Author Archives: Tom Murray

8/31 – Sentence completion assessments for ego development, meaning-making, and wisdom maturity, including STAGES

Feature Articles / August-November 2017

Tom Murray

Overview

This article began as a series of short white papers providing various types of background information about STAGES and its predecessors. Its sections are relatively independent and readers with prior knowledge should be able to skip to and read each independently, or in any order.  For those new to the field, it provides an overview of theories of meaning-making development (also called ego development or leadership maturity—and which we call “wisdom skills”) as …

8/19 – Contemplative Dialogue Practices: An inquiry into deep interiority, shadow work, and insight

Feature Articles / August-November 2015

Tom Murray

PART I

Introduction: Dialogue and the Pulse of Freedom

Dialogue invokes ideals of equality, participation, freedom, collaboration, responsibility, diversity, creativity, and adaptation. A central theme in the advancement of human society is the movement from rigid and authoritarian to more responsive, democratic, and thus dialogic social practices. Open, free, authentic, rich, and reciprocal communication is seen as essential to generating acceptable life conditions in our world of dizzying complexity, rapid change, global interconnectedness (Habermas, …

Feature Article: Integral Leadership as Supporting Epistemic Sophistication in Knowledge-Building Communities

Feature Articles / October 2006

Tom MurrayIntroduction

In a general sense leaders “lead, inspire, and/or organize” people to form beliefs or take actions and theories of leadership cover a wide range of concerns, including management, organizational transformation, character development and psycho-social motivation. For this article I take a particular meaning or slice within the numerous goals and skill sets entailed by “leadership,” i.e., leadership as supporting knowledge-building, new mental models and meaning generation. These three facets of leadership are closely intertwined.

Leaders …