Summary. Opal Systems is an integrated set of original materials and models, developed by organizational systems designer Brad Sargent. He bases Opal elements in a holistic, organic paradigm to train people to observe, analyze, and interpret culture. These are critical skills for team-based missional enterprises that lead to personal transformation toward Christlike character and social transformation toward “Kingdom Culture.”

This is a moderately technical overview. It may seem too advanced for so early on. However, some readers will want this information sooner than later, and I am intentional about accommodating the needs of people with different learning styles. Also, I’m including it here as I suspect it will become an important reference post in the future, whether readers are oriented in their roles to be theoreticians, theologians, practitioners, or – even better to mesh with the complexities of the unfolding holistic paradigm – some combination of those three perspectives.

Components

Opal Systems consists of five components, all integrated from the same paradigm and with the same purposes:

  1. Opal Pyramid – a four-dimensional, four-point pyramid representing the set of all possible cultures, plus the possibility of integrating these four “pure type” points into ideal Kingdom Culture, and modeling how cultural dominances and declines occur over time.
  2. Opal Profiles – assessment tools on information processing modes, communication styles, teamwork styles and roles in transformation, and cultural fluidity. Results are described as they relate with the Pyramid, so they are integrated with the main theory.
  3. Opal Connection Zone Curriculum – training system of 30 core concepts and 15 skills distributed across seven topic categories (humanity, individuality, community, organizationality, culturology, ecology, futurology). All modules use illustrations from films, media, Encounters labwork, and Immersions and Expeditions.
  4. Opal Encounters – lab experiences with a seven-level simulation game in cultural fieldwork. Each level synthesizes progressively more complex concepts/skills, and also integrates with the Curriculum and the Immersions and Expeditions.
  5. Opal Immersions and Expeditions – installation learnings with concrete and visual media (e.g., games, toys, trading cards), case studies, and community field trips to observe and interpret cultural interactivity.

Scope

Opal Systems offers theologically-informed theories and practitioner tools designed to address:

  • An individual’s or culture’s coherence with one to four “pure type” cultures. Each pure type is based on a specific information processing mode (analytic, synthetic, symbiotic, analogic) which are rooted in linguistics (specifically, comparative discourse analysis and crosscultural communications) and learning style theories.
  • An individual’s or culture’s degree of coherence with the comprehensive, ideal, biblical culture. This “Kingdom Culture” is the social outworking of Christlike character. It is composited from value sets drawn from each of the four pure type cultures, and it excludes extreme versions of those values as they would be toxic.
  • Personal or social transformation toward either ennoblement and good, or corruption and evil, based on movement toward or away from Christlike character and Kingdom Culture.
  • Relative dominance of any cultural paradigm at a given time. This includes external factors – such as global paradigm shifts – that affect cultural ascent or descent, and the relationship of these systems to changes in mega-cultures or civilizations.
  • Various relational stances among cultures, and the potential outcomes of those relationships: Monocultural isolation or hegemony. Crosscultural conflict, culture shock, assimilation, syncretism, countercultural resistance. Multicultural coexistence. Intercultural collaboration.

Sources

Opal Systems is based in original research and development work that includes:

  • Processing significant personal practitioner experiences (including many apparent “failures”) in church planting, social enterprises, and crosscultural relationships .
  • Original conceptualizing to create an elegant, comprehensive, organic approach that explains those findings through a set of interactive systems that uses a minimal number of principles.
  • Creating primary sources, and finding secondary resources, to explain and illustrate the concepts, and to teach and train people from a variety of learning styles and cultural backgrounds.

Paradigm Elements

In this post-Christendom, post-Western era of global paradigm shifts, it is important to start from ground zero and create a wholly new model based in the emerging holistic paradigm. It won’t work to create a “new” synthesis based in the Hegelian dialectic (the cycle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis), or simply attempt to glue fragments of previous perspectives and disciplines together and call it “new.” (For instance, would American politics be fixed if we merged the Republicans and Democrats into one big party and did a mash-up of their platforms? Would it create a truly new paradigm if the progressives, fundamentalists, evangelicals, and emergents of American denominations all joined together for a mega- mega-Church, and then re-created a doctrinal statement by canceling out any items where their previous views conflicted with one another? What would be left?)

Opal Systems is my original attempt to design from scratch, using a holistic paradigm, a coherent set of systems to focus on cultural concerns. (Sometimes I call this discipline by the unfamiliar term culturology to keep people from assuming they know what I mean.) Although many sources have influenced me over the years, I have not developed Opal Systems in response to someone’s theory. I’ve based it on my own experiences, reflections, and concepts.

To accommodate readers from other backgrounds, here is a list of more traditionally-defined disciplines that capture some of many aspects of the holistic-paradigm Opal Systems:

  • Narrative/biblical theology and, to some degree, systematic theology.
  • Paradigm profiling, analysis, and interpretation of: end-state and instrumental values, worldview integration, operational strategies and structures (i.e., organization forms), cultural styles and lifestyles.
  • Cultural geography, appreciative inquiry/asset mapping, and critical contextualization.
  • Strategic foresight, analysis of cultural trends and drivers, non-linear extrapolation, scenario production.
  • Organic and organizational systems design, research and strategy development, team compositing, project management, genetics, reproducibility, adaptability, sustainability.
  • Virtual ethnography and network mapping.
  • Linguistics, especially cultural implications of comparative rhetorical (discourse) analysis.
  • Theories of creativity and learning styles, andragogy and pedagogy, game theory, simulations for training.
  • Studies in film, multimedia, and hypermedia to enhance written, relational, and verbal training processes through use of complementary visual media sources.
  • Geometry and mathematical modeling, fractals, set theory, paradox, parallax, and optimality theory.
  • Macrohistory, eco-systems, complexity theory, and other meta-pattern approaches to various ways that elements integrate to create systems.

Implications

In traditional, modernist, analytic paradigms, Opal Systems would be considered “interdisciplinary” – requiring theoreticians and practitioners to draw from multiple separate academic disciplines. However, within emerging cultures, Opal materials would be considered as stemming from their preferred paradigm that emphasizes holistic systems. This means Opal Systems is rooted in a relatively comprehensive set of generalist perspectives and practices that are already interconnected, integrated, and interdependent – not specialist approaches that are dissected, isolated, and independent. Here are some expected outcomes of an elegant system for interpreting cultures:

  • If these various system aspects have been considered well, the resulting concepts inherently include qualitative information that can be used for planning and assessment, both of personal growth by individuals and of social transformation by any size group.
  • If the mathematical modeling of the system works well, it will demonstrate important principles visually. Also, all quantitative measurements (e.g., absolute location of a point, relative distance between points, sources of lines and surface area, triangulation, volume, density, etc.) will be theoretically meaningful and have practical implications for actions social transformation practitioners should take to catalyze change.
  • If the training systems have been constructed well, they will validate and equip both practitioners who are more analytic in their approach to application and those who are more intuitive.
  • If the training systems have been well designed, using multiple learning styles, the content modules and practical experiences will accommodate the needs of people from a wide range of learner types.

All of these have significant implications on our potential for collaboration across differences of paradigms, generations, and system design methods.  And if we cannot figure out how to do more than merely co-exist in a world of shifting paradigms, we will never be able to embody the degree of Kingdom Culture that will draw transformation in the lives of individuals and groups. And isn’t that what we’re here for?

Well, that takes us through the origin stories related to the Opal Systems, and an overview of what I’ve developed in these Systems. The next post, RD1-4 – Fractals and “The Espresso of the Thing” take a more light-hearted approach to looking at the mathematical concept of fractals – which is woven throughout the entire Opal Systems.