High levels of adult development are invariably linked to spiritual intelligence, and therefore a mature leader is one who leads from the inside out, or, as the author puts it, “Who we are is how we lead.”

In a complex world filled with seemingly insurmountable challenges, who is best prepared to lead? This piece contends that it is the leader at the highest stages of adult development who is best prepared to cope effectively with the opportunities and perils of contemporary life conditions at a local and global scale.

These life conditions demand a more complex and a more elegantly simple form of leadership. Spiritual intelligence, or what the author defines as the ability to behave with compassion and wisdom while maintaining inner and outer peace (equanimity) regardless of the circumstances, is integral to such leadership. The critical relationship of wisdom and compassion as pertains to leadership is discussed, and the author presents and examines specific dimensions of spiritual intelligence as viewed though the four quadrants and multiple levels of development. Additionally, the relationship of adult ego development to spiritual development is examined, and the critical distinctions between the functional self and the Higher Self are elaborated. The author presents the latest research on multiple lines of development, identifies three discrete ways in which spiritually intelligent leaders move people, and provides a phenomenology of the uppermost stages of leadership development as reflected in William Torbert’s Ironist action logic.

This piece is informed primarily by perspectives from the UL quadrant. It assumes familiarity with the integral model, constructivist-developmental theory, and Torbert’s Action Logics, and is therefore most suitable for an advanced audience. Topic areas include the AQAL Leadership Model, and The “I” of Leadership.

Scenario planning is a practice used by many sectors of society around the globe to develop forward-looking views to assist in planning and strategy. Chris Stewart's Integral Scenario Development helps to broaden and deepen future views and helps to expand strategic conversation to include more of the objective and subjective realities at as many systemic levels as possible or practical. The author cites Wilber’s “principles of practice” (POP) that guides application of AQAL:

Non-exclusion: All relevant perspectives are considered.
Unfoldment: Everything should be considered from an evolutionary perspective.
Enactment: All that is perceived is done so through socio-cultural lens.
Uncomfort: All that is suggested/communicated is done is a way that minimizes distortion, conflict or “uncomfort” in a way that recognizes the limitations of our mental models.

These POP help in the creation of an Integral Meta-paradigm that directly contributes to the goal of broader and deeper future views.

Susan Cannon and Yene Assegid’s article highlights the transformative power of integral practices and theory when applied to complex, real world problems. Yene, Director of the Ethiopian NGO everyONE, was inspired by an integrally-informed change program and has since aligned her life purpose with reversing Africa’s downward spiral.

The authors rightly place their faith with emerging leaders who possess a Pan-African (vs. ethnocentric) perspective who realistically embrace the adaptive challenges of the entire continent. everyONE’s mission is to nurture ethical and informed leaders and connect them to networks of people and resources that can be adapted to the many unique cultural economic, natural, social and political conditions of the region. By adopting an integral approach that facilitates individual and well as collective evolution, everyONE is at the leading edge of values, attitudes, capability, economic, infrastructure and cultural development.

Conflict is born from scarcity, says negotiaton theory. But the real scarcity is less often physical and more often emotional. When the objective is defeating each other rather than winning together, conflict persists. In this paper, Fred Kofman discusses how the real limited resource is self-esteem, and how those with a narcissistic (self-centric) orientation to negotiation suffer not from an over abundance of self-esteem but a deficit of it. In closing, Fred shows how conflict can be negotiated within a new frame where there are no winners or losers but mutually respectful collaborators.

This piece is informed primarily by perspectives from the UL and LL quadrants. It requires no previous knowledge of integral theory and is therefore suitable – and recommended – for any audience. Topic areas include The “I” of Leadership, The “We” of Leadership, States and Leadership, and The Leader’s Shadow.

It’s impossible to choose whether or not to have conflicts, we can only choose how we respond to them. In this paper, Fred Kofman explores the fertile ground of practicing with conflict. Beginning with five typical responses to conflict, the author takes the reader beyond denial, avoidance, giving up, overwhelm and compromise, and into the realm of creative and collaborative conflict resolution.

The three factors, or triple conjunction, present in any conflict are detailed, including factual disagreement, scarcity or limitation and process disagreement, as well as the means to identify them. The author goes on to differentiate between personal and operational conflict and reveal why some conflicts are pure illusion.

The steps of a process for resolving personal conflict and operational conflict are presented in detail with correspondent graphic illustrations, and a brief methodology is presented for studying underlying conflicts of interest. In closing, six specific questions are presented for evaluating and learning from conflict.

This piece is informed primarily by perspectives from the UL and LL quadrants. It requires no previous knowledge of integral theory and is therefore suitable – and recommended – for any audience. Topic areas include The “I” of Leadership, The “We” of Leadership, States and Leadership, and The Leader’s Shadow.

Integral Theory as applied to leadership is finding an ever wider audience. From the inclusion of integrally informed leadership models appearing in peer-reviewed academic articles to the emergence of organizations and training programs that incorporate an AQAL framework, great strides have been made toward re-envisioning the nature, meaning, purpose, and potential of leadership.

However, there is much work to be done. There is yet a paucity of empirical research and case studies illustrating the outcomes of integral approaches to leadership, and further investigation is required toward understanding how a potentially trans-disciplinary study, such as that of leadership, can be understood, not just through integral modeling, but through integral mapping of concepts, models and theories. The author offers reflections on the future of integral leadership, including caveats relating to theoretical issues, the intimate relationship between integral theory and adult develop, and the collective efforts necessary for integral leadership’s continuing growth and practical impact.

This piece is informed primarily by perspectives from the UL quadrant. It assumes familiarity with the integral model and its general application to leadership, and is therefore most suitable for an intermediate audience. Topic areas include the AQAL Leadership Model.

The current technological, social, political, economic and ecological trends that are wreaking havoc on the planet require rare and even emergent approaches to leadership that co-create the conditions for an evolutionary path that supports engagement with a positive future.

This paper, presented to the World Future Society, links future studies, integral theory, scenarios, developmentalism and leadership development to provide a framework for going beyond prediction to preparation, and for realizing the imperative of genuine fraternity.

Demonstrating the evolution from micro to meso to macro understandings of leadership, the author draws a distinction between a leader as an individual who performs a role that directs or allows collective action, and leadership as an emergent phenomenon that can be properly understood as integral. Laying out the implications for the development of leaders and leadership in systems, six steps are given in designing and engaging developmental scenarios, and the relationship of holons, lines of development, meaning-making, Torbert’s Action Logics model, and other considerations relevant to such scenario work are presented in great detail with corresponding graphic illustrations.

It should be noted that Volckmann points out, but does not discuss differences in approaches of Wilber and others on holons. Additionally, one would have to consider that Volckmann takes fairly strong liberties in combining Torbert’s Action Logic model for organizations and Beck & Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics models. This article should be read with interest, an open mind, and a willingness to apply critical thinking to what is proposed. Not all of the authors cited are equal in the rigor of empirical research and theory development, and yet those limitations are not address in the material.

This piece is informed fairly equally by perspectives from all four quadrants. It assumes familiarity with the integral model, Spiral Dynamics, and with constructivist-development theory and these model’s leading researcher-practitioners, and is therefore most suitable for an advanced audience.

Fred Kofman sees learning as the most important capacity for success in the post-industrial economy. While becoming a “learning organization” is currently popular, we must work harder to reframe learning to mean something more than just gaining or holding knowledge. Fred understands learning as gaining information, but also as increasing capacity to obtain desired results. He believes the second part of the definition is often overlooked, yet most important in that it provides for practical outcomes and encourages continual improvement and innovation. In the article, Fred also explains the constructivist nature of humans and how our definitions of truth as not “real” per se, but a social construction (for the most part). With this premise in mind, Fred suggests that we must move away from our obsessive search for “accurate” representations of reality and instead use effective actions (which he defines quite specifically) as the ultimate criteria with which to measure learning.

In this article, Carolyn Taylor suggests that culture change, done right, can bring substantial benefit to organizations; done wrong, it is a waste of time. To be successful, organizations need to move from seeing change as just a logical processes to one that embraces the full complexity of change, which is made easier by adopting an integral approach. Carolyn introduces five dimenions:

- Achievement
- One-Team(ness)
- Innovation
- People First
- Customer-Centric

and suggests that by assessing all five, organizations can discover how the presence or absence of each impacts current performance. The article goes on to suggest that assessing these dimensions should involve all levels of the organization and that doing so will ultimately raise one or two priorities as related to the business strategy. Finally, she suggests that change is further enhanced by adopting three key “meta-behaviors” – integrity, responsibility and honesty – which can support virtually any strategy.

Fred Kofman begins by prophetically making the point that a leader is a person in charge of creating and maintaining a field of intellectual, emotional and existential forces. His definition of leadership extends beyond the typical heroic model to one that respects the complexity of human systems and collective learning. Fred sees leaders as definers of reality, an imaginative/creative force, a constant cultural architect as well as definer of structures, strategies, processes and procedures. As his final point, Fred makes the case that given our highly complex, fluid business environment, each person in an organization needs to step up, ditch paternalism and its paralyzing tendencies, and becomes the leaders we so sorely need.

Michael McElhenie relates the application of integral theory and leadership development in relationship of building responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa, Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados and a host of other countries. The Leadership for Results approach focuses on five cornerstones of leadership and community development: 1. Emotional Intelligence, 2. Individual Change Model, 3. Integral Inquiry, 4. Individual Development in the Context of Focused Effort, and 5. Deveop Local Capacity for Leading Individual and Collective Development. Clearly Action Learning was a foundation tool within these five elements. The balance of the article provides a wide variety of specific outcomes generated from the application of the LFR model to individual country circumstances. The strong value of this article is that this tells of actual applications and demonstrates results.

A primary competency for integral leaders is learning to teach through key distinctions rather than through theoretical models, Whetten asserts in this article written for coaches and consultants wishing to use an integral approach to leadership development.

Whetten begins by recalling a personal memory that many integral enthusiasts may relate to: his elation and relief in “finding Ken” and his unsuccessful attempts to push the AQAL model on everyone he knew. A more skillful and effective approach, he suggests, is to use integral maps to determine which distinctions matter most in the current context, then teach using the key distinctions.

Distinctions—such as the pre-trans fallacy or multiple intelligences—are the building blocks of a model. For clients who are not familiar with integral theory, distinctions are easier to hear, learn and apply. As examples, Whetten offers a brief hypothetical outline of how he would work with a coaching client using key distinctions, and also cites Anthony Robbins’ skillful means in teaching of Spiral Dynamics to a group of nearly 3,000 people.

The article assumes familiarity with the AQAL model. Because it is written in a conversational rather than academic style and does not dive deeply into theoretical constructs, however, we would assess the level of difficulty at intermediate.

This interview with the authors of the new book, Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change, examines the relationship between developmental stage theory and the individual leader in an organizational context.

The interview explores early influences on the two authors by theorists at Harvard University from the 1970’s. In particular, Bill Torbert is a strong influence, as well as Suzanne Cook-Greuter, Kohlberg, Kegan, Flower, Selman and Michael Commons.

The authors have developed a framework comprised of five levels (Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist) and four forms (context setting, stakeholder, creative and self-leadership) of leadership agility. The four forms, and the eight capacities that support them, move across the developmental stage levels. Importantly, the authors note that each leadership capacity relates to the ability to respond effectively to increasing levels of complexity and change.

The interview touches on the four quadrants as they intersect with leadership; Joiner and Josephs admit that their focus is on the individual leader holon rather than social holons, but within the context of team and organizational interactions. They discuss the importance of capacity development within stages (horizontal health), and introduce the concept of paradox at higher stages of leadership development. With regard to different lines of development, they explain that, “by looking at people in an action context, we found that the cognitive and emotional [lines] are quite intertwined.” The authors also discuss why Spiral Dynamics and elements of Kohlberg’s work are not included in the discussion of developmental models. Finally, they discuss two techniques for developing agility capacity: pivotal conversations and reverse role play.

Albert Durig provides us with a thoughtful and integrally-informed challenge to the common understanding of planning as a technical exercise consisting mainly of gap analysis and resource allocation. The author provides an applied overview of Ken Wilber’s 3 key dimensions – It, We, I – and suggests that attention to all three in terms of products, processes and platforms will add considerable richness and less fragmentation to organizational planning. By also incorporating “Level Order Planning,” an integral planning process is cascaded down an organization in order to acheive greater alignment. While this all sounds appropriate to only “top-down” organizations, Durig also briefly introduces meta-management, which takes the process out to the furthest reaches of the organization to involve others and gain alignment around values, vision and practices. To this end, Durig writes, “Planning is … not itself integral until the full integration of the individual and collective behaviors are addressed with skillful means for managing the expression of ideas, resolution of differences, and collaboration through commitments.”

Fred Kofman pays homage to Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Inference in this short, yet immediately useful synopsis. Fred explains that the ladder “allows us to develop greater awareness of our thought processes by revealing the steps in our reasoning.”

Step 1 – We select observable data
Step 2 – We create a story, theory or interpretation
Step 3 – We make further attributions and interpretations about what needs to change (or not)
Step 4 – We draw conclusions about decisions make or actions to take
Step 5 – We act, yet often without confirming our actions against the original (or new) data

Fred says that we often move through these steps too quickly without awareness. He proposes a number of solutions:

- Remember that not everyone sees reality in the same way
- Be curious about how others see reality
- Reveal your own data
- Inquire about others’ data
- Share your assumptions and inquire about others’
- Ask for examples or illustrations of abstract information
- Constantly scrutinize your own mental models; what do they allow you to see and not see
- Be willing to be mistaken

Fred’s main point is that by becoming aware of and sharing our thinking processes, we can better improve communication and mutual understanding and thereby increase our effectiveness in the world.