This week, I spoke at Microsoft Envision on the Metaverse (S2, Ep 5).

As the next Internet, the Metaverse can be a tool for transformation or dissociation.

This inspired me to explain how the Growth Triangle applies to any technology that you are building.

Remember, the Growth Triangle has three parts – paradigm shifts, pattern breaks, and capacity building. A thoughtful combination of all three accelerates growth faster than one side only.

This triangle works without technology.

In fact, it came to me as a framework to categorize and understand my own analog growth work. Meditation retreats, CLG coach training, breathwork, shadow work, walks in nature, slow eating, forgiveness lists, and more.

The triangle works with technology too.

It can take an individual’s growth triangle and supercharge it through facilitating discovery, expanding access, improving quality, and enhancing expansion of human abilities.

Meditation apps, heart rate variability trainers, neurostimulation, in an ever-widening array of applications.

This doesn’t mean you don’t use traditional means to grow, it simply expands the precision of your tool set.

The crisis we face is that our tech is exponential and our growth is linear.

And the gap is dangerous.

The promise of Transformative Tech is that we can close that gap and enable human growth and development to match exponential curves.

The win for humanity is not in having yet another type of meditation in an app…

The “real win” is to build so that all of our technology — everything that we create — has a pathway embedded in it to help each of us to find our way home to ourselves.

Which brings us back to the example of the Metaverse and the core question:

What would it take for the Metaverse to become a Growth Triangle for Billions?

My answer will allow you to consider any tech and see how to apply it to human growth in implicit and explicit ways.

For this case, I will apply the Growth Triangle to games as a key aspect of the metaverse.

To enable the Metaverse to become a Growth Triangle for Billions, we must look at our designs and find or insert the elements where each side of the triangle is touched.

The sequence will depend on the product and the audience.

The frequency will depend on the goal.

The percentage of implicit vs. explicit will depend on what makes sense to ensure the experience is engaging.

Just as the best meditation technique is the one you’ll use, the engagement line matters and is deeply tied to the unique product and team building.

How can the Metaverse be a paradigm shifting tool?✅

• Paradigm tools allow you to see the world, your life, your problems in a new way. These tools are like a trampoline next to a fence line. Your vision is below the fence. You jump on the trampoline, and on each bounce, you see above the fence to the wideness of life beyond your constraint – whatever that may be.
• The fully digital layer allows us to defy the laws of physics, to be and do anything — it’s a very big trampoline. As such, it could allow us to re-craft different narratives about ourselves. In studying change, it has been my observation that people do not change UNTIL their story about themselves changes. Games can help us do this.

How can the Metaverse be a capacity building tool? ✅

• Capacity building tools stretch your capacity for experiencing the world and your life. These tools are like dirt that you pile beneath your trampoline. By raising the floor, you lower the fence line.
• Games can absolutely be used to push dirt under the trampoline. They can teach emotional range, heart rate training, risk taking, creativity and more. The body of research on the beneficial use of games is extensive…like really extensive. Games, as they are today, have been shown to be able to teach transferable skills, life skills, leadership skills, interpersonal skills, with joy and engagement. All we need to do is point them more directly linked to a paradigm shift.

How can the Metaverse be a pattern breaking tool? ✅

• Pattern breaking tools unwind the patterns that drive us unconsciously. This is the hair knot, the knotted, messy, hard to find the beginning, middle or end of it inside of you. To break the pattern is tug on the root cause, 1st this way, and then the other, slipping out one knot, then again. Every release here lowers the fence itself bit by bit.
• Games can be used to untie the hair knot. There are some extraordinary teams who are working on this in new ways. I cannot wait to share more.

I’m also working on a set of design principles that can help builders ensure that some part of what they build supports growth.

Examples would include things like…

Make sure any game that has a “party” mode i.e. people adventuring together, cannot win without a healer to reinforce the value of that role on teams.

Or make sure that there’s always one “win” path that has no violence, meaning if you play using prosocial attributes you increase your ability to win more than if you do not.

Half of the world plays games today, we must absolutely use it as a vector for transformation.

What other technologies or categories do you want to apply the Growth Triangle to?

I’d love to hear from you.

Love,
Nichol