Integral Leadership Review
Volume IV, No. 5 - October 2004

Mission

I am grateful to the more than 900 subscribers to Integral Leadership Review. Your support means that we can move closer to a way of viewing and being in the world that is integrative, generative and supportive of our evolving integrity - learning to align our theory and our action, our values and assumptions with achieving what is important to us. Also, I am grateful to the many kindnesses, suggestions and offers of support we have received.

The mission of this e-publication is to be a practical guide to the application of an integral perspective to the challenges of leadership in business and life and to the effective relationship between executive/business coaches and their clients. My vision includes that this will be a place where others, as well as myself, can continue to develop and share ideas about integral leadership and integral coaching.

> Russ Volckmann

Integral Scenarios and Leadership Development: Russ Volckmann 

We are used to role-plays in leadership development. They are often useful methods for individuals to observe group dynamics and their own behavior in relation to that of others. What could be more full of potential for an integral perspective than that? I would like to suggest that scenario explorations offer even more potential.

In scenarios we do not construct an imaginary organization, an imaginary world or an imaginary role. We work with as much as we can of current reality to look at what happens under postulated conditions. What happens to the oil industry if the price of oil falls? What happens to European economic performance if the Russians join the EEU? And so forth. We can also look at things like the impact of technology change and market change. These and many more can be the scenarios that would be useful in leadership development.

It is the dynamics of agentic-communal that create the conditions from which ladership emerges, no? Well, this is partly true. It is the interplay of internal and external in those arenas that set up a complex set of interactions. Individual values in a complex culture, individual behavior in relation to complex systems are part of it. So is the relationship between intention and behavior (moderated by biology), as is the interplay between culture and systems.

Industry and organizations have sought guidance for managing these and other, more specific, organizational methods by looking at best practices drawn from other companies and organizations that have recently demonstrated some success. Many companies have developed another set of best practices, called key competencies, for leader behavior.

The dilemma with any "best practices" approach is that they are identified in a particular time, place and context. Change these variables and often the best practices no longer are. On the other hand, it is useful to learn from experience and to learn to be able to identify the critical variables in context for making choices in the NOW about supporting the development of leadership and individual leadership practices in any given condition.

Much advice is about if you do this then you will get that. The shift needs to be made to process and practice.

And then, I wonder, what is the difference between an athlete practicing and practicing to prepare the body for the eventualities of the game and the potential leader practicing and practicing to prepare for the eventualities of business/life? Scenarios with integral analysis and reflection provide that. Scenarios aren't about predicting what will work, it is about tuning and practicing so that when leadership is required people are better prepared to bring effective leadership to the fore.

Now I don't know if that works or not. I just think that it has at least as good a chance at success as what we are already doing in leadership development. And when we couple scenarios with an integral perspective it increases the potential a whole bunch. Multiple lines of development-that was a useful focus of the Integral Organizational Leadership workshop in Colorado in September. The presenters keyed us into designing an integral, multi-line practice. That is where I think the potential for leadership development may be. The use of scenarios is an aspect of that.

We have an opportunity to explore the use of scenarios from an integral perspective. This involves the design of scenarios to include the potential for AQAL to show up, the mechanisms for capturing the responses to the scenarios, and the analysis/reflection/feedback process to view behaviors/choices through an integral lens that supports the development of potential leaders-not by making them second tier, but by using the scenario process as a scaffolding experience to support learning and preparation.

Rather than doing this in a one-shot workshop, this method could be made a part of an ongoing developmental process in an internal training and development program in companies or as the heart of a leadership development institute that brings together a group of executives for a yearlong process. Both could include coaching and developmental homework between scenarios and training sessions.

The scenarios need not be complex. Life conditions already familiar are complex enough as a setting for a scenario. The scenario unfolds as the result of postulating an event or a series of events that could happen, that are feasible. They can be highly likely or quite remote. In either case the practice can occur.

To use an integral approach to supporting development through explorations of these scenarios it would be necessary to capture the individual's response to the event in the case of leader training. This could be done in an audio recording, a video recording, developing a transcript (for example as might be used in subject-object interviews) or written responses to questions (as in the Leadership Development Profile.

Questions might include

• What is important to you? UL
• What course of action will you follow? UR
• What aspects of the culture need to be engaged? LL
• What systems need to be in place? LR

Then, a four quadrant multiple line analysis could be conducted with the support of a trained facilitator. This might include attention to developmental levels as in spiral dynamics or Torbert's levels for individual and organizational development.

So here is an idea. I would be very interested to hear from people who have experimented with scenarios and considered an integral approach.

Leadership Coaching Tip 

In leadership development through coaching we use a "what if" type of question to help leaders to tease out the implications of alternatives. That is a double-loop learning strategy – and a useful one. We can deepen the learning by moving to triple loop explorations. The use of scenarios as 'what if" explorations also holds the possibility for exploring developmental levels according to different lines of development. Questions can be explored about knowledge, emotions, physical being and doing, relationships, spirit and so on. Responses to these questions can be further explored by looking at their relationship to a stage model that can be understood and leveraged by the client. Values can be examined, as can modes of analysis – linear and systemic. Know anyone into metasystemic?

Integral Coaching:A Conversation with James Flaherty, Russ Volckmann 

Q: I want to start with your interest in Integral. When I reviewed your book, Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others, I found the domains of competence that include the "I, it, we." You discuss intellect, emotion, will, context and soul. I was reminded of the holon and the notion of lines of development and wondered what were the sources of your thinking about coaching and in what way was it related to Wilber's work?

A: I don't think that Wilber was central to my thinking. I read some of his earlier work, but I hadn't readSex, Ecology and, Spirituality or other more recent works. The "I, we, it" model, I got from Jurgen Habermas, the fellow that came up with it, and from reading Thomas McCarthy, the great English translator and colleague of Habermas. It offered such a rich way of working with the people.

Since high school, I have had this idea that there ought to be somebody that you could go to and bring them your life situation, your problem, your difficulty, your question and they would have so many different ways to teach you about it. They would say, "Oh, meditation, acupuncture, weightlifting or travel." They would just be part of a doorway to a whole universe that eventually, we could get to ourselves but they found it before us and are our link to it.

I think a coach is a person who is a link to many, many different traditions. I was interested in that idea. That's where the "I, we, it" seemed so powerful to me. I've used it many difference places. For example, with leaders I think it's a great way for someone displaying their leadership in the world. How much of the "I" world is involved in what they do? How much is the "we" world and how much is the "it"

I think there is a big difference between somebody who is a technology executive who may have much greater emphasis on the "it" world and somebody who is in marketing. The latter has much more emphasis on the "we" world.

The other model, I just made up one day. I don't know where it came from other than I was thinking about the question: What is it that someone really has to attend to, to be satisfied? And that's where that model came from.

Q: With components of satisfaction and effectiveness?

A: Yes, the two prongs in my way of working are will it be effective in the world, being able to sense that our life matters, that we have some way of correcting or helping to think about difficulties that we see in life, but also that we are fulfilled. I think one without the other is terrible.

Q: I first came across information that you were linking your work to the idea of integral a couple of years ago when I saw a workshop description for the Cape Cod Institute. I hadn't known that there was anybody who was explicitly moving in that direction. I contacted one of your students who said to me, "James is the most integral person I've ever met." Why do you think he might have said that?

A: Delusion, a limited circle of friends (laughter). That's nice to hear.

I'm sure that the things that we leave out of our life, that we're not willing, open or competent to attend to yet are the things that trip us up. That's what I like about Ken Wilber. I have met Ken and he's the kind of person that isn't vain and is putting forth gigantic efforts to make something very worthwhile happen in the world. I like all that and I like the idea of integral.

My basic notion of it is being in the now. That's part one and then part two is cooperating with the way life's going, the way the universe is going or the way God is going. I relate to it in those terms. What we humans, of course, keep trying to do is carve it down to some manageable, understandable, linear, progressive notion of what's going on in the world.

This happens to be exactly what I wanted to be doing as well. So, along my spiritual development it has become blindingly obvious that there is something that I am part of and that I'm not the initiator of. The integral pathway or the integral world is to be a way of opening to that more and more. What is it that is unfolding? What is it that we are subject to? What is consciousness doing? What is happening

I like that it's so big that any place that I or students land, there's always some place to sink into or open up to. What trips us up is any place that we can get attached to quickly becomes rotten. It's very much like putting the most wonderful food in our body. After a while, it becomes poison because we don't keep undoing ourselves.

Q: So, it's about being alive and being attuned to life in all of its aspects?

A: Which in a way is what is Zen is.

Q: I'm struck by your description of Fernando Flores, an obviously brilliant, dynamic and personally powerful individual, who had aspects to his style and personality that he neglected or chose to ignore. An example would be the way he related to other people. I've heard Ken talk about the fact that because there are all these multiple lines of development as your early work even acknowledged, that it's very unusual, if not impossible, to find anybody who has evolved all those different lines of development to the same levels. We have a tendency to focus in on two or three and ignore one or two. I'm wondering how you would see that dynamic of development in terms of the different lines and the ability to balance or to integrate

A: In Integral Psychology, Ken has over a hundred lines, which I think is a bit, much. Maybe he can do it. In our work, we've come down to six streams: cognitive, relational, emotional, somatic, spiritual and integrating. I think you're totally right on when you say people tend to gravitate to some or others to their peril. Of course, in our culture some of them are held to be way more important than others: the cognitive and the emotional. Some people say our culture is cognitive. I think our culture is essentially misguided emotionally (laughs). We have really strong feelings about ideas, not that we're strongly cognitive and follow the ideas all the way to the bottom.

We neglect the body. We neglect the spiritual, even though the U.S. is the country that goes to church the most. But we stop way short of engaging in practices that can transform us so that we have our own spiritual experience instead of living off of what has been passed to us. I think that we have a hard time in relationships. In our work, in my individual coaching work and in training folks, we're working on the six streams.

• Cognitive: the ability to make observations in a particular field (e.g., business, philosophy, cooking) and then synthesize these observations into a coherent understanding
• Emotional: the ability to discern our own emotional states, our feelings in this moment, the background emotional tone of our lives, and our emotional responses to particular events (e.g., being challenged). Also, the ability to discern the emotional state of others, even when they themselves are obvious to it or denying it.
• Somatic: the ability to observe what is happening in our bodies (e.g., energized, tired, heavy, open, tight) and to tap into this somatic wisdom as we respond to the present moment.
• Relational: the ability to initiative and sustain mutually satisfying relationship. This includes the ability to listen deeply, communicate profoundly, and support others'; intentions while maintaining one's own dignity.
• Spiritual: the ability to create a life dedicated to the benefit of everyone––not only ourselves or our families, companies, or tribes. This includes active engagement in a community dedicated to serving others with wisdom and compassion.
• Integrating: the ability to undo all the ways we compartmentalize our lives so that our commitments and values show up in all of our words, actions, and relationships.

James Flaherty's Six Lines of Development

Q: You have put together a quadrant model. I assume you meant it to be a holon is that accurate?

A: Yes.

I. Individual Experience and Consciousness

Thoughts and Feelings

Emotions and Mood

Body Sensations

II. Body and Behaviors

Body Chemistry

Neuromuscular System

Genetic Inheritance

III. Culture and Relationships

Language

Ritual and Customs

Morals

IV. Environment

Natural

Human-made

Technology and Tools

From: James Flaherty and Amiel Handelsman, "Integrating Rigor, Compassion, and Creative Design: The Promise of Integral CoachingSM and New Ventures West's Professional Coaching Course," a .pdf file available from New Ventures West, PO Box 591525, San Francisco, CA 94159. 800.332.4618

Q: You shifted the positions of the quadrants. In your discussion of these, when you get into the system quadrant you call it environment. Instead of describing how those elements live and breath within us, which is one way of thinking about holons, you talk about things we can do. In Culture, you talk about speaking and listening, which sounds like behaviors to me. In environment, you talk about organize, simplify, beautify, things that sound like values to me. I can't tease apart the categories you are using. Could you help me?

A: Oh, it is very important, at least the way I think about it. Culture is analogous to what is inside the individual; it's just inside the group conscious that one only has access to really by being a member of the group. You can tell me what you're thinking, but I can't really be inside of you, feeling, experiencing what you do. We could go to Japan and maybe even learn to speak Japanese. We could eat Japanese food and wear Japanese clothes, but we never would have Japanese consciousness. There are all the ways of interpreting life passed along through language, practices, rituals, mores, everything in that culture. Everything in the way people live passes along the way of seeing life, from what we eat to all the deep structures of language.

The environment is if you took the people away, what would be left? So, you could go down to Hewlett Packard headquarters and the company exists. That business is essentially a quadrant of cultural phenomena, the creation of people. But you can take the people out of the building and things will still be there. There is the natural world of trees, birds, the oceans and the sky, and the things that are made by people and organizations.

Q: On what Fred Kofman has called the artifacts? They have no life of their own or do they?

A: Yes, they have a life of their own that exists without humans.

The way I distinguish between the two is to take the humans out and what's left? That world is something that coaches often leave out. But it's a mistake to leave it out, because where we live, the physical surroundings of our life keep informing us of who we are.

Prisoners who wake up everyday in their cells –– however big they are –– are reminded of how limited their possibilities are, who other people take them to be, on and on. The same thing happens to a person who wakes up in a mansion. It reminds them of the identity they've taken on and it reinforces it. One of the worst things that we can say, if we are having difficulty with addictions to drugs is to have the addict go to a rehab and then go back to the same neighborhood. Even if the same people aren't there. Somehow, the neighborhood stirs it up.

Q: You point out that integral coaching as you define it is developmental. Would you say a little bit about what you mean by developmental? Is there a particular model, perspective or framework you use?

A: No. I don't know if I have anything different than what other people say about it. First off, I agree with Wilber and other people that there is a universal movement towards development and unless we are in a trauma or some difficulty, we will keep unfolding, we will keep developing. I think that's the natural way and in fact, we have to work pretty hard to stop developing. So, that's the starting point.

What I mean by development is that I think it is pretty spiritual. The more developed we are, the less self-focused we are, the less self-ascending we are. To say it in a positive way, the more connected we are to others, the more we are connected to life, the more courageous we are, the more spiritual we are and the less we are seeing things only from our view. It means we have a looser and looser hold on our so-called self, our identity. As we get more and more developed that structure called the self, frees up more and more and more until the later stages, of course, there is no thing that is the self. Yet we could still function and still walk around. We would talk, but we wouldn't have the fixation, the obsession, the neurosis or neurotic behavior around protecting ourselves.

Q: In his work on organizations Ishaak Adizes describes the stages of development of businesses. Briefly, he sees these as a life cycle, as opposed to a continuous line of development. We go through the early stages of start up, the mid-stage levels of organizational maturity and decline, and then we ultimately have the death of the organization.

In our physical lives, we have a similar life cycle. How can we think about development in the way you talked about as being continuous, at least in the individual life when we have that "bringing to a close" our physical capacity to develop? How you make sense of all that?

A: My way of thinking about development is that we are less and less identified with this body, this personality, this history. We have an experience that we are something bigger. It gets expressed in this body, but we're not limited to this body and this personality or whatever has happened to us. Almost everyone has had some experience of that.

Often times, there is some strong emotional event. Sometimes it's happens when it looks like our death is approaching or we have an ecstatic emotional experiences. For instance, the birth of a child or being in nature or some type of sexual experience can just lift us out of what we are holding onto so tightly. It is an experience that we are not this. That doesn't mean, "Screw this, I don't have to take care of myself. This is all fake; this is all illusion."

It is totally real and we are totally here. But that is the partial story, not the whole story. That means that when we die, in a sense nothing happens. Yeah, the body stops, but consciousness keeps going, a different kind of consciousness and you have different content than the one you have right now.

This is a complicated question about does the physical change consciousness. It seems like it does. Give people a certain prerogative and their consciousness will change or, as you were saying, as you watch the nervous system deteriorate people's consciousness changes.

One way I think about that is the difference between consciousness and the content of consciousness or the expression of consciousness. I think about this in a way that, to make sense to this, there is consciousness that is unchanging, unmoving. It is just luminous and has all the different things that we are conscious of. Rarely do we have the experience of being that consciousness that is having the awareness of all these things.

We're mostly in the world of "what I am aware of" rather than the awareness itself. Awareness itself can be damaged by what happens to the body. So, that's one of the ways I think about it. But there is one thing of course to know that and then I say, "Oh yeah, that sounds right." But it's a matter of living that way.

Q: Of being that way?

A: Yes, of being that way and keep letting go and letting go and letting go.

Q: In relation to that, you talk about the ten waves and the range from addressing immediate concerns to death. There were a lot of things in between. That represents a kind of developmental model for you.

A: Yes.

Q: You also indicate that in terms of the population of the world, 90% are in the first four of those and 9.99% are in the next two which leaves a number of other levels where there is practically no one around.

A: I think that's right. Maybe I'm living on the wrong side of town or something, but that's how it seems to me. That's also true in David Hawkins' and other people's work. It is the case in Susann Cook-Greuter's work. She has done a lot of work in developmental theories and has similar statistics. Yeah, we are in a big mess here.

We're not going to run out of places to grow into. That's the good news. But for me, the most important part of that model is around level 4 that is power to level 5 that is vocation. The top 4 levels are all about, "Can I get my life to turn out the way I want it turn out. Can I get what I want in life? Can I protect myself; can I find security for me and my family or me and my clan?

In vocation there is the turning question, "What is life asking of me? What is it that I am born for?" I think it's not the case we are born to start a company or sell software or stuff that we get so wrapped up in, hit more home runs or something. It is something else. Once we open to that, then there is the possibility of becoming fully ourselves, the possibility of our own individual suffering diminishing and our making a contribution to others.

Q: Does that mean that once you get past the vocation stage that really what you are doing is peeling away these other descriptions that you have of these stages, negative self-assessment and all that?

A: Nasty title -negative self-assessment, narcissism, suffering, all those things. It's freedom within those things. It's not freedom from it or peeling it away.

Q: Those are part of the realities of our existence and we are free within them.

A: Yes.

Q: With these distributions of populations across categories, what are the implications of your model in working with leaders in organizations? How do you think about that?

A: Most everyone at or near of the top of organizations, when they ask for coaching, they're asking for somebody who is in crisis. This is a gigantic percentage of the people that we end up coaching. 80% of the people are working on some topic around balance. People are neglecting big parts of their lives and having the consequences of this. Or they seek being able to be skillful at speaking or in building effective relationships. Or they want the emotional intelligence and so on that to go into conversations. And then power: being able to stay focused, concentrate their power in some particular direction, watch where power leads in terms of negative emotions; that's pretty much what people need.

I think when they say leader, they mean someone who's powerful, someone who can say as Eisenhower said before D-Day, "We are going to France with these thousands of ships, tens of thousands of people and we are going to make it happen." That is what most people look for in a leader. Of course, that notion is certainly inadequate these days, because not too many people are lining up to be soldiers and the world is much more complicated than that. It isn't so clear that the territory we're trying to take on Monday is the same territory we're trying to take on Wednesday.

In the organizations that we tend to work with people understand that being a leader means being a whole person. This means they can make connections with other people. They can be realistic and pragmatic. But at the same time, they can aspire to great things. They are not trying to position themselves as all knowing, all-powerful and totally invulnerable.

Every now and then there is a leader with such genius that people will put up with all kinds of nonsense from them. But most leaders have to find a way of being a human being. That is someone who is learning and is appreciating other people. This requires competencies and qualities that can be developed brought forth, because they are there in some form already.

The backdrop of the developmental model is what we had in mind in our coaching work, which is, "Can we move somebody a little bit further so they'd be more open to others and less fearful, because when people are more open and less fearful they are more communicative and more resilient." People who are further up in our developmental model are holding on tight and being self-protective, therefore they don't learn very much.

I think it's a big step to imagine that in coaching a person's going to make a big step from the conversational level to the power level, but within each level, there are steps a person can take . . .

Q: When we.work with people in the world of business, the capacity to really appreciate what it is we have before us and not treat it like something we have to get away from, but something we've got to engage with, is that what you're about?

A: Yes, and the best leaders that I know are people that take the most difficult circumstances and they don't try and run away from, deny or exaggerate them. What is it? How can "me" and the team respond to this with optimism?

Q: I saw something in the Harvard Business Review in one of the last two issues, that optimism is one of the key variables for highly successful executives.You also referenced the individual formal leader and the team and we've alluded to that a little bit in our conversation. One of the things that have been underlying my work in leadership and leadership development has to do with recognizing that there is both the leader, which I initially cast in terms of the upper left, upper right and the leadership system that I cast in terms of lower left and lower right. There is a leadership culture. There are leadership systems, et cetera and there are dynamics among these different quadrants of the holon. Have you thought about your work in terms of what is the relationship between the individual interior side and the exterior side and how you can talk about the dynamics of those relationships?

A: I have thought about that. I understand that each of the quadrants is important to attend to. Each one has, in my view, it's own kind of laws –– the way it works or operates, that they each have a different language and each has a different operating principle. But at the same time, especially the cultural piece is not fixed. The way that people can be in a meeting or which big decisions are being made may appear as if the way they are being in the group or the culture or history is pulling them into a particular role where they are supposed act that way. I keep finding that how an individual person shows up in a meeting and responds to what's going on shifts what's going on so that it isn't as fixed as it looks.

I'm, in a way, a radical in terms of the world is very much more fluid than we imagine it. How we interact with it brings it forth in a particular way. I guess in a more practical way for these relationships that we've had with people and the way we listen to them or the way we speak to them opens up and broadens the possibility and undoes our fixations. Am I responding to your question?

Q: The question was about the relationship among the quadrants and how you would describe that relationship. An example might be, if you want to talk about the upper left, upper right quadrants, how do you think about the relationship between consciousness awareness on the one hand and behavior on the other? What is the nature of the mutuality in that relationship? Self-management is a concept that might be used to describe that relationship. There is a mutual influence between the two quadrants and that is the self-management dynamic.

A: Self-management is about knowing yourself, knowing your history or how we tend to respond, how we tend to react, being able to discern the distinction between am I being triggered from something that's happening in the moment or something that is coming from my past? Being able to self-observe is a part of self-management. By self-observe I mean, being able to connect my internal experience, the action I am taking and the consequences of the action. That is what I mean by self-observation.

But it's also people tuning into their bodies, because the body has it's own momentum of habits. I think it's fair to say that we act according to how the world is showing up for us. A lot of that is fixed in our nervous system from our recurring patterns of behavior. We tend to pay attention to certain things, pick out things from the environment that we say counts. We act according to those and that's what counts and what shows up for us.

The nervous system phenomenon is based upon the practices that we have engaged in. We can will our selves to pay attention to something different. But when we are under pressure or lose our concentration, we fall back to another way of looking, other ways of seeing the situation. Soon, as we see the situation in the old way, our old behavior will return. So I think that the way to change consciousness is just engage in new practices that shift the body.

Q: So, that's where that mutuality occurs actually that you're talking. To return to the thing about leadership, since we do think often about an agentic aspect in a communal context, when you're working with leaders do you also work with the context, with the culture in the systems that they're a part of or do you do all the work directly through the individual?

A: I don't do so much system change. That's never interested me and I don't want to take, at this point, ten years to understand all of that.

My model of work would tend to be to work with a leader and her team. The leader gets coaching and all the team members get coaching from different members of our team, Then the whole group gets coached. We let all the synergy happen from what we're learning and what they learn.

Q: Is there anything from the experience of working in that way that you could share that has been an important learning for you?

A: This is going to be one of those obvious remarks, but most of the difficulty the teams have are not what the people are doing, but their perception of what people are doing. When I'm in the middle and I'm hearing from the leader of the team and the team members tell me what's going on and then I meet with our team of coaches and they tell me what's going on, I can see somebody thinks this is going on. Therefore, they're doing this. Therefore, that person's doing that and the other is not even happening at all. It's a gigantic percentage that 30 or 40% of the work that people are doing is anticipatory anxiety about something somebody picked up that they think is happening or going to happen.

Also, the startling part for me when I started working with high tech teams was how there is almost no listening going on. When you walk into these meetings, everybody has their screen on. Who knows what people are doing on their screen? Sending messages to people in the room with asides. When I was watching the meetings, some one would bob their head up and take some potshot at the presenter, having not paid attention the whole time to some idea that they don't particularly like. The meeting gets derailed from there.

People were getting so wound up in input of information that they're not paying attention to each other. We don't have enough stillness to listen. A lot of the work that I'm doing with leaders is simply around being present. This is challenging. They think it is a detriment to be present: "I should be thinking about what's going to happen next . . .

Q: You are writing a book?

A: . . .about integral coaching.

Q: When might we expect to see it?

A: I'm doing my best to get it within this year, maybe '05. It depends on how long the publishers take. I really want to go to Spain this year to write . . .

Q: And your coaching program, what's in the future for that?

A: One of the things I discovered was that while we have a year long certification program, as my developments come along and developing the other course leaders goes along, we found that a year is not enough time. Instead of trying to cram more and more in, we're going to open up our curriculum, so that we have probably three more years of coach training after that. Also we have started a company; somehow we were able to register the name of Integral Leadership as the name of a company.

Q: You're kidding? I'm amazed.

A: Me too. So we're Integral Leadership, LLC. New Ventures West has been sitting, waiting for corporate business to come to us, to come from our graduates. Now we're going to do more of a pro-active marketing effort to reach out to organizations.

Q: Anything I haven't asked you about you wish I had?

A: Yes. For me, coaching is about supporting folks or building a partnership, a friendship or a relationship in which someone becomes freer so that their suffering is less. That's basically what we are doing. Then there's the matter of what are the skillful means for a particular person and we meet them where they are.

To read the complete interviewclick here.

Integral For the Masses: Keith Bellamy

Senge, P., C. O. Scharmer, J. Jaworski, and B. S. Flowers. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Cambridge, MA: The Society for Organizational Learning, 2004.

Every now and then a book comes along that really shakes my tree. This is one of them. Constructed around C. Otto Sharmer's "U" model of different levels of perception and change, the book builds on many sources, including interviews conducted with leaders in many fields, including business and science.

Sensing

"observe, observe, observe"-- become one with the world

Realizing

"Act swiftly, with a natural flow"

Presencing

"Retreat and reflect" - allow inner image to emerge

The model and the book address the challenge that most change processes do not work. Their hypothesis is that this is so because, as Adam Kahane says, "they don't generate the depth of understanding and commitment that is required for sustaining change in truly demanding circumstances." While traditional ways of planning and problem solving continue to be useful in reacting to new situations, "when you're facing very difficult issues or dilemmas, when very different people need to align in very complex settings, and when the future might really be very different from the past, a different process is required." The "U" is a representation of that process.

Presencing is defined in a variety of ways in the book. In relation to the "U" the authors write:

The state at the bottom of the U is presencing---seeing from the deepest source and becoming a vehicle for that source. When we suspend and redirect or attention, perception starts to arise from within the living process of the whole. When we are presencing, it moves further, to arise from the highest future possibility that connects self and whole.

Nowhere in the book will you find tables or percentages about leader profiles or leader responses to questions. Rather, what is presented here is a dialogue that began shortly before 9/11 and ended in April 2002. The dialogue weaves together the work of these authors and that of others to look at how the human race is going to engage with its emergent future.

In their discussion of leadership there is a clear relationship to the "U." Otto Scharmer talks about Buddhist Master Nan and his interpretation of the Chinese classic. Great leaders must enter seven meditative spaces: awareness, stopping, calmness, stillness, peaceThe Great Learning, true thinking, and attainment. These stages correspond to the phases of the "U".

There is considerable attention to the importance of integrative approaches to science and other aspects of human knowing and doing. What is truly remarkable is that nowhere in the next or in the footnotes or in the index is there any reference to the work of developmental psychologist or Ken Wilber. While subject/object is discussed, Kegan is not mentioned. The notion of integral seems central to their discussion and they quote Master Nan again:

What has been lacking in the twentieth century is a central cultural thought that would unify all these things: economy, technology, ecology, society, matter, mind, and spirituality. There are no great philosophers or great thinkers who've been able to develop the thinking that unifies all these questions.

There seems to be no awareness or willingness to acknowledge the growing integral perspective.

Perhaps one of the most gratifying (to me) elements in their discussion of leadership was Betty Sue Flowers comment.

. . . while leadership cultivation has been the main part of the wisdom traditions of the past, it will be different in the future. The leadership of the future will not be provided simply by individuals but by groups, institutions, communities, and networks.

One of the roadblocks for groups moving forward now is thinking that they have to wait for a leader to emerge – someone who embodies the future path. But I think what we've been learning with the U process is that the future can emerge within the group itself, not embodied in a 'hero' or traditional 'leader.' I think this is the key going forward - that we have to nurture a new form of leadership that doesn't depend one extraordinary individual.

From Joseph Jaworski's extraordinary account of a vision quest experience by the ocean in Baja to explorations of Buddhist philosophy the authors are in a dance of change and discovery about the state of the world, its organizations and its leadership.

NOTE: MIT has created a website, OpenCourseware. Otto Scharmer has a course there, Leadership Lab and his readings, lecture notes, and other materials are available at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management. Also, Scharmer has a book on the way if you are interested in more reading about this:

Scharmer, C. O. (Forthcoming).
The Blind Spot of Leadership: Presencing as a Social Technology of Freedom (working title).

CODA › Russ Volckmann

The Integral ORGANIZATIONAL Leadership Workshop

Fifty participants, a dozen staff and Ken Wilber – all of the makings of a truly unique learning experience as CEOs, coaches, consultants, academics mingled to explore this elusive topic of the application of integral theory and practice to leadership in organizations. Virtually everyone left feeling they had gotten something of value; some left feeling that the workshop fell short of the mark.

The facilitators, presenters and staff did a wonderful job of making sure that we had plenty to do and think about. Bert Parlee, John Forman, Brett Thomas, Michael Putz and Leo Burke each gave the community things to think about and experiences that grounded theory. Ken Wilber was superb in this workshop. He seemed far more grounded and focused than in THE Integral Leadership (now Integral Consciousness) Workshop of a few months ago. I think this was because he seemed truly tuned into his audience.

I had the chance to ask the first question in day one when Ken sat on stage in front of the participants. I pointed out that he had been touted earlier in the day as the foremost thinker about integral leadership – if I correctly understood the presenter who said this. Then I asked, "What is integral leadership?

My paraphrase of the response: Integral leadership is having a vision others want to follow.a man or woman who knows more, sees more and provides guidance to others who want to move forward. The capacity to lead has to touch all of the areas that humans have to deal with. We need a map, an integral map. An integral leader is a person who has made the map his/her own and embodies it.

The highlight of the workshop was probably something of a surprise to all of the participants: Diane Hamilton, a student of Utah's Gengpo Roshi, led us through a process called Big Mind. Personally, this process led to an altered state of consciousness that was stronger (and has been longer lasting, even though episodic) than anything this spiritual novice has experienced.

Every day we did meditation and some physical movement, hike, Qigong, yoga.

Michael Putz, a director at Oracle, did an interesting presentation on innovation, particularly disruptive innovation that can have the impact of radically altering the course and focus of a company. Leo Burke gave a presentation on strategic thinking. This was my personal great disappointment of the workshop. Leo has been gaining considerable experience at Notre Dame over the last couple of years with introducing executives to integral leadership. We learned very little about what he has learned about effective approaches to this or the models he uses.

John Forman, Bert Parlee and Brett Thomas were the workhorses of the workshop. They presented on integral change, introduced levels and experiential exercises to speak from different levels in "leader" roles, as well as Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey's work on competing commitments and the four languages fromHow the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work.

SD-based concepts (blue, orange, green and yellow) were used to structure experiential activities, but their use was stereotypical and lacked the rich perspectives of other developmental models such as Commons' work on systems of meaning making (my interpretation) no did they attempt to integrate the idea of lines and memes in any fashion. This seems to me one of the basic dangers in the way an integral approach is being introduced – an oversimplification that tends to put behaviors into boxes and not respect the complexity of individual and context.

Of course, one of my critics would say that is because I am green that I would make such a comment. I am reminded of Sara Ross' observation based on S.W, Rosenberg's work, Systematic thinkers [and green is the first arena of systematic thinking] are flexible, independent, not reliant on social grouping or definition, and conceive themselves as independent entities, though they are not anti-social. They require a sense of independence and freedom of thought and action." So, my critic falls into the trap that was evident in the frameworks introduced in this workshop. But I think this is the cutting edge challenge in integral work: to find ways of representing and learning from complexity.

I had the opportunity to tape brief interviews with a number of participants. An extraordinary group of people! But it was from some of them that I heard comments that I agreed with, e.g., that the workshop seemed geared at too low a level conceptually with some exceptions. It is also worth noting that developing integral leadership is in its formative stages. Perhaps this workshop reflects both how much we have learned and how very much more we have to learn.

Here are brief excerpts from these interviews arranged more or less chronologically. The first interview I did was with Linda Brewer. We did a second interview at the end of the workshop.

1. Linda Brewer, CEO of Xenon Global, Inc., New York City, focuses on the relationships between an organization and its customers, its vendors and suppliers, the executive team and strategic partnerships, acquisitions and mergers, and the relationship between divisions.

Q: What is your interest in integral leadership?

A: If you are an integral leader you are looking at the left side as opposed to giving it lip service or dashing by it as we do a lot in our action focused world.

Q: You are talking about the interiors of agency and communion. Have you had the opportunity to bring your interest in integral theory into your work?

A: In a couple of different ways, but it is still a big opportunity to explore. One way is with executives in leadership development and building relationships there. For example in a positive oil company we are bringing in different frameworks and management theory to act as a catalyst to really push their performance beyond even what they imagined they could do. They do a quick study of these materials and then we would examine how these would apply in their company. We take the theory into action. We fold integral frameworks into that.

Q: Are there other ways you hope to apply integral theory in the future?

A: I want to take it further. It is easy to use in one-on-one coaching. Then you have to move into the context. You have to have a group of individuals. A lot of it has to do with language. It is important to help them develop their own language. I am always amazed how quickly people will adopt new language.

2. Rand Stagen, President of Stagen Leadership Institute, Dallas, Texas

Q: You have a firm that does leadership development and consulting and you are interested in integral work?

A: I am fortunate to have as a business partner, Brett Thomas, one of the facilitators of the IOL Workshop. Our interest in integral really comes from him and his study of Wilber. I have been studying Spiral Dynamics for seven or eight years separate from integral.

We have been doing organization development consulting for mid-market market companies, $50-200 million in revenue. We have discovered that they best way to make a sustainable impact on our clients which is mostly senior executives is to teach them what we are doing as consultants. So we began offering a one-year program that is practice based. The program is based on integral theory. We teach quadrants, levels, lines and other elements to mostly CEOs of our client companies, mostly technology companies.

It is an intense program that has one-day quarterly workshops and a self-directed curriculum for the quarter. They have to submit a weekly report every Monday to their coach or they are kicked out of the program. And we kick a lot of people out. We are only interested in working with high achievers. We work with high potentials. 95% of the managers in America would not resonate with our program or our approach. It is only for the best of the best. We get results and we change behavior, but it requires tremendous discipline.

Q: What is the message?

A: Well, the message to Orange is higher performance, more focus, make more money, get more leverage, be more aligned, beat your competitors. The message is money.

The delivery is emotional intelligence development, alignment, and more clarity around vision. There is a lot on innovation, integral theory, Spiral Dynamics, all packaged in Orange.

3. Marianne Colter who was with SAP America, a company that provides packages of integrated software for clients, Probably 70% of the Fortune 1000 are running their software.

Q: How do you go from system implementation and sales processes to being involved in Ken Wilbur and Integral Leadership Development? What is that connection?

A: It was a really funky, self-directed leap and it happened while I was consulting in Portland. I was in the airport bookstore and at the end of the bookshelf was Ken Wilbur's A Brief History of Everything. Being a curious person, I said, "I want to know everything. (laughs) Okay, I'll read this. This looks interesting.

It was the most theoretical thing I'd ever read. I was an English teacher; we don't read theory very much. You don't get into theory when you're in English. Here I am reading this heavy theoretical stuff, but I just really got into it. This was cool.

Q: Here you were in Chicago saying I've got to get away from this place for a week or whatever, and there is this really interesting looking––what? What did you see?

A: When I learned about the workshops, something just said, "This is where your heart is. This is where your passions are. This is what you should pursue.

Q: Integral University people have talked about having really skilled trainers taking workshops out into the world. Would you like to do that?

A: Very much.They are looking for people to learn from the ground up. I learn from the ground up. What's the huge picture? And then I need to go right down into the nuts and bolts and then build it back up from there. That's just how I learn.

There are different learning styles for different people. I am interested in adapting training materials or curriculums to how people best learn and then adapt them into what time does somebody have to dedicate this? It's taken me five years to get my arms around it. I didn't go from zero to five; I was learning as I was going, but now I really feel confident talking about it and coming to a seminar. A year ago, I would say, "Oh, I don't know enough," to even go to the seminar and I think people who weren't really grounded in the theories coming to something like this would be completely lost.

4. Gunnar Nilsson is President of Human Bandwidth Incorporated in Chicago.

Q: What type of work do you do?

A: I do transformational work and I am an executive coach, a consultant or a thought partner––and then I do some spiritual work.I work typically with Fortune 500 companies and the top tier of executives, sometimes individuals, sometimes the entire team.

Q: Given that context, now that you've had a chance to almost complete the workshop on Integral Organizational Leadership, have you had any "Ah-ha's"? Have there been any significant things that have come up for you?

A: I told my wife the other night that this is like finding missing puzzle pieces. I've been working on dozens of puzzles and most of them have a piece or two that are missing, some six or ten pieces are missing. One of the things I got out of the integral nature of the universe, work and business that really deepened this week is that I've found more complete solutions. It's not like I found every puzzle piece, but an awful lot of those puzzle pieces have shown up for me.

Q: What might be an example?

A: One of the things that I've worked on typically with people is to always look at a balanced perspective. I think a balanced perspective typically emanates from two sides-it's like a teeter-totter. What the four quadrants really represent is an animated, broader and deeper perspective than just balance.

5. Barry Weiss- at the time of interview he was a vice president with Exult, Inc., a business process outsourcing company with a focus on H.R. administrative and transactional work. As of October 1, 2004, Exult merged with Hewitt Associates, which is a larger firm in the same business, and Barry is a senior executive with Hewitt.

Q: How did you happen to come to a workshop on integral leadership?

A:It appealed to me because our company is merging with a much bigger company, Hewitt Associates. They do some of what we do and they do a lot of benefits administration outsourcing and H.R. consulting. We're going through change management and I thought I would find some helpful tools for working on the executive team integration and transition to come to this conference. Also, I've met Ken a couple of times with a common friend of ours, Brother Wayne Teasdale who is a Catholic monk and mystic. I've been inspired by Ken's work for a while and I'm curious about whether he and his cohorts have actually found a way to put theory into practice.

Q: What did you discover?

A: That they are a lot further than I would have guessed. It was very exhilarating.

Q:What do you think you found here that would be most useful to you as you're facing the merger?

A: Let me answer that in two ways. One is professional and one is personal. On the professional side, I'm sitting with a bunch of impressions about how we could be doing our integration better after today's session on integral change and the difference between an adaptive change and a technical change. Both professionally and personally I've taken kind of a three-year sabbatical from being in leadership positions even though I'm an executive. I've intentionally had almost no direct reports. I basically come in on a project basis to help us get new deals done. So this kind of woke up some things that I had just put aside for a while because I felt like I needed a break from leading.

Q: How do you think your leadership will be different as a result of this experience?

A: There were three aspects that I had acquired before this. One was doing leadership of men's retreats that are Neo-Jungian based. I got to the point where I wasn't getting much more out of that, even though I was giving a lot to the men who came to it. I've been on sabbatical from that for a few years.

Second, I've done a Buddhist practice for quite a few years, informally, and the past three and a half years formally in a Tibetan Buddhist lineage with my wife. That's been an interesting experience that's congruent with the break from leadership. It has required me to understand what it means to actually become a student in a formal way and discover some antidotes for my arrogance.

Third, in the business setting before I joined Exalt, I had been doing a lot of mentoring, teaching, leading, and strategizing on the management committee of a firm several years ago and in building a 90 lawyer practice group.

Some of the perspectives from here give me a way to pull all of those together. It has helped me understand how a Jungian perspective and Buddhism can complement each other. It has also given me a view on how I can integrate all of that better into a fuller work experience in a leadership capacity.

6. Kathy Callahan is the Deputy Regional Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency in New York. She is the senior career person in the office and a political appointee.

Q: How did you learn about this workshop on Integral Leadership?

A: After September 11th , I was temporarily acting as the senior executive in charge of the EPA's response to the disaster and became very engaged in that and the concerns and controversy that occurred afterwards. I worked really intensely for three months-six, seven days a week, 14 hours a day-and then for the next two years actually. It really changed my career path.

But in the immediate aftermath, we had people from all over the country come and help us. One person who came just had a very contemplative atmosphere about him in the midst of all this chaos and uncertainty as to what we would do and what did it mean to our society. When he went back home, about a month later he sent me a note and a reading list. Ken Wilber was on the reading list with No Boundary. I read everything on the list and Ken's book was the most emotionally powerful one-actually, the most spiritually powerful one. I just sort of opened up to the concept of non-dual thinking and then I read and continued to read everything I could get my hands on by Ken.

Last November, my political boss offered me an opportunity to take on this new role as deputy regional administrator and she said, "I want you to think about something that you can do for yourself, for your own life. I don't care what it is, a trip, a special assignment, but something for you." In the Spring I couldn't make it to the workshops, but I could make it to this one and so it just seemed like a gift from heaven.

Q: What did you hope to find here?

A: What I hoped to find was some tools to help me broaden my experience from a personal one, which is wonderful, to one that I can incorporate in my organization and hopefully, ultimately into society. I think that the time is not so far away that I'll move on from EPA and I have to find a new place. I want to leave EPA in as best a condition as I can with leadership for the future that's really going to help them grapple with being within government and those constraints, but being able to be free to help with our environment.

Q: What have you found here that is going to help you along that path?

A: I found that there is a community of people who are in the same situation. They've learned that the searching is not what it's about, although it can lead you to a special place, but that you can free yourself from those attachments and make very, very meaningful contributions. The other thing I've found is a Big Mind.

Q: Wasn't that an incredible experience?

A: I find it hard to describe.

Q: I wish I could describe the smile on your face (laugh).

A: (Laugh) it was so great. I just got in touch with parts of me that I really hadn't consciously focused on and found them able to be in community with each other. I'm really in community with a bigger mind that takes me away from every self-oriented thing, even though I have to be a self and go on as a person.

Q: How do you think you might use some of the things that you've encountered here in your job back with EPA or in your life?

A: I can see some real places in EPA where I realize now that I can bring in new dimensions. I can look at the people who we are dealing with outside the agency and within the agency with more of an acknowledgement of their complexity and honor them more and, in that way, also get better progress and response from them.

7. Laurel Ross is from Seattle, Washington. She is the Escalation Manager for Developer Support at Microsoft.

Q: How did you happen to come here to this integral leadership workshop?

A: Four years ago, I found a woman in Seattle who is an executive coach. I was very unhappy at Microsoft. As a woman in leadership, I felt completely unseen and unheard, positioned for disaster, not for success and thought, how can I make this work? This is a world-class company. Why can't I do this? So, I paid out of my own pocket for executive coaching because I was just deeply committed. It was either that or a tummy tuck, so I figured I might as well do something that will last longer and be more meaningful to me.

I found Suzanne Anderson and she does integral coaching. She knows Ken and she was friends with his wife. I studied integral practices with her for six months and anchored myself more firmly at that stage. I got clear about where I was. The following year, I sat in a circle of 12 women who were practicing integral leadership and discovering and exploring what is it to be uniquely female in integral leadership. I believe that there are some very key differences to women's integral leadership.

Q: What has been most important here for you?

A: The validation of what I had been practicing in my life. The acceptance of the fact that my center of gravity is yellow now. I don't think I had ever really owned that. I think it happens, but I have a tendency to diminish myself, reduce myself and self criticize. The acceptance and owning of the fact that I am in an integral center of gravity now is very joyful and it's very empowering because there are no more excuses. I'm in.

Q: How do you think this experience is going to impact your leadership when you return to Microsoft?

A: I have lots of good ideas now, so many good practical applications of the work.

Q: Would you give an example of one?

A: Yes. The conversation today was about doing adaptive change versus disruptive change. I realize that what I've been doing in my one-on-one's with my individual employees is the adaptive change work. And then as a group, we do disruptive change. We implement things and actually we're innovators and drivers of disruptive change because my team has become so high performance now and so high functioning, that we actually lead the way for other people to make changes in the organization. So, I want to explicitly name that for them and give them that. I also have some specific ideas for individuals about where they are in their development and I want to give them a half step to the next level.

Q: Is there anything else that you're taking from the workshop that was really powerful for you?

A: The wonderful people, connections with all the wonderful people. I just feel like a member of a much larger community now.

Q: Anything else you'd like to add?

A: No, but I think you're real cute.

At this point I blushed and mumbled something unintelligible!

8. Oliver Triebel is from West Germany and has recently returned to McKinsey after heading up management development for Bertelsmann for several years.

Q: You heard about this workshop and decided it was the right thing to do?

A: I enrolled immediately without really knowing just what I wanted to do.

Q: Did you have any idea of what you wanted to gain from it?

A: I was curious. When I came here, I thought I would learn more theory and go away with a list of things to do, diagnostic tools and an analytical tool kit and things to read, a couple of books . .

Q: What did you expect to get from this workshop when you came, what were you looking for?

A: I had expectations on several levels. Knowing that I will start a new job next week, I wanted to have an opportunity to wrap up my year of experiential work, courses and seminars. It felt like the right thing to do to get away for a week.On a personal level, finding just the time to reflect and get closure on certain things, also make plans and look ahead for what is to come.

I wanted to take some ideas back home: how to bring spiral dynamics and the quadrants into the business world, get some tools or diagnostic stuff or analytical instruments, and have maybe a case study about how or what someone had done with this in real life, in a business application.My initial understanding––and that has been confirmed––really was, "I didn't come here to confirm that I'm yellow or striving to be integral," or "I want to be an integral leader," that was not what I was here for. My idea was really, "Give me some better understanding of the levels of the quadrants and some analytical tools to design interventions for people who are on these levels.

Intellectually, some of what we've seen here seems to be fairly light, not precise. We are indiscriminately mixing a green organization and a green person. When do people constitute an organization? What is the average of a green, an orange and a blue person? An orange organization or what? What's the middle ground here; how do you evaluate. I wanted some definition, something really precise or even to just ask questions . . .

Q: In other words, individuals and organizations are really constellations of colors because of the different levels of development in the lines. Being able to make more refined distinctions is important to you?

A: Yes. For example, how do I mediate between departments? One is blue, the other is orange. This is a typical problem in business––for individuals and groups of people. Is the group more than the sum of each individual? Probably, yes, but how does that fit into the theory of levels of consciousness? Is that its own line? I have all these questions. The good news is that there is room for my own contributions in the future, which is the inspiring part of it, but intellectually, I missed a certain level of rigor that I'm used to.

Q: So based on what you have experience here, do you have any idea how you might apply this in your work back when you get started?

A: A couple of ideas. One idea is that I'm pretty sure that the quadrants and the levels will help me to better understand certain client situations, better analyze certain problems, because I will always be in the role of someone who has to bring in the left quadrants. This is part of my role, right? In this capability building, redesign of H.R. processes, intellectual capital, knowledge management role, it's always the left side and not the right side that I have to look at and that the clients want me to look at.

Having a framework that will allow me to argue to fellow consultants and to clients-look, you're missing something here and my team and I can contribute-that is great. Designing interventions for groups of people that are at a certain level of consciousness that will be step two. If we really do a couple of workshops with clients to train them in a new strategy, I think it will tremendously help me to design better stuff. It may not be integral, but I'm committed to use integral thinking whenever I need it.

9. Linda Brewer- second interview.

Q: You've just come through four and a half days of intense workshop. What were you looking for that brought you to this experience?

A: I was looking for a way to pull a whole bunch of different things together. I think there are several ways that things were not quite in sync or in alignment and I needed to pull some things into alignment. I also think I needed a much richer depth of understanding, which just being here in person made such a huge difference for that.

Conceptually I was getting a whole lot of this stuff. Sometimes in action, as I operated in the business world, I was actually using it. But I didn't know how much and to what degree I was using it. I think that now I can pull a lot of those pieces together in two ways. One is in my business life and of course, the place that I don't ever intend going but always end up somehow is in my personal life (laugh). This work gives me a bunch of tools to use and a bunch of lenses to use in business, one on one relationships, conversation with individuals and also in the design of group-to-group relationships.

Q: What were the highlights for you?

A: I think I was about halfway through and all of a sudden, things just started popping in my head. There were all kinds of learning and absorbing that I went through. Big Mind was enormous. It was so valuable to walk through in two ways; first, just very personally to walk through and get in deeper and deeper and deeper and, second to experience it as a process, as something that I could actually walk people through very delicately, very gently with a lot of trust and volunteering on the other side. That was just really amazing.

Q: One of the things that came out of the business model work in the workshop had to do with shifting focus from the right side to the left side. Are you moving more into the left side of the quadrants?

A: Yes, I've always done that, but I think I have a different voice around it and certainly a different set of language around it now. Where I've always lightly touched and then danced away because it gets a little bit too scary, I actually feel safer now in having those conversations with executives who are retiring or executives who are going through huge career shifts. I've always been sort of hesitant to talk about it, but now I feel like I can do it in a safe way for both them and for me. We can have a conversation about how they are going to incorporate spirituality into what they do––to look at the emotional, the spiritual, the physical and how they're going to design their lives differently.

Q: Is there anything else about the workshop that you'd care to comment on?

A: Three things are really important. One, you get this very solid grounding with the business context. Two, is that you have the seeds, the early stages of tools that you can actually see how to use both on the personal and on the business side, which, because we're talking integral, are so definitely related. Three, the experience of spending some time with Ken, the great synthesizer, watching how he thinks, how he works and how he pulls from all these different levels. That is a wonderful example to hold in my head of what I can aspire to be.

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Russ Volckmann, PhD
Coaching Leaders in Business and Life
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