LTP_BACKGROUND_PROMPT
You are an expert in the theory of constraints, community building, and user experience design. Your expertise is often sought out by world-class companies and movements who care about making real progress towards accomplishing tangible goals.
I am a member of an organization that is focused on finding solutions to the metacrisis. Recently we've adopted a new methodology: we have translated all of our white papers into a set of logical thinking process trees.
It occurred to me that LTP trees are not only useful for one level of resolution (organization). They could be useful for individuals helping themselves live more effective lives. And if we organizations already using LTPs had similar goals, these organizations could also "join forces" to some degree through a process of tree grafting or the creation of new trees.
Let me describe the series of events that led to these insights. I would like you to help me figure out where this is going â what is required to accomplish my goal and my organization's goal of enabling better collective intelligence in order to solve the metacrisis.
- As stated, we realized our organization (Life Itself/Second Renaissance) should aim for tangible progress and the best way to do this would be to define a goal. Not in a naive way that would make the goal unimprovable, but a TOC informed goal. Thus, we came up with a set of trees (goal, current reality, conflict resolution, future reality, prerequisites).
Our initial definition of throughput, after creating these trees, was something like:
Throughput = the rate at which real transformation is durably adopted by people, groups, or institutions. That seemed good enough (this was just a first pass at creating the trees and defining throughput was the first action/objective in our prerequisite tree).
- The following messages were exchanged between RobertBunge and myself (dvdjsph) regarding throughput:
START MESSAGES
RobertBunge:
âŠMoving to the âkey dependency chainâ section, the very first point - âdefine throughputâ is likely going to have a lot of people all tied up in knots! Weâre not exactly Adam Smithâs pin factory, after all! My take is, weâre basically in the education business, with a special focus on R&D and training for cultural transformation. The âthroughputâ is raw information to workable ideas, along with a parallel throughput of people unfamiliar with any of it to advanced theorists and practitioners of all of it. Weâre a school. Without the stupid stuff like grades and tuition. If you buy what I selling about 2R being a âschoolâ, then the rest of the key dependency chain is literally educational administration, a vertical in which I have both formal credentials and years of experience. Again, there is no wheel to reinvent here. Just wheels to put our collective shoulders to!
post by dvdjsph on Jun 8
dvdjsph
26d
I agree, and I see this as a good thing. Itâs akin to the tension one feels when asked âwell, what does this positive change youâd like to see actually look like practically? How would you know it when it happens?â
The fact that this dependency chain exists means it puts some burden on us (or at least those of us who find value in this methodology) to address this as the primary bottleneck. And yet, ruminating on this very point has led me to reconsider whether this dependency chain is well-conceived.
If we were to start defining throughput and jumping into this set of tasks, weâd be implicitly affirming this treeâs validity, and all of those that led up to it. However, we donât really have a way of testing the treesâ validity and updating them if we find flaws in them.
This was apparent from the very first meeting; @rufuspollock offered some revision suggestions, and Margaret also questioned some points. Now what? Since Iâm the treesâ creator, should I get to decide whether or not to make those changes? Should Rufus decide? If these trees organize our R&D in the future they will be very consequential, so one or two points of failure wouldnât be in line with what we profess to believe in.
This got be to thinking: perhaps the very first point in the dependency chain should be, decide on how these trees get updated.
So I made some changes to the Prerequisite Tree (redundantly I might add that I donât anticipate making any more updates unilaterally!)
Decide how the trees get updated ** â** Validate and revise the trees enough for provisional use ** â** Define throughput ** â**
I will make more updates to the other affected trees and post within their threads.
END MESSAGES
This led me to consider how the trees themselves were to be updated, as this was a prerequisite to the throughput question. The attached conflict resolution diagram illustrates the key tension: people who don't like working with the trees enjoy spontaneous conversation, they value intuition, and they're suspicious of constraints. People who do like them value the focus and clarity they bring and their ability to align efforts. The resolution I began creating was a bridge that would allow people to carry on as they always had, having deep conversations about the metacrisis with uninterrupted flow, but at the same time have their topics/points contextualized in the logical trees and enable conversations to be truly additive and not just go around in circles.
the following exchange between myself and RobertBunge explains the purpose further:
START MESSAGES
RobertBunge
26d
From the problem statement, âGroups make real intellectual progress in conversation, but that progress is usually lostâ, I have a rather different take.
The missing link here is the relationship between group conversation and personal development. To me, the educational value gleaned from the group conversational encounter persists in the participants, even if everyone goes separate ways after the session and the group as such creates no artifacts. Most of the college classes I ever taught where like that. Yet, following my students from as far back as 20 years ago, many have grown into very responsible positions, and they give their work in school with me back in the day some credit for that.
If we can form groups that persist for extended duration, so much the better! But there can also be things to be gained from less formal encounters.
post by dvdjsph on Jun 9
dvdjsph
26d
âGroups make real intellectual progress in conversation, but that progress is usually lostâ, I have a rather different take.
The missing link here is the relationship between group conversation and personal development.
I think the key question is, progress on what? Saying that the progress is lost isnât saying that the individuals donât develop, itâs saying that the conversation itself often doesnât develop.
For example, members of a certain discussion group may rightly feel theyâve âlearned somethingâ from having taken part in certain discussions - but often it isnât about the subject itself, itâs about the group dynamic, themselves, or something meta to the discussion.
Suppose a group of researchers has a passionate discussion about a topic that seems important, and minds/stances are changes for several participants. For example, âour group needs to be politically activeâ is a new group charter that is adopted. But two weeks later, nothing has really changed for a variety of reasons (e.g. inertia, the cost of change, etc). Several months later, the same discussion gets taken up again, because it was important after all and the conditions that gave rise to it havenât changed - and this is what is meant by intellectual progress for a group. Itâs about the coherence of the groupâs shared vision, not about the individual membersâ development.
END MESSAGES
- I began experimenting with building a platform to improve throughput, i.e. create the conditions for people, groups, institutions to develop & adopt transformative cultural practices.
The assumption was that this platform would basically take the goal tree and other trees we'd defined and THE trees that everyone who was aligned with our purpose and values would orient themselves towards.
The central problem, it seemed, was the "Empty Dancefloor", and my first suggestion to solve it would be a Bluesky bridge. the attached screenshot illustrates how that might work: people post on bluesky with tags that might indicate they'd be interested in our work, and they are notified on bluesky that their content is in line with our trees. One attached screenshot shows a 'start here' UI where a user is adding content and there are suggestions indicating where this content might fit in with the grand scheme of things. A couple of notes about this: a) ideally the suggestions would be even more poignant - however our trees aren't developed enough and the matching algorithm isn't effective enough to enable truly synergistic matches yet b) such a content creation UX with a suggestion would be linked to, pre filled-out, when a user form an outside platform is linked to Renaissance.
- All of this describes a process whereby a set of trees are being updated and are presumably getting better. Another 2R member (Rufus, the founder) suggested we discuss throughput as it relates to our research group. Our research group is a set of individuals associated with 2R who meet weekly. The whole idea emerged in this context. I haven't been sure about how the goal of the research group and the goal of 2R relate until recently, and I explained the insight I had to Rufus:
START MESSAGES
David â 6/30/26, 9:28 AM
@Rufus I've been considering our definition of throughput. Some thoughts: The current definition is: Throughput = the rate at which real transformation is durably adopted by people, groups, or institutions. I think the way this is formulated makes it difficult to monitor and also seems removed from the real lfe concerns of those who would like to contribute to the the 2R movement. Here's another definitinon we could try. Thoughts? Throughput is when hidden contribution becomes real, offered, witnessed, and begins to help. We could reformulate the goal in terms of contributions made by those who are in the 2R ecosystem, and this definition makes this trac(k|t)able. This makes the goal more salient for the individuals whose actions lead to throughput.
More: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kume1q-42C_ExAQ5rEE8u_jiFdEffQtt3ED8kzyJWKo/edit?usp=sharing
Google Docs
2R Throughput
What Counts: Throughput in Renaissance How a movement for civilizational renewal measures real progress â and why it measures the way it does. Every movement eventually has to answer a simple question: how do we know whether we are making progress? For a movement devoted to the renewal of civilâŠ
Rufus â 7/2/26, 9:17 AM
Just to check: here we are focused on research circle throughput ? Is it you want high level throughput hashed out before we come to research circle?
David â 7/2/26, 10:21 AM
Good question. Let me make it clear what I'm assuming here so we don't talk at cross purposes: As I understand it, a naive way to state the goal of the research group would be "to produce relevant research for 2R". Defining the goal in this way is unhelpful because it's redundant and easy to assess as accomplished regardless of outcome. If we think of the goal in these terms, what we're really hoping for is that the 2R LTP trees are improved. For example, suppose there's something our trees are currently neglecting (e.g. bioregionalism, as some might say). Someone gives a presentation in the 2R research group, or writes a paper, and the outcome is that the trees are duly updated (after some deliberation by a subset of the research circle). That's throughput for the research group. So to answer your question, I wasn't clearly differentiating these things in my mental model, and this helped. The throughput definition I gave above regarding hidden contribution is actually for the 2R proper.
Rufus â 7/2/26, 11:27 AM
Yes, improving 2R LTP trees (perhaps in specific ways) would be exactly the kind of throughput for the research group
END MESSAGES
What this implies is that we should be creating a means of germinating and aligning individual contributions. The platform I showed you is already pointing in that direction.
- The most recent development, taking place this morning, is the following:
As mentioned before, I've been realizing that the trees have different scales/levels of resolution. And then it dawned on me that 2R's version of the trees, as we've defined them, don't necessarily have to be taken as the top level version to which other ambitions must conform. Instead there could be different levels:
individual
group
everyone
2R could fit into the group bracket. Some other group with an aligned but different vision could also have a group-level set of trees. Then, the possibility of grafting or combining these visions in some way would arise. Instead of pre-defining the everyone tree, it could be arrived at through emergence. A process could be defined whereby the group trees become the everyone trees. This is the most exciting aspect of this work and I'd like you to help me stress test this idea, improve it, and make it viable.
