Leadership and the Integral Vision

Seeing Integral Leadership through Three Important Lenses: Developmental, Ecological and Governance

By Mark Edwards

This article looks at the issue of leadership within three multilevel contexts. The first context relates to the developmental context of leadership as a process of ongoing growth through various stages. This context focuses on things such as values, cognitive capacities, interpersonal skills and all those abilities that mark off the requirements of effective and authentic leadership. The second context relates to leadership as it exists in its relational and embedded forms throughout the whole organisation. This view sees the leader as a reciprocal role of leader-follower. It emphasizes the socially nested nature of organisations and organisational decision-making. The third context considers the issue of power regulation and broad governance within an organisation and how leadership manifests that from the aspect of organising.

These three lenses provide their own unique window into the complex world of leadership. Because these views are multileveled they can be represented as holonic systems, that is, as multilevel systems of part-whole relationships. The developmental view sees leadership as a temporal process of including former stages of human development within later stages. This developmental lens looks at how “the leader” develops over time and with experience.

The socially-nested or ecological view sees leadership as the network of leader-followers embedded within structured organisational settings. I am using the word ecological here in the sense of human ecology, that is the study of human groups in their social environments. And thirdly, the governance lens sees leadership as a functional process of leader-followers embedded within a system of power, decision-making and regulation. Governance refers to more than just executive or board governance, but to the whole system of self-regulation and decision-making that occurs throughout an organisation.

These three holarchical views of leadership have much in common and yet are very different in their explanatory focus. These similarities and differences give rise to many confusions and conflations between these three explanatory lenses.

This paper discusses i) divergences and convergences between these three lenses, ii) common forms of confusions that have been associated with these three lenses, iii) how these three views might be combined to describe more comprehensive meta-theoretical frameworks for exploring organizational leadership.

Read More: Here

MARK EDWARDS PhD. is a registered psychologist with a Masters degree in developmental psychology and a PhD (awarded distinction) in organization theory from the University of Western Australia. He currently teaches business ethics at the Business School, University of Western Australia and metatheoretical studies at John F. Kennedy University in California.

Also by Mark Edwards:

• Integral Theory and Global Developmental Pathologies

• The Depth of the Exteriors
• Integral Sociocultural Studies and Cultural Evolution
• Integral Theory into Integral Action
• Organizational Transformation and Integral MetaTheory
• A Brief History of Holons

Integral Theory and Global Developmental Pathologies

A Future in the Balance: Integral Theory and Global Developmental Pathologies

By Mark Edwards

This essay employs three fundamental principles of Integral theory to consider the developmental nature of some of the major pathologies currently afflicting social development at the global level. It has been quite apparent for some time now that there are very powerful global forces which cause immense harm to communities and environments.

However, these very forces are also responsible for some of the most important advances in human welfare and social development. There’s a very deadly race in progress between the developmental potential of these movements to create a worthy future for our planet and their destructive capacity to consign humanity and many other innocent parties to the evolutionary scrap heap.

How might we better understand how these developmental forces can be held in balance? Is it possible to untangle the beneficial side of these movements from the destructive side? How might we better enunciate and work towards a truly healthy form of global development instead of a socio-centric form of rampant “progress”? This essay presents some considerations on these and associated questions from an integral theory perspective.

Read More: Here

MARK EDWARDS PhD. is a registered psychologist with a Masters degree in developmental psychology and a PhD (awarded distinction) in organization theory from the University of Western Australia. He currently teaches business ethics at the Business School, University of Western Australia and metatheoretical studies at John F. Kennedy University in California.

Also by Mark Edwards:

• The Depth of the Exteriors
• Integral Sociocultural Studies and Cultural Evolution
• Integral Theory into Integral Action
• Organizational Transformation and Integral MetaTheory
• A Brief History of Holons

Integral Theory into Integral Action: Mark Edwards & Russ Volckmann in Dialogue

In a series of ongoing, in-depth dialogues Mark Edwards and Russ Volckmann attempt to rethink the potential of integral theories, maps, models and their applications. Their dialogues are guided by the hope of making two important contributions: first, to increase the clarity and level of critical analysis of integral theory - particularly as it applies to the subject of leadership; and second, in comprehending how to use integral theory as an integrating device for the many innovative concepts and ideas coming from a variety of mainstream disciplines.

READ MORE HERE: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Mark Edwards is a leading voice and innovator in the field of Integral Studies. Russ Volkmann has a Ph.D. in Political Science and Public Administration from U.C., Berkeley, and has taught at the University of Arizona and several other universities. Volkmann is the publisher/editor of the Integral Leadership Review.

Organizational Transformation and Integral MetaTheory

On August 15th, 2009 integral theorist and organizational specialist Mark Edwards published his first major work outlining his own version of integral theory through Routledge Press :

Description from Routledge:

Organizational Transformation for Sustainability: An Integral Metatheory

By Mark Edwards

During the 21st century organizations will undergo a level of radical and global change that has rarely been seen before. This transformation will come as a result of the environmental, social and economic challenges that now confront organisations in all their activities. But are our understandings and theories of change up to the task of meeting these challenges? Will we be able to develop sustaining visions of how organizations might contribute to the long-term viability of our interdependent global communities? Organizational Transformation for Sustainability: An Integral Metatheory offers some innovative answers to the big questions involved in organizational sustainability and the radical changes that organizations will need to undergo as we move into the third millennium. This new approach comes from the emerging field of integral metatheory.

Edwards shows how a "Big Picture" view of organisational transformation can contribute to our understanding of, and search for, organisational sustainability. There are four key themes to the book: i) the need for integrative metatheories for organisational change; ii) the development of a general research method for building metatheory; iii) the description of an integral metatheory for organisational sustainability; and iv) the discussion of the implications of this metatheory for organisational change and social policy regarding sustainability. This book brings a unique and important orienting perspective to these issues.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Towards an Integrative Pluralism

1: The Need for Metatheory in the Study of Organisational Transformation
2: Metatheoretical Domain and Definitions
3: The View from Here and Here and ...
4: Stories of Transformation
5: A General Method for Metatheory Building
6: A Multiparadigm Review and Analysis of Theories of Organisational Transformation
7: The Web of Relationships
8: An Integral Metatheory for Organisational Transformation
9: Implications and Evaluation
10: Metatheory and the Crisis

Available for Order: Here

See Also:

• The Depth of the Exteriors
• Integral Sociocultural Studies and Cultural Evolution
• Integral Theory into Integral Action
• A Brief History of Holons

A Brief History of Holons

The concept of holons has been in contention from the early formulations of AQAL to the present day. Even the most savvy integralist might be inclined to wonder: what really are holons? Are holons an ontologically fact about the world (are they real)? And how does such a notion truly contribute to an understanding of the territory and not just the map?

In this 2003 essay, Mark Edwards examines the history, use and relevance of the concept of holons in integral theory:

A Brief History of Holons - by Mark Edwards

“This concept has a long and respectable ancestry. So much so that defenders of orthodoxy are inclined to dismiss it as "old hat" - and often in the same breath to deny its validity. Yet I hope to show as we go along that this old hat, handled with some affection, can produce lively rabbits.” -- Arthur Koestler, 1967, p.45

The idea of hierarchy and of their constituent part-wholes, or holons, has, as Arthur Koestler points out in the opening quote, a long and distinguished history. There are many philosophers who have proposed abstract systems for explaining natural and social phenomena. In pre-Socratic Greece Leuciddus and Deocritus developed the abstract concept of the atom and used it to develop a philosophy that could explain all observed events. Aristotle used hierarchy as the methodology for accumulating and connecting biological knowledge. Hierarchy was perhaps the dominant way of viewing the connection between the natural, the human and the supernatural orders of being through the middles ages.

In the 17th century Leibnitz proposed his "monad" as an irreducible unit for explaining not only the material world but the inner world of the soul. In the early twentieth century there was a flurry of interest in holism and hierarchy that owed its genesis to the impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory. I think the contribution of Jan Smuts in his publication of "Evolution and Holism" in 1926 is particularly important. Smuts was a soldier, a revolutionist republican, a lawyer, the Premier of the Republic of South Africa for several years (before the instigation of political apartheid), a globalist, and one of the founders of the United nations. writers of the UN founding charter. He also was a philosopher who saw the deep connections between the natural and social worlds and his concept of holism clearly influenced Wilber's ideas in this area. Wilber quotes Smuts at the very beginning of his first major work that fully utilized the concept of hierarchy – The Atman Project - "Everywhere we look in nature we see nothing but wholes" (cited in Wilber, 1980). While all these various threads of ideas included the consideration of hierarchical networks and levels and orders of development it was not until the work of writer-philosopher Arthur Koestler that a fully theory of holarchy and holons was proposed.

Read the entire essay: Here

"A new perspective on whole-part relationships is taking shape around the concept of the holon - a term coined by Arthur Koestler to designate that which is simultaneously a whole in its own right and a part of a larger whole. An atom is a whole in itself. When it is also part of a molecule it becomes a holon, or a whole-part. The molecule that is also part of a cell is a holon, as is the cell that is part of an organ, and so on.

This hierarchy of relationships from the atom to the organism is known as a holarchy. The concepts of holon and holarchy are fundamental to understanding the healthy function of complex living systems, which requires that each of their whole-parts maintain its own identity and boundaries even as it functions as part of the larger whole." - David C. Korten (The Post-Corporate World)

Integral Theory into Integral Action: Part 8

In the recent issue of the Integral Leadership Review, Mark Edwards and Russ Volckmann continue their pioneering dialogue on Integral Theory with Part 8 of Integral Theory into Integral Action.

In Part 6 of this dialogue, Mark laid out an elegant way of mapping and thinking about 1st, 2nd and 3rd person at micro, meso and macro levels, as well as the mediating factors in the relationships among these. In Part 7, Mark pointed out the importance of including an “ecological lens” along with a developmental lens in redressing the imbalanced focus on developmental to the exclusion of ecological in much of the theory related to integral development.

So far in their discussions Edwards and Volckmann have identified several “lenses” that can be used in more flexible and nuanced analysis, touched on the neglected issue of power in integral theory, and the importance of collaborative approaches in building metatheory.

READ MORE: HERE

Notes from the Field

Reflections on the Integral Theory Conference (2008) from Integral Leadership Review:

Russ Volckmann: A highlight of the conference for me was meeting Mark Edwards. I found him not only to be predictably brilliant, but warm and very present. His paper, Of Elephants and Butterflies: An Integral Metatheory for Organisational Transformation, is available on the conference CD. I do not know if there are plans to publish it elsewhere. Following some graphic humor of caterpillar transformation, Mark discussed the nature of metatheory and integral as a metatheory: “i) a metatheory for the study of organisational transformation, ii) a general method for performing metatheory building research, and iii) some evaluative comments on the metatheory building resource used in this research Ken Wilber’s AQAL framework.” But there are other metatheories to consider, as well, including some we are discussing in our dialogue for the last two years in Integral Leadership Review. Examples are social mediation and the work of Vgotsky (which he notes has never been addressed by Wilber), Bandura’s work on learning, systems dynamics and autopoiesis, alignment, stakeholder, decentering, evolution and the governance holarchy.

Edward Kelly: …while the conference was conducted in a very supportive manner, this did not preclude integral from being under the critical spotlight. This might have come as a surprise to some delegates butmayreflect the change from a small cult to a broader movement (as discussed by Roger Walsh). There was also a sense that this conference signaled that integral was developing two distinct strands: integral research on the one hand and integral life on the other. Integral research is spearheaded by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and integral life by Robb Smith and the integral institute. Both are complimentary, but both are also different. The integral theory conference was primarily about the former, although Robb Smith used the conference as an opportunity to re-launch integral life.

Finally, sitting on the plane (getting some high altitude perspective) I wonder whether I will return for the second biannual integral theory conference in two years time and whether I would encourage others to do likewise? Given all things being equal I will return in 2010 and in the meantime would encourage others interested in integral research to consider doing likewise. Overall the quality of the papers was very high, the presentations very engaging and the welcome and hospitality of the organisers (including all the staff at JFKU and volunteers) was wonderful.

Gayle Karen Young: It is undeniable that seeds bore many fruits in this conference. The intellectual horsepower was awe-inspiring. Behind the papers, the rigor, the numbers, and the abstracts were the stories of love—love of truth, love of beauty, love of people and the more-than-human world. We move through these multiple worlds, and frequently other worlds get reduced to the merely tangible. While papers, posters, panels, and presentations formed much of the tangible structural spine for the conference, they also formed windows into personal and then collective stories of tenacity and courage, of descents into the ambiguous and into uncharted territories.

Read More: Here

The Depth of the Exteriors - Part 2

The Depth of the Exteriors
Part 2: Piaget, Vygotsky, Harre and the Social Mediation of Development

By Mark Edwards

In the first part of this series I presented Ken Wilber's view that all exteriors are "material" and that all exterior development is the layered complexification of matter in sensori-motor space. Ken sees the Right Hand exterior quadrants of behavioural and social development as a Flatland of "surfaces" that can be "registered with the senses" and which is "all empiricism, all monological gaze, all behaviourism, all shiny surfaces and monochrome objects" and which contain "no depth". As Ken puts it, "the Right-Hand quadrants are all material".

In the sections that follow I investigate some alternative views of the behavioural and social exteriors. Views that, while recognising the reality of interiors and subjective consciousness, nonetheless provide very different understandings of the Right Hand quadrants and the part that they play in human development.

In contrast to Wilber's interpretation of the Right Hand quadrants, I propose that a truly Integral understanding of the exteriors recognises their qualitative depth, their causal and developmental equivalence to the interiors, and their richness and profundity in terms of unfolding ontological complexity. I am arguing that, in a more balanced statement of Integral Theory, the Right Hand is not a Flatland any more than the Left Hand is. We not only need to include all quadrants in the explanation of human behaviour but we nee to have a valid understanding of what each of those quadrants represents and how they relate to each other.

I am suggesting that Ken sometimes misinterprets the developmental relationship between the interior and the exterior quadrants and that he has neglected several very important schools of developmental thought that focus on exterior aspects of evolution and personal growth.

This second part of the series will take a look at some of these schools, and in particular the sociological tradition of Cooley and Mead, the cultural-historical tradition of Vygotskian developmental studies and the Activity Theory approach to human development.

Read More: Here

An Interview with Daniel Gustav Anderson

Below is a transcript of an interview Erik S. Thornquist conducted with Daniel Gustav Anderson by email between 30 April and 26 May 2009, originally published by Integral World.

Daniel Gustav Anderson is a literary scholar, cultural critic and integral theorist currently teaching literature and cultural history in Washington D.C. Along with Mark Edwards, Steve McIntosh and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Anderson is one of the most innovative thinkers to emerge out of the integral movement.

This interview highlights the importance of evolving a much more radical approach to integral thinking, being and doing. Daniel and Erik challenge us to reconceptualize what it means to intentionally explore an ever expansive worldview. Enjoy.

Nonviolence of Nonmetaphysics
An Interview with Daniel Gustav Anderson

Erik: How did you become interested in integral theory?

Daniel: How I came to be interested in integral theory and integral culture is a separate question from how I came to be committed to an integral project. I'll try to address both of them.

The first has to do with everyday life for me. I am an intellectual by trade and a practicing Buddhist. My politics have always been to the left as a matter of conscience. There are other factors but I don't think my life is interesting. I find memoirs rather dull and, as the great American sage Steveland Morris observes, I don't want to bore you with my troubles. The gist of it: my commitment to this project comes from an unwillingness to endure the sufferings of others when that suffering could be avoided. I don't want to see children who should be developing into responsible adults go hungry and not learn to read, for instance. There's something wrong with me that I can't tolerate it, like you can't just sit there and watch your grandmother trip and fall down a flight of stairs with a disinterested attitude. I can't do that, I'm not that cool, so I have to step in and do what I can. This has meant that I have spent most of my adult life learning how to do certain things, and learning what is possible for me to do well. I read a lot. I am slowly losing my hearing, so I will never be a revolutionary piano tuner, but I have found that I can write American English. So, I write American English.

How specifically did I become committed to integral theory? I was teaching English Literature surveys as a lecturer at the University of Idaho. My students were struck by some passages in Matthew Arnold that I had asked them to read, which reminded me of some materials I had been studying on my own in Aurobindo Ghose. I have long been an admirer of Aurobindo's poetic work, and had some notes on a paper regarding some problems in Aurobindo's poetry and also his theories of time and race. So I put all this together in a tidy package and submitted it on a lark to the Integral Review. The editors at that journal did a remarkable thing: they decided to publish it but more importantly they challenged me.

Read More: Here

Also by Daniel Gustav Anderson: New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

Integral Sociocultural Studies and Cultural Evolution

Towards a more integrative approach to the analysis of collective development and the possibility of an Integral egalitarianism.

By Mark Edwards

What I hope to show in the following [essay] is that the basic principles of Integral philosophy itself, when applied consistently to the issue of sociocultural evolution, raise some serious concerns regarding the assessment and ranking of cultures on global unidimensional scales of development, irrespective of how universal or cross-culturally valid those scales may be. I maintain that, if we apply the same developmental logic that Wilber has proposed for individual growth to the collective domains, then Integral philosophy should regard global assessment and ranking practices as invalid and unnecessary in many instances.

In addition to this, because Integral philosophy actually incorporates the valid perspectives of the transpersonal philosophies and Nondual revelations, it should be a voice for a type of Kosmic egalitarianism which, according to many scriptures and sacred teachings, has absolutely no place for the grading of evolutionary attainment, whether that be for individuals, cultures, or other collective forms.

Read More: Here

The Depth of the Exteriors - Part 3

The Depth of the Exteriors

Part 3: Cooley and Mead and the Social Behaviorist View of Development in the Exterior Quadrants

By Mark Edwards

In any detailed discussion of Integral Theory principles relating to the AQAL framework, it becomes quickly apparent just how vague are the definition of many of its fundamental concepts. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of "The Exteriors".

But does this mean that when a mystical experience is described (or even remembered) in third-person terms that it becomes an exterior phenomenon. Does it mean that my behaviour should be regarded by me as a third-person "it"? Does it mean that the interiors and exteriors refer to the same holon or do they refer to different holons or does the context continually alter depending on one's perspective? Does ken's definition of the "exterior" mean that the Left Hand paths refer to first-person holons and the Right Hand paths refer to third-person holons or do they both refer to third-person maps or knowledge quests? Does it mean that these exteriors are flat material objects or do they have some type of exterior developmental depth. Do the basic holonic tenets and structures that Integral Theory applies to the interiors have exactly the same application to the exteriors? Are we to think that the term exterior refers to the objective world of scientific research and abstract knowledge or to the real world of eating, meeting friends, watching TV and going to school? I could go on, but I am sure that you get my message.

The answers to such questions might, in part, be buried within Ken's existing writings but even if they are they are not immediately accessible. The clarification of these issues is absolutely essential for the clear definition of many Integral theory concepts. In any event, these very basic issues have still not been widely debated within Integral theory or an integrally informed community of thinkers and consequently, in my opinion, some of the current ways of presenting and applying the AQAL model are highly debateable.

In writing this series on exteriors I hope to expose some of these shortcomings and confusions problems and to bring to light other models of the exteriors that also pose interesting problems for the way Integral Theory currently divides reality.

In this last essay on exteriors I will have a brief look at the American behavioural sociologists – Cooley, Mead and Blumer. These theorists present a strong challenge to Ken's current way of defining the exteriors. These American sociologists were some of the greatest pioneers of the behavioural and social worlds and, interestingly, they each propose developmental models that explain the worlds of consciousness and interiority in terms of exterior developmental dynamics. They were "flatlanders" who acknowledged the existence of interior consciousness and proposed models that saw interiors as the result of exterior depth! Now there's a challenge to test the non-exclusionary capacity of Integral theory IMP.

Read More: Here

[Check Out: Part I: Wilber's Flatland / Part II: Piaget, Vygotsky, Harre]

Latest Issue of The Integral Leadership Review Online

The Integral Leadership Review Vol. 8 Issue 3 is now published! Among the interesting articles featured are: a continuation of the discussion between Mark Edwards and Russ Volckmann, a critical response from Steve McIntosh, a conversation with Robb Smith, CEO Integral Institute, and other quality articles.

Description from the website:

The Integral Leadership Review is the world’s premier publication of integrated approaches to leadership. It serves leaders, professionals and academics engaged in the practice, development and theory of leadership. The Integral Leadership Review offers a comprehensive framework that provides insights and tools leaders can utilize to solve problems. Appropriate guidance is a key to solve the challenges of the world. Today’s approaches are fragmented, incomplete, and inadequate for the world’s multidimensional, multilayered global issues.

Read the full issue: Here

The Depth of the Exteriors - Part 1

The Depth of the Exteriors
Part 1: Wilber's Flatland

By Mark Edwards

This is the first part in a series of essays on Integral theory's treatment of the Right Hand exteriors of behavioral and social development. As always my intention in working through the following issues is to strengthen the internal consistency and overall validity of Integral Theory. Often my essays focus on rather minor aspects of the model, but sometimes they do look at central features of the Integral framework that have broad implications for its theoretical development and practical application. And this is particularly true for the present topic of the exteriors of development.

Ken Wilber, of course, has been the driving force behind all of the development of the Integral model thus far, and his works have always and continue to be an inspiration for me. To this point (to my knowledge) Ken is still the sole Integral thinker who focuses on the development of the theoretical framework of the model. As a consequence, my aim of critically clarifying and offering alternative views necessarily involves the specific critique of Wilber's writings. The ongoing targeting of critical comment towards Wilber's writings (always constructive though I hope) can become rather tiresome for me as I am sure it can for those who read these essays. But there seems no way around this issue, if my purpose in offering alternative ways of interpreting Integral Theory is to be pursued. If there were other Integral thinkers working on the theory side of the model (as opposed to its applied utilization in various fields, of which there are many), I would include their work in these critical essays as much as Wilber's. But, unfortunately, this isn't the case.

Those who do offer critiques of Wilber's writings, such as the contributors to the "Ken Wilber in Dialogue" book, Kirk Schneider, Albert Ellis, Andy Smith, and Jeff Meyerhoff (see Fischer, 1997 for an excellent, if rather out of date review article) almost always do so from outside of the model. These authors have their own theoretical models that they work from to comment on Wilber's ideas. However, I take a very different approach to these critics in that I work from within the Integral theory framework itself. I utilize Integral Theory concepts to consider the internal coherency of the Integral framework itself. I not only identify problematic aspects of the theory but I also try to show, as Michael Zimmerman puts it, "how integral theory has the resources needed to address the problems".

Typically, I try to reveal some aspect of the model I find unclear or problematic, trace this back to some interpretive inconsistency and offer alternative constructive suggestions for improving the coherency of the theory that is in accord with, what I believe to be, its definitive principles. And so it is with this present issue of exteriority and Wilber's treatment of the behavioral and social aspects of reality. This area of exteriority, behavior and social development is one of the most fundamental aspects of any over-arching model of reality. It has also been for me the topic where Wilber has articulated some of his most puzzling statements.

In this opening essay of this series on exteriors I will try to identify problematic aspects of Wilber's definition and conceptualization of holonic exteriors and of the Right Hand side of the AQAL model in general. In the following installments I will look at other depth models of the exteriors and finish with a alternative suggestion on how Integral Theory can better conceptualize the behavioral and social domains of existence.

Read More: Here

See Also: Part 2 / Part 3