — Live Edge of Change
Practice: Process Work / Deep Democracy / Restorative Dialogue
Purpose: Surface and integrate tensions, work with edges and power
Science: Qualitative field methods, group dynamics, phenomenology
Metrics: Resolution rate, role diversity, participant satisfaction
4. Collective Intelligence — Presencing & Co-Sensing
Practice: Theory U / Presencing / Systems Thinking
Purpose: Tune collective awareness, sense emerging future
Science: Participatory Action Research, complexity science
Metrics: Learning depth, innovation rate, systems insight adoption
5. Governance Intelligence — Consent & Feedback
Practice: Sociocracy / Consensus / Citizens’ Assemblies
Purpose: Equivalence, consent, continuous feedback loops
Science: Decision science, deliberative democracy, network theory
Metrics: Decision cycle time, objection quality, role clarity
6. Structural Intelligence — Roles & Accountability
Practice: Holacracy / Cooperative Governance
Purpose: Clarify distributed authority and accountability
Science: Organizational psychology, operations research
Metrics: Role fulfillment, accountability audits, cycle throughput
7. Ecological Intelligence — Design for Reciprocity
Practice: Permaculture / Syntropic Agroforesty / Agroecology / Biomimicry
Purpose: Design regenerative ecosystems and social patterns
Science: Ecology, systems ecology, energy & nutrient flow analysis
Metrics: Soil organic matter, biodiversity, resource efficiency
8. Economic Intelligence — Accountable Value Flows and Fulfillment
Practice: Commitment Pooling / Commons Stewardship / Mutual Aid
Purpose: Anchor reciprocity and measurable exchange
Science: Game theory, accounting, network economics, operations science
Metrics: Fulfillment, redemption time, reciprocity balance, honor, audit rate, witnessed care
~*~
Feel free to add to, change, edit this as a work-in-progress.
a partial view
a curation of things we all might appreciate.
I invite inquiry and practice.
Good morning Will. I am reminded of Dee Hock and his acronym CRUSTTI ( I had to school AI to finally make the correct selection!)
Dee Hock's CRUSTTI acronym stands for the
Capacity to Receive, Utilize, Store, Transform, and Transmit Information. He developed this concept as part of his "chaordic" theory of organization, which emphasizes a blend of chaos and order.
Hock, the founder of Visa, used CRUSTTI to analyze how the massive growth in information handling capacity was changing society and accelerating institutional failure. He believed that this exponential increase in information flow necessitated more organic, less hierarchical organizational structures.
I am adding this to the conversation because the work of Dee Hock has been used to make many cases that miss his point. There is an excellent interview series with the man in the years before his death in 2017.
Brilliant!
Perhaps worth considering:
The categories of "governance intelligence" and "economic intelligence" feel like cheating to me. All the other categories are general properties of any life form's information processing. But "governance intelligence" or "economic intelligence" are too specific. Its like you picked "banana eating intelligence" for monkeys, or "plumbing intelligence" for people.
Once you have specific categories, you obscure how the other, higher order kinds of intelligence are required for CP. I no longer need to think about how emotional intelligence combines with structural intelligence to create CP governance, because now I have thing thing called "governance intelligence"
I recommend reading the chapter on Alfred Binet in Gould's Mismeasure of Man. Binet invented a variety of intelligence tests to identify learning disabilities. He specifically warned not to collapse all test numbers into a single overall intelligence number, because they represented fundamental cognitive operations. If you knew the kid did well with linguistic understanding but poorly with logic, you could give her tutoring in logic. You know what is missing. Of course the elitists at Stanford immediately did what he warned against, and collapsed all the different tests into a single metric (the Stanford-Binet test, aka IQ).
"Governance intelligence" from my POV also collapses the useful categories. You cannot say what is missing, because you collapsed it all into one "governance intelligence" entity.