Dialogue: Integral Theory into Integral Action: Part 6

Dialogue / August 2007

In the last episode of this dialogue, our conversation turned to process and mediating factors in development. I closed that episode with the following paragraph:

The question I will leave us with for our next installment is this: How can the “Basic Activity Triad” and the “Mediating Holon” help us make sense of all of this. For example, what can we see about the relationship between leader and follower and context? What are the mediating variables? How do these help us clarify the phenomenon of leadership? Ultimately, these are questions I hope we can dig into. One strategy might be to take a case example and develop it. Please let me know if there are other issues we need to address before we move into this.

To reopen the dialogue, I offer the focus on mediation as a variable in development.

-Russ

Russ: Mark, since our last contact, the subject of mediation is of growing interest to me. Like the holon, like holarchy and like stages and lines of development, it seems to me the mediator and its role is another structural variable in integral mapping, integral meaning making related to change.

I have been reading Suzi Gablik’s Conversations Before the End of Time in which she introduces the notion of mediation. She speaks directly of the crisis the world is facing and to role of art in relation to that crisis. Writing in 1994, she states, “I do feel there is a massive paradigm shift happening in our culture at the present time, which is not something that any one person, or profession, or ideology, is legislating, but it’s affect all spheres….The process is bigger than any of us. A whole cultural path is changing.” [440] In the role of art in relation to these changes, Gablik characterizes herself as a midwife and continues, “Someone needs to mediate the process in such a way that everyone can understand and relate to what’s happening, instead of getting caught in the anxiety of change.” [441].

It seems to me that as we explore development as change, a mediating role is one that not only addresses the relationships among quadrants, but also among stages, among lines and between individual and social holons. In engages the relationship between subject and object, past, present and future. Can you tell me more about your ideas about the mediating agent? Perhaps it could be related to what the Romanian particle physicist and leader of the international transdisciplinarity movement refers to as the Law of the Included Middle. [Volckmann, 2007] Here are three graphics that I included in that interview that may help make the point.

Figure 6.1: The Logic of the Excluded Middle

Figure 6.2: Model of the Included Middle

Figure 6.3: Nicolescu on the Included Middle

Now I invite readers to read the interview with Nicolescu, but for now the point is that Nicolescu has suggested a way of conceptualizing the relationship between the material and the non-material aspects of existence. I offer it here as a way of beginning to think about the importance of mediation, the middle. What is in the middle? What is the mediator? The answers to these questions will no doubt vary, depending on the level of analysis.

This intrigues me, but it is a way to develop a both/and perspective that has the potential for wholeness, that excluding the middle, the mediator, leaves us with a less effective way of comprehending the whole of an occurrence or development over time. It would mean, for example, in talking about an event involving leadership we must highlight leader, follower, context and the mediating factors in those relationships. Is this a fruitful path to explore?

Mark: These are incredibly fruitful paths to explore Russ and as always in our conversations your knowledge and wonderful curiosity about leadership opens up a tremendous range of topics that we might muse on here. I particularly want to thank you for introducing me to the thought of Nicolescu here. I’ve done a little bit of reading in response to your comments and his is certainly a great contribution to a more integral approach to understanding and explaining our world. I have read some snippets from his “Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity” and it seems to be a wonderful work. I look forward to becoming more familiar with Nicolescu’s ideas. Thank you so much for this Russ!

So to the substance of your comments, I would like to explore this topic you bring up of Nicolescu’s logics of the included/excluded middle. These logics can be discussed in a number of ways and the work on holonics of John Mathews (1996) is particularly relevant to these issues. To my mind the idea of an included middle refers to relationships that are non-reductive, i.e. simultaneously holistic and analytic. Such relationships pose the question: How can something be both what it is and what it is not? For example, how can a leader be “a leader” (what it is) and “a follower” (what it is not) both at the same time. There are many ways to explore this paradox (through autobiography and poetry for example) but for me the most crucial one for academic discussions is through holonics. Holons and holarchies are first and foremost ways of describing reality that are non-reductive. I know that I go on and on about holons, but their importance for integral approaches cannot be stated too strongly. Holons, by definition, are constructs for overcoming reductionisms of many different kinds and they hold this paradox of the included/excluded middle at the forefront of our considerations.

A holon is a whole (what it is) and a part (what it is not) (and vice versa) both at the same time. And this immediately creates the need for holarchy. In being a whole, an entity will necessarily include other “smaller” entities. In being a part/member, an entity will necessarily be included within other “larger” entities. Hence, there arises a nest of ordered levels of inclusion. If we look at someone as a leader that immediately suggests that that person has followers. Looking at that same person as a follower immediately suggests that person has leaders. Right there we have the unavoidable “Big Bang” of emergent levels of reality—the inclusive emergence of part/whole levels. And when we see that person in the company of fellow leaders/followers heterarchy arises (the emergence of translational processes). Together hierarchy and heterarchy form holarchy (the inclusive emergence of transformational levels as translational processes). Whenever we forget that the leader/follower paradox exists at each point in that holarchy, some pathological form of hierarchy arises and we fall into the reductionisms of “the logics of the excluded middle”. Whenever we stop seeing leaders as followers and followers as leaders, we fall into the ontological traps of leadership as being either top-down or bottom-up.

This is the great insight offered by models of the servant-leader. In Jesus’ kingdom of heaven the true leader is that one who is last among all others. The great symbol of this vision of leadership is that of Jesus washing the feet of his “followers”. Non-reductive, holonic leadership is inherently paradoxical and it carries that paradox into the activity of the leader as genuine servant. When we regard a leader as “The Leader” we get caught in reductive forms of leadership and we fall foul of the logic of the excluded middle. This happens typically in very large social complexes where institutionalization and mediating processes set up reified and impersonal images of “The Leader”. At the micro and meso levels of interpersonal relations and of the group, people have a much more dynamic, involved and humane sense of what leading involves. This is why the “team” and the mesolevel of innovative groups is so critically important for collective transformation (continuing with the allusion to Jesus of Nazareth we have his “team”, of course, of the 12 apostles). However, when we come to the political realm of, for example national leader, then all the mediating powers of corporate and government mass media flooding in to fill the gap between citizen and state. Hence, Bush and Howard can lead us into fighting a war even though no one (apart from our “leaders”, and the Halliburtons and Rupert Murdochs of the world) is particularly interested in doing so.

When we get trapped in the logic of the excluded middle we reduce the leadership holarchy, what I call, more broadly, the governance holarchy, to a simple top-down understanding of leadership (or, much less frequently, bottom-up leadership). It is crucial that we differentiate between this governance holarchy and other forms of developmental and ecological holarchy. Where developmental holarchies (which have such a prominent place in Wilber’s AQAL) and ecological holarchies (which Koestler was more interested in) use the criteria of maturation/growth and size/spatial inclusion respectively to define their levels, the governance holarchy uses the criteria of organising, decision making or regulatory power (as in “spheres of influence”) to build up its holarchic structure. In adopting the logic of the included middle we can use our governance holarchy lens in its non-distorting form. We can see leadership and followership as co-creative and dialectical complementarities. We can see them as co-constituting the actual reality of a system’s form of governance and autopoietic identity. We can, for example, see that listening to others is crucial for being a good leader and that decision-making is crucial for being a good follower at every point in the governance holarchy. Leadership becomes much more of a reciprocal and collaborative process when this holarchic multi-level perspective of governance and decision-making is taken to heart.

From this perspective Russ, it occurs to me that your wonderful journal might consider ILR to be an acronym for Integral Leadership/Followership Review. Followership is just as important as leadership in governance because every leader is a follower and every follower is a leader. The reason we don’t see followership as a worthy quality in organizations (although this is changing, see Collinson, 2006; Gasaway, 2006) is because we have adopted the logic of the excluded middle which turns some organizational members (those from the top of the hierarchy) into leaders and some organizational members (those from the bottom of the hierarchy) into followers and we consequently see change as being driven in a top-down fashion. This is a very common reductionism caused by the use of distorted versions of the governance holarchy lens. The postmodern concern with heterarchy and participatory, emergent and bottom-up forms of leadership is a reaction against these top-down distortions. The problem is that postmodernity sometimes throws out hierarchy altogether. In their quite valid disdain for those “excluded-middle logics” that elevate leadership to the upper echelons and relegate followership to the lower rungs, the postmodern leadership theorists are sometimes suspicious of all forms of direction setting and decision-making. In the main, however, the postmodern concern with heterarchical and bottom-up forms of governance calls for a considered balance to the pathologies of hierarchy rather than a complete denial of its utility.

In contrast to these distorted versions of the governance lens, a more integral approach would also proclaim the citizen/worker as leader and the CEO/community leader as servant to balance these distortions. Reciprocal and relational models of leadership/followership are more in keeping with these understandings. At the moment integral theory is overly concerned with top-down models of transformational leadership. The idea is that we change the consciousness of the leader and then see if these transformed leaders can institute some similar transformations in the lower levels. This might be one aspect of how social collectives change but it’s a rather limited one. Top-down models, even when assuming significant transformational capacities at the top, are not sufficient for the consolidation of whole-of-system change. The lens of the governance holarchy adds a whole new dimension of insight and interpretative power to the developmental lens of transformational levels. The use of the governance lens allows us to pick up on top-down and bottom-up reductionisms and power imbalances. It allows us to diagnose problems that arise due to entrenched systems of influence, privilege and bias in the decision-making channels of social collectives such as organizations.

As you point out leaders, from this perspective of reciprocity, can be usefully pictures as midwives, enablers and mediators of transformation rather than as heroic individuals who push through resistance and inertia to raise the social level to some new height. In this light, leadership can also be seen as the practice of mediating changes that are already present in people’s hearts and hands. Our deepest intimations and hopes are brought to light through a receptive silence as much as through forceful instruction, and perhaps even more so. The image of the transformative leader as someone who necessarily challenges, provokes, and didactically instructs is a very partial one. Of course, we need heroes and champions but those agentic images and these models have dominated for far too long. They still can be seen as the dominant image of leadership even in many “integrally-informed” theories.

Relational forms of the leader-follower are urgently needed in social organizations to complement the embedded forms of directive management that are so prevalent across the world. We all suffer as a result of these distorted forms of governance and the images and expectations that flow from them. The agency-communion lens has much to tell us here about leader-follower styles and the whole issue of masculine and feminine forms of the leader-follower lens. For one thing there has been a great confusion between reduced forms of the governance holarchy and the bipolar lens of agency-communion (which might also be called autonomy-relationality).

What has happened is that we have used a reductive version of the governance holarchy lens, namely that of top-down leadership (also called executive leadership, strategic leadership, senior management leadership and often associated with transformational leadership) and falsely associated it with the agency-communion lens (for reasons that we might discuss some other time). The result is that agency gets associated with the top levels of management and communion with the bottom levels. Hence, top-down leadership is erroneously associated with directive agency and bottom-up leadership is wrongly attached to relational communion. In fact, both agency and communion are inherent capacities of the leader and the follower.

Human systems being what they are, however, the distortions we use to interpret the world quickly reproduce those distortions in the actual relationships and structures that constitute social realities. As Marx and others have so forcefully tried to point out, false consciousness and distorted beliefs get reproduce in the very stuff that makes up our physical, emotional and social world. The amazing thing is that we can change those realities and emancipation from limited forms of governance is possible. When we consciously encounter the physical, emotional and spiritual impact of distortions like “excluded-middle logics” we can open up our imaginations and so enact new realities that permit healthier forms of leading and following.

Can I ask you Russ, how do you see the idea of leader as mediator contributing to a more integral understanding of leadership?

Russ: In order for me to answer your question, I think it is really important to generate some clarity about our use of terms. There is a lot of disagreement about the role and importance of definition in the leadership literature with Joseph Rost’s work one of the key elements, I suspect he would applaud what you have presented here.

As you know I have used the metaphor of the snapshot (leader leading) and movie (leadership) to help distinguish the scope and level of analysis of the leader/follower/systemic/contextual phenomenon of leadership. While I personally value the idea of defining terms, at this point I am more concerned with what the terms point to. So, let me offer something and request your help an establishing a useful foundation.

Leader is a term that points to an individual at a moment in time. This individual is taking initiative and seeking the support of others to achieve some end. The more significant in scope the achievement might be, the more significant a role the leader may play. It may be that we can even think about holarchies of leadership that include “hierarchies” of leader capacities and behaviors. So I would like to use the term leader to refer to an individual. The “moment of time” is that period or episode in the life of a system in which that individual is taking on a leader role.

Of course, if there is a leader there is a follower. The follower role is a support role in the sense that achievement is unlikely without the participation of the follower. That role, too, is occurring in an episode or moment in the life of a system.

Together, the two roles might be explored in terms of who is metaphorically standing up or sitting down, to the left or to the right, in the front or in the back, etc.—all as metaphors for position during the episode. This suggests that in the next snapshot positions will have changed to some degree, perhaps even radically with a reversal of roles.

I would offer leading as the term that describes the behaviors of the individual in a leader role at any point in time. I would offer following as the term that describes the behaviors of the individual in a follower role at any point in time. In order to understand the behavior of either in the moment in the system, it is also important to understand their intentions, beliefs, worldview, etc., and to understand the life conditions in which these behaviors take place, i.e., culture(s) and system(s). The plural would include contexts of diverse cultures or meta-cultures, diverse systems or meta-systems.

Leadership, then, points to the comprehension of the dynamics of leader, follower, culture and system over time in any effort to achieve some change, or as Rost would say, some significant change. What constitutes a significant change would depend on the level of analysis. One individual could take the role of leader in shifting the dynamics of a relationship. Another could take on the role of leader to remove the threat of an unwanted change. Still another could take on the role of leader in a technological innovation or in the course of nations. Thus, to comprehend leadership means to be able to not only include those variables captured by the notion of holons and holarchies, but the dynamics of the included middle over time.

In the case of analyzing a particular leader at a particular moment of time, an instant in time, all is frozen, unvarying. Of course, this is not the “facts” as “reality”, but it is what an analysis is intended to do. It is using a map, be it theory, model or what have you, to generate meaning about a particular episode or moment in time. As soon as time sequences are introduced other than as time limited maps, the included middle becomes very important.

The included middle constitutes mediators in the influence among quadrants and among levels of a holarchy. They contain much of what is being worked on in the name of development, be it economic development, consciousness development or anything in between. When we speak of development we are embracing time. We need to develop a “mapping” system for the factors that mediate. And all of this gets very, very complex. It challenges us to begin thinking in terms of nonlinear mapping.

My assumption is that simple cause and effect relationships among mediators are the exception, not the rule. Consequently, we are challenged to come up with a way of thinking about this. I suspect complexity and chaos theory and perhaps even string theory (which I confess I do not understand) may be suggesting of mapping approaches both to this complexity and to developmental strategies. Consider, as an example, strategies for leadership development.

Most leadership development programs are focused on such things as mental models, emotional intelligence, systems thinking, ethics, and various kinds of skill building. Some are about strategic thinking, financial analysis and other competencies. In a recent article, Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood (2007) provide several example of leadership development programs that are successful because they are aligned with core qualities of their companies which are, in turn aligned with the aspirations of customers and stockholders.

“These companies go beyond standard-issue leader-training doing something they themselves aren’t even necessarily aware of. Instead of merely strengthening the abilities of individual leaders, these companies focus on building a more general leadership capability. Specifically, they build what we call leadership brand….

Building a strong leadership brand requires that companies follow five principles. First, they have to do the basics of leadership—like setting strategy and grooming talent—well. Second, they must ensure that managers internalize external constituents’ high expectations of the firm. Third, they need to evaluate their leaders according to those external perspectives. Fourth, they must invest in broad-based leadership development that helps managers hone the skills needed to meet customer and investor expectations. And finally, they should track their success at building a leadership brand over the long term.

This is another example of analysis that fails to bring the wisdom of an integral perspective because the authors appear to have no way to organize their learning in a comprehensive way. It is, as you would say, reductionist, irrespective of how useful or accurate an analysis it may or may not be be. Still, it is an attempt to be more inclusive of domains in exploring what is important about leadership. But note the absence of followers. Note the emphasis on hierarchy implied in focusing on the most “talented.” Approaches that focus on skills, mental models and the like in relation to stakeholder expectations are vulnerable to the same challenges as those that do not. After all, we know that the market is fickle. Those things that are vital today are sometimes forgotten tomorrow. I have advocated for an approach to leadership development that prepares for people throughout organizations for unanticipated futures. I think integrally facilitated approaches to the use of scenarios are high potential ways to approach this challenge. Without going into detail here I will simply point out that this approach would prepare people for unanticipated futures and introduce into the leadership development process organizational interventions that prepare people involved for unanticipated future. At the same time individuals are able to examine their relationships with stakeholders, their own responses and the behaviors that they select.

In my earlier work on Integral Leadership I introduced the idea of four mediating bi-directional dynamics between pairs of quadrants. Today I see these as preliminary but they may be suggestive of how we might approach mediating factors in leadership. I think of them as processes. The first process, between UL and UR I called self-management. This includes all of the human development activities and processes that we have available to us from sensory awareness to emotional intelligence development to skill development to therapy, etc. It consists of feedback and adjustment in the relationship between UL and UR. It is personal.

The second process is in the relationship between UL and LL. I call this attunement because it is a continuous bi-directional process with feedback and adjustment between an individual’s worldview (and self-view) and her relationships with the cultures in her context. Both are dynamic. Both change. The relationship is mediated by many variables in a continually turning and retuning process.

The third process is engagement. This involves the relationship between UR and LR. It, too, includes the dynamic feedback processes between the individual’s behaviors and the behaviors of systems. The fourth process is development or systems development. Here the focus is on the development of the system, the significant changes and learning in the system, as they are impacted by individuals and it, in turn, impacts individuals through culture and systems. Similar approaches might be used in the relationships among the 1st and 3rd person cells of a holon and the 2nd person.

Now, none of this is about hierarchical development, necessarily. It could all be about horizontal development, but it could be a beginning to map vertical development. But this is where my thinking about mediation begins. I am more focused on mapping it than I am on the specifics. In my work I have treated the specifics as emergent. But I think there may be useful potential in having some approach like this and welcome your thoughts on this.

In any case, your suggestion about the name of Integral Leadership Review becomes unnecessary with the pointers I offered above, so I think we will keep it as it is for a while.

Mark: I wasn’t suggesting changing the name of your publication, merely proposing a reframing of the way we instinctively think of the term “leadership”, particularly as it appears in titles and framing contexts. It seems to me that leadership can more productively and accurately be thought of as standing for a type of ongoing activity that involves leadership, followership, collaboratorship. And I am proposing that the lens of governance holarchy is a way of doing that in theory building.

I like your dynamics of self-management, attunement, engagement, and systems development. These are crucial processes that mediate between core work roles and the social, economic and physical environments that surround us at work. And it’s interesting to see that these processes apply to any role, to any level of work because all work is to some degree self-managed, requires attunement to cultures and systems of meaning, demands engagement with physical and organizational structures and contains opportunity for skill development, improved performance and so on. Such aspects of work are not limited to leading but are also highly relevant to following.

When we look at the work roles of any person we see that leadership qualities and followership qualities are needed at all levels. If we apply the agency-communion lens to the work situation we find a close correspondence between agency and leadership, on the one hand, and communion and followership, on the other. Holons at all levels of governance can be seen as possessing agency and communion and as evincing leadership and followership capacities. The followership qualities of good listening skills, observational skills, capacity to empathise, providing feedback, attention to detail, problem solving and team work are just as important for leaders as they are for followers. And conversely the leadership qualities of decisiveness, focus, taking initiative, capacity to communicate, adaptability, and vision are just as relevant to the work of following as for the work of leading. Of course, each of these qualities will be expressed in different ways at different levels of governance but the point is that there is nothing particularly exclusive about the qualities of leadership or followership for any level. In the following (pun intended) figure we can see that each level of governance in an organization can be seen as possessing both leading and following aspects. Leading without following results in the agentic madness of the dictator. Following without leading is the communal blindness of the quiescent mob. The following figure tries to show the complementary nature of these lenses within a governance holarchy.

Figure 6.4 Governance Holarchy

Some examples of this might be useful to clarify this concept. In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq many millions of people from countries all over the world marched in peaceful public demonstrations to give voice to their opposition. Polling in all these countries also showed that the national populations across the globe were either in strong opposition or decidedly equivocal about plans for invasion. However, the leaders in government, in opposing political parties, in business and community groups did not listen to these “grass roots” voices. In my terms, these leaders did not apply the qualities of good followership to inform their decision-making (to say the least). The result of this form of excessively agentic leadership (which has completely overridden communal followership) has been disastrous for everyone involved. “Strong leadership”, must also include the capacity to listen and to take the lead from knowledgeable individuals and groups that occupy more fundamental levels (“lower”) of governance, e.g. members of the public. Weak leadership can also be seen in the inability to change policy, to adapt to changing circumstances and to continue on with inappropriate policies despite the evidence. These issues are also highly relevant to organizational leadership issues.

In his book “In praise of followers”, Robert E Kelly identifies four types of followers based on the crossing of the lenses of active-passive (agency-communion) and critical-uncritical. He ends up with the four categories of “Sheep” (communal uncritical) “Yes People” (agentic uncritical) “Alienated Followers” (agentic critical) and “effective followers” (communal critical). I actually think that all Kelley’s categories are ineffectual because none of them integrates leader-follower capacities according to their position on the governance holarchy.

To put this in simpler terms, all this suggests that organizations should run leadership training programmes for staff at the operational levels (front end) of the organisation as much as for executive levels (back end). Similarly, all leadership training at the executive level should include followership training – how/when to listen, give feedback, to observe and reflect, to let others lead, and to consult with colleagues.

The organizations that most appreciate these issues are the defence forces where followership is sometimes even regarded as more important than leadership. There’s an on-line paper called “Dynamic Followership: The Prerequisite for Effective Leadership” by a Lieutenant Colonel Sharon Latour from the US Air Force. This paper emphasizes the reciprocal nature of the leader-follower lens. The armed services are one of the most educated workforces in modern societies and there it is becoming rather passé to emphasise the reciprocity of leading and following. It’s perhaps indicative of where our social priorities lie that such a view should be common within the ranks of the military and yet rarely encountered within the civilian organizations.

What I am arguing here for is the idea that leadership is not just about leading, it is also about following. An integral approach to leadership sees followership as the co-creative complement to leadership in the same way that interiors are cocreateive to exteriors. The governance holarchy lens stresses this point that the follower-leader is the equivalent to the part-whole. Each level, each holon is a leader-follower in the same way that it is a part-whole. It’s just that follower-leaders exist at different levels of governance. When we associate upper levels of governance with leadership and lower levels of governance with followership we are not seeing the integral nature of decision-making and we are conforming to the distorted and reductive worldviews that limit our capacity to lead or to follow not matter what work we do.

Russ: I would add to your leader-follower the following: leader-follower-context. This represents one of the strengths of integral mapping, i.e., making sure that we minimize blind spots in our analyses. And this is certainly very much aligned with all of your work on integral mapping.

Second, the focus on skills is of vital importance at the leader/follower level. The works of so many in examining the skill, competencies and capacities of exemplar leaders (and followers) has an important role to play. The dilemma in most of these works (at least the ones I am familiar with) and a reason Chris Argyris wrote his book , Flawed Advice and the Management Trap, is that the results of these studies has been used to prescribe behaviors and beliefs of individuals who aspire to leadership…without regard to context.

I suppose I can agree with your listing of some essential skills for leaders and followers. Some of these skills are valuable in contexts not involving leader-follower dynamics. They are, in a sense, fundamental skills of human communication, problem solving and decision-making.

All of this leads me to a desire to return to the map that we agreed would be useful for our conversation:

Figure 6.5: The Quadratic Relationships of an Individual Leader with Other Individuals, Groups and Organisations

When we speak of skills and capabilities, we are in the “ul” and “ur” quadrants of each holon in this map. But whose skills and capabilities are we addressing so far? Leader/follower and even the “non-followers (he/she) are included. I am suggesting he/she is about non-followers. They may be partners, collaborators, etc., but not followers.

In this map when we talk about values and roles we are addressing culture and “system” in the sense that roles are sets of expectations about behavior. These represent the collective culture and system, if they are not those. Maybe I need to clarify this a bit. As I understand the values and roles, they are the representations of culture and systems held by those represented in the holon. So, using the designations of u (upper), m (middle) l (lower) and 1 (first column), 2 (second column) and 3 (third column) in the map we have ur (upper right), ul (upper left), ll (lower left) and lr (lower right) in each holon on the map. I apologize for making this so complicated, but I think we need a shorthand approach to talking about each part of the map. So it would look like this:

Figure 6.6: Proposed Key for the Quadratic Relationships of an Individual Leader with Other Individuals, Groups and Organisations

Let‘s see if this key is useful in talking about relationships. After all, I do believe the focus is still on the “space in between.”

The point I was making above is that skills, capabilities and capacities of the individual leader can be found in “ul” and “ur” in U/M/L1, inclusive. In any given leadership event or occurrence, as Wilber likes to say, there may be different mixes of skills required within each holon, even though all of the holons include “me”, the leader. Then, ul and ur in U/M/L2, inclusive, would be the skills, capabilities and capacities of the individual follower. Finally, ul and ur in U/M/L/3 would include the skills, capabilities and capacities of the “other”. By other, I mean non-follower/non-leader. This could be an observer, neutral or antagonist/collaborator/competitor.

This would mean that values and roles in U1-3 are about individuals, in M1-3 are about groups and in L1-3 are about organizations. Values, then mean different things at each level or, at least, we have two different terms for these. At the U1-3 level this would refer to the individual worldviews. Roles would be the set of expressed expectations others have of them. At the M1-3 level values refers to group norms, while roles refers to the expressed expectations of others about the functioning of the group. At the L1-3 level, values refers to culture and roles refers to the expressed expectations of society for the functioning of that organization.

Now, Mark, I am not sure that this is what you had in mind. I may be conflating the individual/collective thing again. But, from a mapping point of view, it provides us with the way to see that all of these variables in relation to each other. But it also suggests that the hyphens in the centers of each holon in Figure 6.2 between me and you and me and other, etc. are about the “space in between.” Therefore, at the micro level, self-management still seems to work in U1, the I-Me. Self-management is the relationship between my ideas and feelings, on the one hand, and my behaviors on the other. In U2, however, aren’t we really talking about the ideas and feelings and behaviors of the 2nd person? Of the follower?

Before I take this any further, I need your perspective. This analysis could lead to all of the cells, and then to thinking about the space in between not just within a holon but also between holons in this matrix. Are we on the same page here?

Mark: Yes, we still have a little way to go Russ before we are on the “same page”. But we are getting there. I might need to Skype with you on this. In any event, you’ve been so incredibly patient with trying to get a handle on my rather idiosyncratic approach to integral metatheorising. I hope it bears fruit for you. As you astutely point out, there is still some confusion about the individual-collective thing. Let’s have another go at making it clearer.

Integral mapping for me means choosing a set of relevant lenses and placing them in a metatheoretical framework that draws out the relationships between those lenses in a consistent and valid way. As I pointed out earlier, the map that we are using as our framework for leadership (as shown in Tables 6.2 and 6.3) uses four basic lenses:

Perspectives (first, second, third person),
Ecological holarchy (micro, meso, macro – a more valid form of the individual/micro-collective/macro lens),
Interior-Exterior, and
Agency-Communion (this is an explanatory dimension that many theorists have used and not simply a “drive” as Wilber uses it.)

In my PhD research I have found more than twenty such lenses that are commonly used to build up explanatory theoretical frameworks for describing, explaining and analysing organizational change. At this point we might also add the developmental holarchy lens while we are going through this (at a later point we might also include lenses such as the governance lens and the mediation lens to build on this framework). Here are descriptions of these lenses:

Conceptual lenses commonly used for understanding, explaining and researching organisational events such as leadership, change, etc.
Explanatory Lens	Lens Description
Perspectives lens	Focuses on the various forms of inquiry that can be taken in explaining organizational events and usually expressed as first, second and third person perspectives or subjective, relational and objective forms of inquiry respectively.
Ecological holarchy lens	Focuses on the “multilevel”, micro-meso-macro nature of organisational realities, reduced to individual-collective levels in AQAL.
Interior-Exterior lens	Explains organizational phenomena in terms of distinctions between the informal-formal, software-hardware, culture-structure, consciousness-behaviour, and people-technology.
Agency-Communion lens	Explains organizational events as the dynamic between autonomy and relationality (also expressed as task-relationship, unifocal-multifocal and masculine-feminine bipoles).
Developmental holarchy lens	Explains organizational realities as levels of development, transformation, or discontinuous change, for example in organization stages of transformation, stages of leadership development, or technological transformation.
Governance holarchy lens	Explains organizational realities as levels of decision-making and organizing power for example as in management structure, spheres of influence or leadership theory.
Social mediation lens	Explains organizational realities as a process of mediation, communication and discourse, for example it sees the “site and source” of organizing in the creation and exchange of “texts” or language-based identities.

Figure 6.7: Conceptual Lenses

As long as we have an accurate and valid understanding of the relationships between theses lenses, we can be very flexible in combining them to develop metatheoretical frameworks for explaining topics like leadership. Lets combine these lenses systematically starting with Agency-Communion and Interior-Exterior. Combining these two bipolar lenses gives a set of “quadrants” that can be used to metatheorise about social phenomena like leadership-followership. This metatheoretical framework is outlined in the following diagram. It needs to be remembered that these quadrants are not the same as Wilber’s “Four Quadrants”. They do, however, result in four domains that can be used to describe four fundamental types of leadership. (These metatheoretical frameworks can be put to several purposes including the development of typologies, the categorization of theories, the development of applied approaches to specific topics).

Figure 6.8: Agency-Communion Quadrant Labels

So lets take each quadrant and describe its domain. Interior agency represents leadership as a visionary and directive activity that takes decisive action born from a powerful interior vision, intention, and deliberate agency. It interiorally “sees” what is to be done and autonomously acts on that insight. It describes a leadership domain of directive consciousness that we might call “Agentic Vision”. Another approach to leadership emphasizes exterior agency, that is, leadership as a decisive behavioural activity that engages with individuals and groups through strong regulatory action, the modeling of desirable traits and, through powerful gestures, moves people and social structures towards specific objectives. This form of leadership comes within the leadership domain of directive behaviour and we might call it “Agentic Action”. A third variety of leadership approaches see leading as a process of insightful networking and tuning into socio-cultural trends and cutting-edge innovations. This is leadership that derives insight and vision, not through the power of its own intention but, through relational connection with others, i.e. through social influence, developed relationships, reputation and informal or “soft” power. This is the leadership domain of relational consciousness or “Communal Vision”. Finally, we have theories of leadership that emerge from an understanding that is based on social norms. Here the focus is on the social position of the leader as behaving in the valued social roles of, for example, president, governor, director, manager, chairperson, parent, etc. Here theories of leadership concentrate on the formal position, the public status, the communal standing and the social role of the leader. This is the leadership domain of relational behaviour or “Communal Action”. These four “quadrants” describe explanatory domains for various theories of leadership based on the use of the two lenses of interior-exterior and agency-communion.

As you can see the result of crossing these lenses is very different from Wilber’s AQAL framework. For one thing, the “quadrants” in this map do not represent the same aspects of holons as Wilber’s quadrants. And none of this has anything necessarily to do with individual or collectives (I will introduce a more complete form of that lens later). All of these types of leadership can be seen in individuals and in collectives. To understand this form of integral metatheorising requires a little frame-breaking and we need to break out of the AQAL straightjacket to get the hang of how this flexible form of metatheorising operates. This may be confusing or even non-sensical to some, but that’s the price we pay when we work with a more adaptable method of metaframework. The advantages of this form of integral metatheorising is the inclusion of a great range of lenses, the creation of more flexible and targeted metatheories, a keener appreciation for the relationships between lenses and a more sophisticated view of the need for internal consistency in how they are described and combined to form metaframeworks. The disadvantages are the apparent arbitrariness in including and combing lenses, the greater difficulty in interpreting metaframeworks and communicating their capacities and implications, and the constant need for reframing in how we approach the task of metatheorising.

“Agentic Vision” theories see leadership as a directive process that guides the organization towards top-down visionary goals that have to do with mission, values, purpose, meaning-making and cultural renewal.
“Agentic Action” theories see leadership as a directive process that guides the organization towards top-down behavioural goals that have to do with organizational tasks, operations, activities, and technological systems
“Communal Vision” or theories see leadership as consultative process that allows the bottom-up emergence of new visions and values that come from participative processes.
“Communal Action” theories see leadership as consultative process that allows the bottom-up emergence of new tasks, business systems,innovative products and services and operations.

Theorists can often use reductive forms of these lenses and emphasis only one or two of these domains. Wilber calls such reductionisms quadrant absolutism because it inevitably results in one domain being regarded as the causal source or dominant explanatory mode for what is understood as “leadership”, to take our present example.

Now we can introduce the lens of developmental holarchy. This is the very important mode of explanation that relies of stages of transformation in a social entity’s core structures, regulatory systems, worldviews and cultural identities. The experiences and behaviours of individuals, groups and larger collectives can all be explained in terms of the development of more complex and inclusive orders of being/doing. A very large number of stage-based models of development have been proposed in such areas as human development, group development, organizational transformation, and economic and international development. While many models include a large number of stages or levels, Wilber has shown that we need to include at least three levels to make a rudimentary start in analyzing developmental stages. If we use only two levels we run the risk of falling into pre/trans type category errors. So, we need to include some notion of at least pre-normative, normative and post-normative stages. The following diagram introduces the developmental holarchy into our map of agency–communion and interior-exterior quadrants.

Figure 6.9: Stage-Based Transformation

There will be pre-, normative and post- forms of Agentic Vision, Agentic Action, Communal Vision and Communal Action forms/theories of leadership. For example, Agentic Vision leadership, which directs an organization towards some interior visionary goal can potentially appear in pre-, normative and post- forms. In its pre-normative form it appears as the visionary dictator such as the Nazi and Stalinist dictators. In its normative form it appears as the visionary conventional leader such as Gough Whitlam in Australia or Franklin D Roosevelt in the US. In its post- normative form it appears as the visionary activist such as Martin Luther King Jr. The following table indexes these forms of leadership according to all categories of the lens matrix that we have so far developed. This is an example of what Wilber calls “integral indexing”.

	Interior Visionary Leaders		Exterior Activist Leaders
	Agency Goal-Vision	Communion Network-Vision	Agency Goal-Actio	Communion Network-Action
Post- normative	Visionary prophet focused on transformational goal, e.g. M. L. King Jr.,	Visionary prophet focused on communal transformation e.g. Aung San Suu Kyi	Activist prophet focused on transformational goal, e.g. Moses, Thomas Clarkson	Activist prophet focused on communal transformation, e.g. Ghandi
Normative	Visionary leader focused on specific goals, e.g. Gough Whitlam,	Visionary leader focused on communal reform, e.g. Bob Hawk, F. D. Roosevelt	Activist leader focused on specific goals, e.g. Al Gore, Margaret Thatcher	Activist leader focused on communal reform, e.g. Bob Brown, Ralph Nader
Pre-normative	Visionary fascist dictator focused on specific (pre-normative) goals, e.g. Adolf Hitler,	Visionary communist dictator focused on communal power, e.g. Lenin, Mao	Activist fascist dictator focused on specific (pre-normative) goals, e.g. Franco, Pinochet	Activist communist dictator focused on communal power, e.g. Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung

Figure 6.10: Integral Indexing

Next, let’s bring in the perspectives lens. Wilber and Torbert, among other theorists, place great emphasis on this lens. The perspectives lens is what I call a standpoint lens (one that is sensitive to different viewpoints) and it takes the form of three basic pathways of inquiry – the first, second and third person approaches to knowledge. These roughly conform to subjective, interactive/relational and objective forms of inquiry respectively. As with all our lenses, the relationship between our first two bipolar lenses and our standpoint lens is assumed to be orthogonal in that they each provide a unique explanatory orientation to the topic of interest. Consequently, each aspect of a lens can be crossed with each aspect of every other lens (they are conceptually independent). Hence, we can have agentic and relational AND interior and exterior AND pre-, conventional and post- forms of each of the first, second and third persons. This gives the following matrix:

Figure 6.11: Perspectives

The first person inquiry into leadership discloses intrapersonal information about “I/Me/My” experiences of Agentic Vision (AV), Agentic Action (AA), Communal Vision (CV), Communal Action (CA) at the pre-, normative and post levels of development. This comes out in such things as autobiography, journaling, personal reflection and so on. The second person inquiry into leadership discloses interpersonal information about “You/Your” experiences (of AV, AA, CV, and CA at the pre-, normative and post levels of development). This is the realm of dialogue, coaching and conversation. The third person inquiry into leadership discloses intrapersonal information about “His/Her” experiences (of AV, AA, CV, and CA at the pre-, normative and post levels of development). Here, the world of objective knowledge is disclosed through comparing and analysing multiple experiences of leadership. This is the realm of statistical (variance) approaches to studying leadership. All of these approaches can come under the rubric of scientific approaches to leadership as long as they are rigorous in their methods and logical (in the broad sense) in their inferences.

Now, we can add the ecological holarchy lens of multiple levels of human ecologies, i.e. as micro, meso and macro levels. Because this is a holarchical lens we need a minimum of three levels to begin to capture the various facets of this lens. If we use two levels, as does the AQAL framework (individual-collective), we run a considerable risk of confusing holarchies with bipolar lenses and developing reductive and conflated models that do not do justice to the open-ended nature of holarchical lenses. So let’s use the levels of micro (individual), meso (team/group) and macro (whole organization). Combining this lens with our other three lenses results in this expanded matrix.

Figure 6.12 Holonic Mapping of Lens

Now this is actually the matrix we agreed to be our basic framework for discussing leadership theory (Figure 6.3) (with the addition of the developmental holarchy lens). Can I suggest that we use a different labeling scheme so that we can overcome confusion between Wilber’s use of the terms “quadrant” and “upper” and “lower” etc. Instead of U1, U2, U3 we can use Micro 1, Micro 2 and Micro 3. Instead of M1-3 we can use Meso 1, Meso 2 and Meso 3. Instead of L1-3 we can use Macro 1, Macro 2 and Macro 3. Notice that ALL of the “quadrants” in Micro 1-3 refer to individuals, ALL the “quadrants” in Meso1-3 refer to groups/teams (not individuals), and ALL the “quadrants” in Macro 1-3 refer to the whole organization. For example, the upper quadrants in the Meso 1-3 row represent the agency of teams NOT the agency of its individuals members and the upper quadrants of the Macro 1-3 row represent the agency of the whole organization NOT the agency of its individual members. Similarly, the lower quadrants of Meso 1-3 represent the relational/networking identities and capacities of the team (its communion) NOT some other group of teams. And the lower quadrants of Macro 1-3 represent the relational/networking identities and capacities of the whole organization (its communion) NOT its inter-organisational environment.

Finally, I would like to introduce the lens of social mediation. I understand that this might be pushing our framework to the point of conceptual overload, Russ, but I find that social mediation is such a crucial explanatory lens that it must be included in any explanation of transformation (in the same way that the Developmental Holarchy lens needs also be included in any discussion of transformation and development). The lens of social mediation forces us to look at what happens in the “space between” holons, to look at their relational dynamics and to include explanations that go beyond the reductions of developmentalism (which sees all transformation as a function of the unfolding of individual structures of consciousness and behaviour). It interesting to note that the writers you have mentioned in this part of our conversation, Susie Gablik and Basarab Nicolescu, both recognize the importance of mediation in their approach to transformation.

Let’s represent social mediation very simply through the use of a mediating holon between each of the cells in our framework. The mediating holon is represented as W for “Word” or “language” or “text” with these being among the most archetypal of all forms of social mediation. However, this mediating holon can also represent another organization, an individual, an image, an artifact-in-use, a gesture or any holon that mediates some social phenomenon from one holon to another. In effect, the mediating holon W represents ‘the space between”, the space out of which relationship between holons arises, the space in which they encounter each other. The following diagram is meant to show mediating holons as existing between any possible combination of holons.

For example we might represent a conversation between one person and another as Micro 3–W–Micro 3. A communication between my organization and “me” can be represented as Micro 1-W-Macro 1. A competition between my football team and your football team could be represented as Meso1-W-Meso 2. These shorthand forms are not really important. The thing to remember is that social mediation can be represented in our theorizing as much as developmental levels can. There are, for example communication-based theories of leadership that focus on the microlevel of communication between leader and their individual staff. There are other theories that look more broadly at the communication of the transformational vision at the macro and meso levels. This integral “map” finds a very precise spot for these and many, many other leadership approaches.

Figure 6.13: Social Mediation Lens

So what do we have after all this: An integral metatheoretical framework made up from the explanatory lenses of interior-exterior, agency-communion, developmental holarchy, ecological holarchy, perspectives and social mediation. Like all metatheoretical frameworks it can be used to:

i) index and review the ontological, epistemological and methodological bases of other theories and methods,
ii) critically evaluate the ontological, epistemological and methodological bases of other theories and methods
iii) develop new middle-range theories
iv) propose new metatheoretical propositions (“metaconjectures” as Lewis and Keleman call them)

This framework can be use to map out many perspectival orientations towards such things as leadership. For example, we could take on a first person leadership perspective and look at all relationships between Micro 1 (i.e. “I/Me”) and every other cell in this matrix. The same can be done for Meso 3 (an objective assessment of the relationships between a “team” and other individual, teams and whole organization) or Macro 2 (a consultant’s assessment of the relationships between the “Organisation” and other individual, teams and organizations) and so on.

To make things a little more concrete, one of the most important uses of these sorts of frameworks is in the evaluation of other theories or applied approaches to topic such as leadership. Paul Colomy calls this Metatheorising for Adjudication. This is where blind spots and weaknesses in theories and their assumptions can be identified. This integral indexing can be used not only to categorize theories but also to analyse the lenses that they use (or partially use) and those that they leave out (or partially leave out). So we could look at all theories of leadership that objectively investigate the relationship between a middle manager and a project team, that is, between Micro 3 and Meso 3. We can pull the holons out of those cells and look at them in detail.

Figure 6.14: Relationship

We can now look at all the mediating interactions (communications, conversations, texts, symbols, images, “go-betweens”) between the line manager and the project team in terms of their developmental impact (transformational and translational), their agentic and communal relations, and their social reflexivity (reciprocated interactions over time). At this point we might also introduce the governance holarchy lens and investigate the impact of decision-making, top-down and bottom-up management and influence. Such analyses can be contextualized at any point in great detail.

There are other more dynamic ways of presenting these “frameworks”. For example, in Part-3 of our dialogue Figure 6 shows holons in a dynamic perspectival relationship. This is also an excellent way of combining multiple lenses. Once again, this shows the flexibility of this approach to integral metatheory rising. We can emphasise processes or structures or one explanatory lens over another or different lenses in different combinations according to our particular analytical objectives.

Russ: So we need multiple maps. And there is no one holonic map that includes all of the variables or all of the conceptual lenses in one, although in Figure 6.9 you cover a lot of territory. If this is the case, I feel a sense of loss with the realization that what we need is not a map, but an atlas! Not that there isn’t considerable elegance in what you are proposing. The potential for the use of these as analytic tools seems extraordinary. Yet the complexity is also an extraordinary challenge to leadership developers and educators and those who practice leading. It may be that the map (or atlas) that is being involved will be useful only to staff analysts and to “second tier” leaders and change agents. Now that’s not bad; it is a step forward. But it seems to me that the power of AQAL is in (and I am sure I will stir some laughs with this one) relative simplicity and “grok-ability.” That makes it useful, almost immediately practical, since it has been demonstrated that lines of development, quadrants and stages of development have been well received in multiple cultures.

Let me clarify one thing at this point and then pick up on more of what you have presented in our next installment. The clarity of your presentation of social mediation makes it very clear to me. The fact that such mediation can be provided by entities such as individuals or organizations, as well as by symbols and technology suggests a taxonomy of social mediators. At the very least it calls our attention to the phenomenon of social mediation when seeking to understand the completeness of an analysis or model of leadership.

Isn’t there another type of mediation within cells at the Micro level and, by implication, at Meso and Macro, as well?

As I understand Wilber, if we were to take Micro 1 (I/Me) as an example, all four quadrants arise at the same time when any occasion is focused on. This is a static approach. And, as I have suggested earlier in our conversation, if we introduce time as a variable there are horizontal and vertical relationship dynamics that occur. These are reciprocal dynamics between each pair of quadrants and, ultimately in the non-linear, organic, self-organizing relationships among quadrants over time.

As an individual leader, I may experience an insight about how I understand culture that may trigger a shift in my worldview that, in turn, leads me to make different behavioral choices in the exchanges that I perceive with the systems I relate to. Now this may be harkening back to AQAL, but I think it applies in the holonic framework, as well.

And there are equivalent mediators operating in this dynamic. In Micro 1 these would be essentially meaning making triggers, such as an intuitive identification of patterns, a sensory experience, an emotional response or an analytic “conclusion.” Each of these can be triggered by any one of them. And if you are sensing a bit of Carl Jung creeping in here, well you are very observant.

The same would apply to all of the Micro levels. At the Meso and the Macro levels this get a little muddy for me at this point. We are in the realms of sociology and systems theory and exploring these dynamics at the “collective” level that they represent. Methodological pluralism helps us here, too. We can observe group of large system behavior. We can evaluate this in terms of Michael Commons’ level of complexity measurement approach. We can look at artifacts of culture and deduce memetic levels and so on.

And note the choice of words above: “dynamics.” Not only are media and artifacts mediators, but aren’t there processes, as well. For example, for the individual, internal processes of meaning making mediate the translation of behavioral experience into more sophisticated or complex capabilities.

Am I on track? If so, then we need to lay out mediation a bit more completely. Then, I think we can also talk about the importance of multiple methodologies for 1st, 2nd and 3rd party meaning making in relationship to leadership phenomena. Then…well there is so much just in the way you have presented the approach above.

Mark: You’ve got this absolutely spot on Russ. We need integral surveyors and cartographers who make their own maps and who don’t just rely on Wilber’s AQAL map. As Wilber has said AQAL is just one form of many possible IMPs and what I am saying is that we need to get handy in moving between different compasses, scales, dimensions and other “mapping tools” and to deploy them in different territories. My vision of Integral metatheory is that it be a collective process of engaged scholarship that accumulates many different maps. We all have different expertise and familiarity with various lenses and territories and we can all contribute to this truly integral “atlas”.

As for the analysis of mediation and mediation holons, well, just like any holon it can be analysed according to any combination of lenses and as you suggest we can thereby build up a “taxonomy of social mediators”. Before that however, a key issue when analyzing mediating holons is to be very clear about where the holonic boundary is drawn especially when those mediating holons are artifacts like texts, computers or technological systems. It’s very important in these cases to see the mediating holon as an “artifact-in-use” and not simply as a particular arrangement of physical materials. Let’s take, for example, our artifact to be a blind person’s white cane. If we draw our holon boundary only around the cane then we see it simply a piece of plastic or wood that has almost negligible interiority, developmental potential, agency or inter-subjective capacity. If we draw our boundary around the cane AND the blind person then the cane becomes an actual extension of that person’s consciousness and embodied identity, in fact, it plays a part in changing that persons consciousness, behaviour, autonomy and communion. This artifact-in-use approach to holonic boundary drawing is very familiar to activity theorists who see tools and artifacts as mediating consciousness and behaviour. And I think this is what you are getting at when you emphasise the “dynamic processes” involved in mediation. Our white cane is better seen as a dynamic process that reflexively contributes to a person’s being/doing than as simply a inert product of some sentient holon! The same goes for computers, cars, newspapers, the Internet, and any technological system that mediate between individual holons and/or collective holons.

Wilber (and Kofman) make the mistake of defining artifacts in isolation from their “host holons” and considering them simply as products of individual and social holons that have no interiority or agency or inherent capacity to change consciousness. From of A Vygotskian point of view this is a grave error. Vygotsky said that “the central fact” in his developmental psychology was “the fact of mediation” and since his insights into how consciousness develops the CHAT theorists have focused more and more on the role of artifacts, as they exist “in-use”, in how humans development.

You refer to Wilber’s model as a static model. I don’t think this is true at all. His emphasis on the four quadrants of “an occasion” or “moment of experience”, means that he’s taking a temporal perspective on development, one that emphasizes the role of time and the moment by moment inclusion of people’s experience. Each occasion includes and integrates each prior occasion. Wilber’s model is more accurately seen as a dynamic model of temporal enfoldment, where a prior instant enfolds, embraces and integrates all successive instants. This is a temporally dynamic model. However, because it struggles to consider the relationship between holons in space, it ends up becoming spatially static and extremely limited in its capacity to show ecological relationships. I see two key reasons for this crucial limitation. First, the AQAL model has reduced the ecological holarchy of multilevel reality (e.g. micro, meso, macro) into a binary dimension of individual-collective (or micro-macro). This binary reductionism has trapped the AQAL framework into applying the individual-collective dimension only at the intra-holonic level so that can never be applied at the inter-holonic level (for more on this see John Matthews’ work on holonic organizational architectures—referenced in an earlier conversation). In effect, by reducing a multilevel holarchy to a binary holarchy, Wilber has performed something equivalent to the pre-trans fallacy and it might be called a micro-macro fallacy. One outcome of this reductionistic use of the ecological holarchy lens is that we never see holons in spatial relationship in Wilber’s work. The second reason for the spatially static nature of AQAL is that it does not employ the mediation lens in its analysis of change. So I would say that AQAL is temporally dynamic but ecologically static.

Mentioning Carl Jung here is very apt. Jung, after all, is the pre-eminent theorist on the transformative power of collective (un)consciousness, and the artifacts that consciousness communicates through myths, symbols and rituals. He saw these aspects of collective consciousness as mediating transformation in personal and societal consciousness and behaviour. So I would see the work of Jung as extremely relevant to these discussions. For example, Jung’s work shows us the agentic power of collective consciousness in shaping and motivating individual and group identities and behaviours. His work (and that of others like Campbell and Steiner) puts a spotlight on the mediating power of stories that tap into and resonate with these deep cultural identities. Many leaders have a capacity to almost instinctively raise up, mobilize and in some cases manipulate these identities through their words and actions. They can move people and groups because we all possess and share in these collective identity structures. Human consciousness is as much a distributed quality as it is a personal one and collective consciousness in its own right has a great agentic power that we should not underestimate.

One of the unfortunate implications of the ecologically static nature of AQAL is that it cannot adequately represent the reality of collective consciousness nor can it represent the autonomous agency of that collective (un)consciousness. AQAL reduces intersubjectivity to a governing nexus that is the aggregate of individual consciousness. It simply does not recognise collective consciousness as something more than the sum of individual consciousness (and their artefacts). A more inclusive assessment of how theorists have viewed consciousness sees all social holons as possessing collective (un)consciousness which can be expressed through agentic (directive, goal-seeking, self-focus) means as much as through communal (networking, relational, other-focus) means. This is one reason why AQAL-informed strategies for change focus so heavily on the transformation of personal consciousness and almost completely ignore or even belittle social strategies that propose government regulation, legislative action, or public policy initiatives that are aimed directly at changing collective agency and social consciousness (i.e. they do not assume that individual change comes before collective change). But I guess that is another story.

Russ: How very interesting you should turn to the collective and archetypal aspects of Jung’s work. I may have read the archetypal into it, but I think it is appropriate, anyway. I do not want to take us too far away from the conversation we have been having about holons and mediating agents, but the interview in this issue of Integral Leadership Review is with Carl S. Pearson, author of Six Archetypes to Change Your Lifeand Awakening the Heroes Within. Part of what we discussed is the nature of archetypes and I would like to add a comment in light of your discussion of consciousness.

Archetypes are present for individuals as well as collectives. The Hero is an archetype for individuals as well as societies or organizations. We are looking for heroes to lead us to fulfill our promise. We seek to be heroes and feel like failures when we are not. In addition, there are relationships among archetypes, as Pearson’s work discusses. So, the intra-psychic and the collective-psychic are very dynamic and play off each other. And here is where myths, symbols and rituals—along with lies and other less attractive phenomena—have their role to play.

As for your caution and example of the cane, this seems so very important, not just in the case of mediators, but in the relationships among cells. They can be separated for analytic purposes, but ultimately our analysis of the mapping tools as well as their applications to fields like leadership are about their co-existence, including the mediators. For many of us, this is a radical shift in thinking. Personally, I was trained as a graduate student to take things apart and analyse them. Then I was fortunate to have people like Hampden-Turner and others come into my intellectual life and help me see that comprehending life and events in this world is not only about taking things apart and seeing the elements, but mentally putting them back together in order to see the whole and is parts in dynamic process over time. A challenge is to learn to communicate this to others in a way that they can see it, too. And this is where the mapping can be helpful.

As for Wilber’s model being static, I was referring to the maps because they are still about taking things apart as quadrants, lines, stages, states and types. Yes, there are places to put these in the maps, but the relationships among them are not demonstrated. Wilber completely understands this, as far as I can tell. In fact, it is a central premise of his work that all of these are in dynamic relationship. I wonder how you would describe Wilber’s approach to talking about those relationships.

Mark: As you say, Wilber is aware of the difficulties in communicating and symbolising both structure and process in the explication of his AQAL framework. For example, he has argued many times that development through the stages is a dynamic and idiosyncratic process, and yet this point still gets missed in critiques of his work (see Meyerhoff’s “Social evolution” for example). The problem I feel is not so much that Wilber’s work is analytical (in “taking things apart” as you say) or that it goes into such detail on the various components of the AQAL framework. This type of detailed description of the structural elements of the model is essential business in any theory-building endeavour.

I also think that Wilber pays as much attention to putting things together as he does to taking things apart. There is a balance in the analytical and holistic phases of his work that I rarely see in other metatheorists. Having said that I do agree with you that there is a problem with the “static” nature of AQAL. For me however, AQAL’s emphasis on structure comes out of its instinctive combination of only certain lenses (which have a strong structural emphasis, e.g. developmental stages) and its consequential inability to model interaction via processes such as interpersonal and interholonic dynamics (as seen, for example, its neglect of social mediation). Taking the topic of leadership as an example, this is why there is no discussion on participative or bottom-up leadership in Wilber’s writings. Participative leadership is by its very nature interactive and interpersonal. Strategic or executive leadership is, in contrast, concerned with the structural position of CEOs and senior management and almost all discussion of leadership in Wilber’s work focuses on the developmental stages of these senior levels of management. Consequently, an AQAL-informed approach to leadership almost inevitably focuses on a top-down approach to leadership, one that is aligned with the various levels of organizational structure. Hence, we get an emphasis on structure over process—no interpersonal process, no peer-to-peer, no social mediation, just discussions of structural altitude.

References

Agryris, C. (2000). Flawed Advice and the Management Trap. New York: Oxford University Press.

Collinson, D., 2006, “Rethinking Followership: A Post-Structuralist Analysis of Follower Identities”, The Leadership Quarterly, 17, 2, 179-189.

Gasaway, R. B., 2006, “The Leader-Follower Relationship”, Fire Engineering, 159, 7, 12-16.

Mathews, J., 1996, “Holonic Organisational Architectures”, Human Systems Management, 15, 1, 27.

Meyerhoff, J. 2005. :Bald ambition: A Critique of Ken Wilber’s Theory of Everything,” http://www.integralworld.net/ accessed August 23, 2007.

Ulrich, D. and Smallwood N. “Building a Leadership Brand,” Harvard Business Review, Volume 85, Number 7/8, pp/ 92-100.

Volckmann, R. (2007). “Transdisciplinarity: Basarab Nicolescu Talks with Russ Volckmann, “ Integral Review, Issue 4, pp. 71-90.

http://integralreview.org/current_issue/documents/Volckmann,NicolescuInterviewonTransdisciplinarity4,2007.pdf. accessed June 14, 2007.

Integral Theory into Integral Action: Part 6
Mark Edwards and Russ Volckmann