My goal in this piece is to highlight the mechanism and a solution to **cancerous development**—the kind of growth that occurs when parts do not or cannot take their neighbors or even their future selves (anticipatory systems) into account. We see socially constructed tumors and cancers everywhere we look. What I'm trying to say in this piece is that cancer is different and worse than is getting lost; and therefore, that development (avoidance of cancer) must be added to navigation as metaphors and methods for enacting viable systems.
**Development** is about transformation—changing shape, changing form. It is a deeper more foundational process than navigation.
Development is about systematically extending one's capabilities and fitness and fittingness. Failure of development is a state that affects the whole—failure occurs when the individuals do not keep in synch with neighboring developments. Failure to develop occurs when one fails to change, or when one changes at a different tempo or rate or direction than one’s neighbors, or more generally **when one changes without an awareness of the shape and dynamics of the neighbors and neighborhood. **The protection against cancerous growth is to find ways to ensure forms of awareness that allow development instead of cancer—this will include some sort of immune system to clean up small cancers early.
Malignant development is cancerous and often kills the host and the malignancy.
A development metaphor is essential and useful. - Most people have little awareness or understanding of development. - It is a gradual non-dramatic process going on in the background and it is perceived to be a secondary effect of other forces. - Policy attempts at controlling development are often unattractive to policy-makers because of the inherent uncertainty, the time span required for development to play out, and the necessity for participation by the ‘target’ of development.
The development metaphor calls for each agent (a second generation navigator) to be **continuously aware of at least three levels** (Three Level Awareness) when making decisions, first themselves (identity) as a system, second the systems/organizations that they are part of and which depend upon them, and third the systems/organizations of which they are composed and that therefore they depend upon.
There are organizations (systems) that are the parts of me/us and there are other organizations (systems) that I/we are parts of. We must understand our developmentally relevant, intimate interrelationships as a whole: inside-of-us—us—outside-of-us. This essential, three-level, developmental awareness is more intimate and more proximate than the awareness denoted by the concept of the environment. When I/we choose to grow, taking too little account of the symbiotic, dependent, generative, encompassing system and the neighboring parts, our growth becomes cancerous to our neighboring parts and to the whole on which even we depend. Deaths of our parts, leads to death of us. Death of the organizations we are part of, leads to death of us. Viability depends upon these kinds of nested, intimate, dependent, developmental relationships.
How can I/we learn to avoid being malignant as we rush forward? My fear is that **our rushing to help** will necessarily lead to more cancer. My suspicion is that health (healthy development) can only occur in those locales that can still move at nonmalignant rates—rates compatible with an ongoing multilevel awareness. Chris Alexander has laid it out for architecture and the development of our built environment. A Pattern Language and his eight or so books that followed give us insight. Can we find ways to extend his approach beyond architecture, just as some software engineers have done—creating the object oriented programming paradigm? Repeating the main point, there is significant difference between getting lost (failed navigation) and failed development. When we grow without developmental-levels-of-connection-and-awareness we are experienced as cancerous by our neighbors—we put the whole organism at risk. Maybe there can be **healthy organisms** (cooperative businesses, communities or neighborhoods) **among the ruins**? That is cause for hope and action. Placing the best navigators on sinking ships will prove to be an ineffective strategy.