Integral Leadership Review

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Tom Thresher May 6th 1949 – July 9th 2015 I first made contact with Tom Thresher in 2009.  Russ Volckmann, the Publisher of Integral Publishers, passed me his email address and phone number along with a message along the lines, “… I think you two should chat.”  I waited a few days before dropping him […]

     A UCC pastor and an Episcopal priest walk into an Irish pub…or into a trattoria…or into a fish-and-chips joint…we did all three and more actually, Tom Thresher and I did.  And even though we never got around to writing the rest of the joke, the humor was never lost on either of us.  Tom’s […]

Welcome to the 3rd and final release of the August-November 2015 Issue of Integral Leadership Review. As this WE-volutionary edition comes to a close, I would like to say thank you to all who contribute to the Integral field. In a time of chaotic global transition, your attention and intention are especially needed. Rounding out […]

Eric Reynolds Wow! Need I say more? Wow!! I’m truly honored and humbled to be composing these leading comments, not to mention thrilled to bring you the first release of the August-November 2015 Issue of Integral Leadership Review. What has emerged is a transdisciplinary exploration of WE space. An effervescent field of creative tension infused […]

“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness – mine, yours, ours – need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.” from: Palmer, Parker J. A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward […]

“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.” Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Leadership is a “socially constructed… common process in which the organizational members find themselves and through which they negotiate the becoming of commonly shared phenomena.” – Petrm Salovaara, From Leader-Centricity Toward Leadership – A Hermeneutic Narrative Study, Helskinki,Finalnd: University of Tampere, 2011   “… leadership is an aesthetic, embodied phenomenon, a subjective ‘felt experience’, rather […]

Rob McNamara Authenticity is often highly valued by our clients and ourselves as coaches. We like feeling authentic. We enjoy discovering our own integrity. And we soak up the power we get when we are being “true to ourselves.” Authenticity is an intoxicating idea. It’s an even more intoxicating experience. For a self, there’s nothing […]

Winsor Jenkins In the process of coaching a client, you are not expected to go into the process with answers for the client.  As coach, this means you are not there to perform.  Stay open to learning about your client’s needs and trust the process. When I went through my coaching training at the Hudson […]

Michael Brabant Adults are not born, they are not products of 18+ years of living in a human body, they are made. The prerequisite for this creation into adulthood? The death of their identity and habits as a child. I’m not referring to the inner magical child, the enlightened innocence, the sense of wonderment that […]

When Russ Volkmann suggested that Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk, the co-founder/president of The Memnosyne Institute, be interviewed for ILR, it seemed easy enough. But then, that was before catching her on Facebook revealed that she and her husband, Joshua Raymond Frenk, President of The Club of Budapest Americas and VP of Memnosyne, are often in multiple […]

Carol Sanford served as speaker for Saybrook’s Organizational Systems 2015 graduating class.  She inspired the curiosity of our graduates and students as she spoke about her transdisciplinary approach to working with organizations in support of innovation for a more sustainable world.  In this interview, we explore Carol’s approach to disrupting organizations, challenging leaders to think […]

Eric Reynolds Aftab Omer, Ph.D. is a sociologist, psychologist, futurist and the president of Meridian University. Raised in Pakistan, India, Hawaii, and Turkey, he was educated at the universities of M.I.T, Harvard and Brandeis. His publications have addressed the topics of transformative learning, cultural leadership, generative entrepreneurship and the power of imagination. His work includes […]

Lisa Norton   “Jazz is not a what, it is a how.”  Bill Evans  “One Halloween, our group is excited to do a scary Halloween show. To start our play we ask the audience to give us an example of something that scares the living daylights out of them. I’m eager to get started, imagining suggestions […]

Robin Lincoln Wood Overview of the Purpose of this Series of Articles – with excerpts from “A Leader’s Guide to ThriveAbility” This series of articles is intended to illuminate how an integral approach to leadership can help us meet the critical leadership challenges of the 21st century. We apply the perspective and frameworks of ThriveAbility […]

Jon Freeman So what’s this “Teal” organisations thing? There has been some major buzz generating about “Teal” organisations.  It started with Frederic Laloux’s book “Reinventing Organizations”.  There are some good videos on YouTube of Frederic talking about it and if you haven’t read it, you can easily get an overview.  The buzz has been amplified […]

Tom Bruno-Magdich  Hello fellow Integral Leadership Review reader. I think it’s only fair that I disclose who I am and what I stand for before you spend your valuable time reading this article. I’m a firm believer that fear is behind most, if not all, of the worst things human beings do to each other. […]

Peter Merry         Introduction As we stand on the edge of a new era, with old beliefs, institutions and values crumbling around us, a new realisation is dawning in the minds of many. This is not just an upgrade of our current civilisation. This is a new starting point. From this point […]

Maureen Metcalf & Carla Morelli Abstract This paper provides a high-level framework for leading transformative change that increases the probability of success by integrating leadership and culture into the process. It is based on decades of practical consulting experience incorporating integral models into solid consulting and change leadership frameworks. This material is intended for leaders exploring options […]

Tracy M. Cooper, Ph.D. Abstract This paper presents a view of emergence as an integral leader in the community of individuals who have the personality trait sensory processing sensitivity, aka: highly sensitive people or HSPs.  Written from a first person point of view I specifically recount the organic pathway that eventually led to my emergence […]

Tim Winton So, something happened at the Integral Theory Conference. Four weeks now since it ended and its still happening. Not with quite the same intensity, but intense enough that it feels like one of those things where once the experience has been had, the power of it means that things are never really going […]

Daniel Álvarez Lamas                                                                                     María Ortega Luna   Abstract This article is one of the […]

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 […]

Judith L. Glick-Smith I’m all about flow. Being in a flow state brings me a sense of joy and the feeling of being authentic in the moment. This is a topic I have been studying for eight years and with which I feel intimately connected. Since beginning my study of flow—what it is, what triggers […]

David MacLeod Abstract This paper considers current concerns about resource depletion (“energy descent”) and the unsustainability of current economic structures, which may indicate we are entering a new era signaled by the end of growth. Using the systems thinking tool of PatternDynamics™, developed by Tim Winton, this paper seeks to integrate multiple natural patterns in […]

Alain Gauthier Abstract The purpose of this paper is to explore – from an integral perspective – what it means and what it takes to transcend and include individual leadership in moving toward evolutionary co-leadership, as well as the triple impact it can have – at the individual, group, and societal levels. There are profound […]

Giorgio Piacenza Some ancient seminal ideas from previous Earth-respecting traditions – in spite of originating in largely pre-modern stage societies – are still essentially compatible TODAY with Integral Theory and with other integrative approaches. These are integral-level ideas embedded across time within the main cultural-social developmental stages. Apparently, many of these ideas did occur in agrarian economies […]

Bill Baue and Robin Wood To achieve sustainability, we need to transcend the sustainability paradigm – a limiting mindset that (counter-intuitively) has only succeeded in solidifying unsustainability. We need to transcend and include sustainability by integrating it into a new meta-paradigm that spawns systems designed to thrive, sustainably. To get from here to there, integral […]

Mark McCaslin Recently, I had the pleasure of representing Integral Leadership Review and the School for Advanced Studies, University of Phoenix, at the International Leadership Associations’ annual conference.  Being involved as I am with the Integral Leadership Review I am often questioned by the affiliates of the Center for Leadership Studies and Educational Research, the […]

Assembled & edited by Jane Allen and Nick Owen Snapshots of a transformational leadership conference with inputs from Bill Torbert & Frederic Laloux Amara is a collaboration of likeminded leadership practitioners formed earlier this year with the stated purpose of doubling the number of leaders with transformational leadership capacity worldwide within 25 years. The founders […]

Edward Kelley INTRODUCTION  Over the past 2-3 years we have run a number of retreats on The Third Act in life. In April of this year we also ran a successful Third Act Conference. More recently we have been running Third Act workshops in which we have moved our attention to what work we can […]

Jeremy D. Johnson Elza Maalouf gave her ITC2015 keynote on Saturday morning. I was present – as the ITC live blogger – and published the bulk of my notes for her talk on my homepage[i] The following is an extended version of that morning’s blog post. As Mark Fabionar mentioned to me back in June, “Elza […]

You can buy a video of Sean Hargens’ opening presentation and more from ITC 2015 here. Well worth watching for a status of integral theory, its impact and potential. His presentation on the list of projects around the world is remarkable. In the US, Europe and Asia individuals are applying integral approaches and making remarkable impact. Also […]

2015-16 State of the Future Jerome C. Glenn, Elizabeth Florescu and The Millennium Project Team http://millennium-project.org/millennium/201516SOF.html Concerned for “the” and “our” future? Highly recommended report by the UN sponsored Millennium Project. The report contains much more useful information than can be offered in this space. The link above provides access to the full report and […]

Paul Gibbs In late July, Middlesex University hosted a symposium of invited academics, thinkers and practitioners to discuss the nature of transdisciplinarity in the context of UK postgraduate higher education. Participants included Professor Nicolescu and academics from universities in the UK including Middlesex, Kings, University College London Institute of Education (UCL IOE) and Manchester, and […]

Elizabeth Kennedy The altar stood tall, and stood out in the room.  Simply walking into Bence Ganti’s Integral Flow Experience you sense something special is going to happen here.   Bence uses an altar and ceremony to affect the lower left aspect of the class – and it works beautifully.  Integral Flow experience is truly a […]

Alia Aurami  A nexus for integral, next-stage organizations is born Since Frederic Laloux published his Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next-Stage of Human Consciousness, with foreword by Ken Wilber, the impact of Integral on businesses and other organizations will never be the same. The author seems to have hit a […]

Bill Toth As I stood on the balcony of the Herrenhausen Palace, overlooking the magnificent gardens I felt very fortunate to be invited, along with 26 other PhD students to this gathering of systems thinkers from around the world to consider the interesting problem of Anthropocene governance.  It was not initially clear what the objective […]

Jeffrey Pfeffer (2015). Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time. New York: Harper Business. In the year 2000, Chris Argyris introduced the new century with his publication of Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They’re Getting Good Advice and When They’re Not. In this exceptional book […]

Robin has brilliantly woven his ThriveAbility model into a field manual for executives, policy makers and change agents in service of creating a better world for future generations. Earth’s 7.3 billion citizens are currently consuming 1.6 times its available resources. This rate is clearly not sustainable, and trends indicate it will continue to rise. We […]

John Brockman, Ed. This Idea Must Die. New York: Harper, 2015. This is a most unusual book to be included in Integral Leadership Review. But it is a significant contribution to integral understanding. It is a book of very short entries by scholars and other intellectuals on ideas that are current in the various sciences, […]

In 2007 Inteegral Leadership review featured a couple of articles about holacracy (http://integralleadershipreview.com/5328-feature-article-organization-at-the-leading-edge-introducing-holacracy-evolving-organization/ ; http://integralleadershipreview.com/5333-feature-article-holacracy-in-action-theory-to-practice/), Brian Robertson’s innovative organizational approach in the software company he built and his subsequent entrepreneurial activity.

Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt. Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.   The foundational theme of this book: “Meeting complexity with complexity can create more confusion than it resolves.” Stuff interacts in a variety of ways. Complex approaches can overwhelm us. Simple Rules asks, what alternative […]

Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston. Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Here is a book that seeks to confront our historic, cultural approach to leadership and nudge leading toward addressing the more rapidly changing and complex organizational and contextual landscape. Their strategy is to […]

Mauk Pieper. Humanity’s Second Shock and Your Unique Self: Integral Leadership & Spirituality. Lage Vuursche, The Netherlands: Venwoude, Press, 2014. Essentially, we have here a highly readable and understandable presentation of our developmental relationship to self and the universe that is built on the work of Ken Wilber and Marc Gafni, among others. It is […]

Scott K. Edinger and Laurie Sain. The Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness within Your Company, Foreword by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. New York: Amacom, 2015. I sometimes find that I have snobbish tendencies. One way they come out is in relation to books published by AMACOM. Most of what I have […]

Robin Lincoln Wood. The Trouble with Paradise: A Humorous Enquiry into the Puzzling Human Condition in the 21st Century, Foreword by Ken Wilber. Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2014. Russ Volckmann I met Robin Wood about a decade ago. He was in San Francisco to explore and promote his work in Europe, Renaissance 2, an integrally informed […]

Reflections on Otto Laske, Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer Otto Laske, Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer. Tucson: Integral Publishers, 2015. Russ Volckmann Full disclosure: I am the publisher of Otto Laske’s newest book, Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer. As such I must acknowledge that I am part of a […]

Dear MetaIntegral Community, The moment many of you have been waiting for… The announcement of our next round of grant finalists. But first, let me just say a few words about the process.  We received a wide range of amazing proposals (24 to be exact) led by some incredible integral thinkers. As part of our selection process, […]

23rd CEEMAN Annual Conference Almaty, Kazakhstan 23-26 Sep 2015 This International Association for Management Development in Dynamic Societies conference  will be attended by at least 150 participants from 35 countries – deans and directors of business schools and universities, corporate partners, and international publishers. The topic of the 2015 conference is Localization vs. Globalization of […]

International Leadership Association to Explore Leading Across Borders and Generations at 17th Annual Global Conference Barcelona, Spain October 14-17, 2015 The International Leadership Association, the global network for all those with a professional interest in leadership, will be holding its 2015 annual global conference in Barcelona, Spain. Taking place October 14-17, ILA 2015 will bring […]

 Women Impacting Healthcare – Broadening Our Leadership November 6, 2015 Minneapolis, MN The University of Minnesota’s 4th annual full-day Women Impacting Healthcare conference, Broadening Our Leadership, is designed for women professionals in healthcare and offers unique lessons and learning opportunities for high-performing leaders. The day’s sessions will focus around diverse communities, global initiatives, and international […]

APROS/EGOS Conference “Spaces, Constraints, Creativities: Organization and Disorganization” Sydney, Australia December 9–11, 2015 Hosted by CMOS (Centre for Management and Organisation Studies) UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney in collaboration with APROS (Asia Pacific Researchers in Organization Studies and EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies). For additional information, go here.

New Directions in Leadership Studies: Exploring the Critical Turn Lancaster University 13th–15th December 2015 In 2015 the International Studying Leadership Conference returns to Lancaster University Management School. Having hosted the Conference in 2003 and 2005, as well as having launched the Leadership journal in 2005, Lancaster provides an ideal setting for debates and discussions about […]

GLOBAL DRUCKER FORUM 5 – 6 NOV 2O15 Vienna, Austria The Drucker Forum 2015 touches a key theme of our time: it will look at the technology revolution – with Robotics, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, and The Internet of Things – through the lens of humanity. This leads into fundamental questions to be […]

All delegates wishing to attend the British Academy of Management Conference will need to be a BAM member. So you will need to pay the membership and the Conference fee. The fee covers delegate’s lunches and refreshments for the duration of the conference. There is also a Gala Dinner which is held on Wednesday 09th […]

Dennis Wittrock has sent out the following appeal: Get behind IEC 2016 – support the team! For the 2nd Integral European Conference in 2016 I ask for your help – the help of the integral community. We need to raise funds to finance the work of our core team members for the coming 9 months. […]