Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic is reorganizing the world, but to what end? According to the human development social innovator Robb Smith, we are in the midst of a “meta-crisis” that predates but includes the pandemic. He recently spoke with Resilient Futures about the origin of this crisis and “the Age of Transformation” that will follow it.

Smith’s career follows a fascinating trajectory. He was once co-founder and partner in Nevada Ventures, the state’s first venture capital fund. He was founder and CEO of Chrysallis, the world’s most comprehensive human development app. Most recently, he is the founder, alongside American philosopher Ken Wilber, of Integral Life. This “digital hub [supports] the global trend towards meta-integrative human capacities.” Integral theory, which inspires this hub, integrates a wide diversity of human development models into a single framework.

For Smith, the meta-crisis we find ourselves in has spiritual (i.e., values oriented), governmental, environmental, economic, and educational dimensions. The Information Age we have occupied since World II is “an operating system…that is no longer up to task. The next major stage of human evolutionary progress, which is the Transformation Age, [will have] a fundamentally different set of requirements.”

Smith believes that what will be considered a scarce resource in this Transformation Age will evolve. Following the Industrial Revolution, this…