Increasingly we see people trying to find approaches to change and development that are integrative. By integrative we mean are able to account for critical factors and leverage those factors to make transformational changes. Partly this is driven by our human urgency to create, learn and achieve what is important to us, individually and as societies. We have a long history to see what happens when these efforts go wrong.
Notice what we see happening in some circles of leadership theory. James MacGregor Burns, one of the most respected leadership theorists alive today initiated a process among a multi-disciplinary group of academics to build a general theory of leadership. Several years later they published a book with some highly insightful chapters AND with the admission that they had not succeeded in their mission. They were still significantly divided and could not come to agreement. I would suggest that one of the key reasons for this lack of progress in creating an integrated perspective on leadership was that they had no unifying framework within which to bring their academic and research knowledge and talents.
Contrast this with what Mike McElhenie tells us about an experience he had in Africa while training people in leadership as part of a UNDP effort to reduce the incident of AIDS/HIV infection. One of the participants in the gender-separated groups was a sergeant of police in Swaziland who seemed to be taking to heart the lessons of respect and communication with others while recognizing that there was a need to communicate in ways that they could hear and value. Mike tells us that this policeman “was brought to tears at the realization that he had been ignoring the needs of his wife for twenty some odd years. He decided to have a discussion with her about this insight that very night. The next day he came and his wife was right next to him. As I was to lead the group that day, she came up to me and said, ‘Michael, I wanted to come in and see what had so powerfully moved my husband to want to be my partner, not just my husband.’
“I swear, you talk about stories bringing tears to your eyes, well that was what was happening right there in front of 50 people. My partner doing the workshop with me, Felice Tilin, saw me hugging this woman and her husband and all of us letting loose these joyful tears. She came up with tears in her own eyes and asked, ‘What’s going on?’
“I said, ‘We are just having a wonderful moment.’
“She said, ‘I felt it from across the room.’”
Mike told of this experience as a way to communicate the power of more integral approaches to leadership development. I still get tears in my eyes every time I read this. And I know that more integral approaches to leadership development are able to produce such powerful results on the individual and relationship levels.
They are also capable of producing results on organizational levels. In one case, the CEO and COO of a company went through integral leadership training with a firm in Dallas. They had recently taken over a company that had been spun off by a large, global corporation. As a result of this training, they have brought about 25 others in their company, about 25% of their employees, through the same program and are making a modified version available to all employees. This company had been stagnant. Now it is growing in an expanded international market. The CEO and the COO attribute the business successes to this program.
Whether we are talking about changing how we understand leadership roles and practices at the individual level, at the level of relationships and organizations, at the level of societies and in the realm of theory, we need some framework to begin from. As in any approach to development and change, we must start from where we are to move in the directions that are important to us. In leadership development we need to start with a framework that offers potential for growing not only our knowledge, not only our capacity for integrating diverse perspectives, but growing our effectiveness in learning from the past, learning from our current efforts and about what we hope to create in the future. To do this we need to stop being victimized by our blind spots. For that is the result of our narrowed perspectives. We inevitably create and protect our blind spots.
Over the years there have been attempts by a number of people to create such an integrative approach, but the ones I have seen continue to have blind spots. I think the most promising approach I have seen so far builds on the work of American philosopher Ken Wilber. He has developed a “mapping” approach that is intended to significantly reduce our tendency to work and reason with blind spots that impair our effectiveness on a number of levels. How would this work? Without going into these methods for the moment, here are some of the results we can look forward to:
- We will help to build a path to learning and knowledge creation that will serve all of mankind. It is one that will help us address the myriad of challenges we are faced with in communities and societies, ecologically, socially, politically and economically.
- We will engage in an approach that addresses not only theory and practice for others, but also is intentional about promoting our own development cognitively, emotionally, physically and spiritually. I do not mean to suggest that we will all approach things in the same way. Rather, we will approach things in ways that work for each of us and, at the same time, generate useful material for the evolution of a metatheory that integrates our work and knowledge with that of others.
- And how can this proposal make life any more difficult than it already is? I do not foresee such a result. Rather, I see a time when we evolve a more universal way of linking arms with those of various perspectives to build a future that benefits all.
Where would we start? I propose we build on what already exists, on the shoulders of the giants who have come before us in all fields. That we show how their work can by integrated into an integral framework, how it informs each of us more clearly, and how it can support generatively the creation of the ethical, the true and the beautiful in all walks of life. We can take advantage of existing institutions and publications that are open to considering this approach. We can learn to frame this vision in a way that can be understood and appreciated by those who want to learn more, as well as those who are skeptical. We can do the work that is required to show the skeptics how this proposal embraces and supports them, while enlisting their participation and contributions. And we can learn about our selves, our own visions, our own capacities and capabilities, with an eye to our development.
- Russ Volckmann, Integral Leadership Review
