Integral By Degrees: An Integral Business Story

I had fun at work on Friday; I slid the thin edge of the Integral wedge into our companies culture.

In my role as VP of Operations, one of the things I do is lead a weekly Operations meeting. The intent of the meeting is to improve our ability to do things. To “sharpen the saw” as Stephen Covey puts it. I have four direct reports who attend who basically represent all the project, product, design and software development staff. Including my HR responsibilities that pretty well covers the company.

We’ve spent the past few weekly meetings brainstorming a list of about forty things that we could implement that would improve things. These range from leadership training to quality assurance to employee retention practices. As we began the process of categorizing and prioritizing, we found they fell into four broad areas:

• Professional Learning
• Culture
• Capabilities
• Business Processes

At this point in the process the list was rather daunting and the team began to show signs of uncertainty about how to proceed, although I did have a strategy prepared. However after staring at the four headings on the sheet in front of me I abandoned my prepared course of action and launched an entirely novel idea for me and them; the four quadrants.

Although I have been reading Ken’s books for three to five years, for the past few months I have immersed myself in the Integral mindset. I have been reading more of Ken’s books, purchased the Integral Life Practice Starter Kit, joined the Integral Institute and the Integral Spiritual Center, participated in the forums and have been consuming on-line multimedia at a steady rate. So it is only natural that when I saw four headings on the sheet in front of me I saw four quadrants.

Now, I am an 80/20 kind of guy. Once I feel I have 80% of the information I need to make a decision I move to the action plan stage. This approach is similar to one I have gleaned from my studies of US military doctrine. It is based on the idea that when you are given a mission you don’t have time to plan everything before you move out. You move out NOW and begin gathering information and planning as you go. This “learn as you go” approach is also in keeping with the spirit of Ken’s admonition not to confuse the map with the territory – data is great and a plan is great but don’t fall in love with it because it is going to change when the boots hit the ground.

So without a careful analysis as to whether or not the four categories on the page before me matched the I, We, It and Its spaces, I suggested to my staff a new approach as to how to prioritize and proceed.

Without telling them it was the Integral approach, and without using Integral language, I drew the four quadrant cross on the whiteboard. Then I added the diagonal lines and added about four little gradient marks (levels) per line. Then I suggested we place each of our four categories in the four quadrants and take the two things in each category we felt were the most urgent things and those would become levels one and two on each of the diagonal lines in each quadrant.

At this point they began to get the idea and they told me that we would have to do the four things at each level in each quadrant simultaneously (the horizontal approach in Integral terms) because they were all interdependent. I agreed.

I suggested that as we completed each level we would add another based on the fact that completing one level would give us new knowledge and insights. We would move out the diagonal lines, completing each ring of levels as if they were concentric waves moving out from the center.

The meeting ended with everyone feeling very comfortable with our approach and extremely positive about our ability to accomplish our ambitious goals for the next twelve months. The AQAL/Integral approach had moved us from feelings of uncertainty and being overwhelmed to a feeling of confidence.

Notes:

As I explained, I jumped to the integral model based only on intuition. I did not have time for analysis. Now that I have time to reflect I see that our four categories and the four quadrants do indeed relate:

I - Professional Learning

We - Culture

It - Capabilities

Its - Business Processes

I certainly did not have time to play the Holon game and examine our goals (levels) against the criteria for holons and I am not concerned about that at this point. This is the thin edge of the wedge. I only wanted them to take away one lesson at this time: the quadrants, lines and levels model and the “do them all at the same time” approach.

If you are a business or organizational person, I suggest this is an example of a way to introduce the AQAL/Integral model to the workplace in a “no name brand”, generic fashion. I believe doing so reduced potential resistance that might otherwise have arisen.

Some next steps (probably separated by months each) in the evolution of the concept could be:

• Each goal at each level should comply to holonic principles
• AQAL colors/stages: each holon at each level should be at the same stage as those at the same level in the other three quadrants
• The quadrants should comply to the “I, We, It, Its” constraints

Finally I suggest that moving to the “body, mind and spirit in self, culture and nature” aspect of all this and the AQAL/Integral branding only be ventured after the team was very comfortable and sold on the generic model and approach.

Thanks, Nick and I were in contact with one another a few years ago, and I've admired what he's managed to accomplish!

Lynne

Russ -- thanks for your thoughts on this -- I have been immersed in medical and caregiving crises for two dads, so have been away for awhile. Look forward to checking the references you mentioned.

Dennis

Ralph,

I shall do so this week. Thanks for the recommendation.

 Russ and Molly and all, I love reading these posts and the perspectives that they offer. 

I must tell you quite honestly that I find that my buttons have been badly pushed at my school, and the last thing I did on the last day of school was to slam the door in my supervisor's face, after he told me that he's assigning me to the worst classroom in the building....it's a way of him getting even with me for having a stroke after he harassed me, thus causing the faculty to turn against him and the administration.  Very nasty situation....

My micro- example, tho, is a serious question, and I do not wish to divert the disucssion to one about my situation, which I'm tending to on multiple fronts. I pose it as a concrete example from our very real lives.  We may have grown considerably in our AQAL understanding, our theoria may be the best in the state, but when confronted with Red, we/I may well revert to anger and old behavior patterns.  I assume that each one of us, coaches and leaders alike, can reference that type of response regardless of our altitude in many lines.

If you read some of the posts on the Integral Parenting thread, it again becomes fascinating to see the interplay of the theory and the practice, which is what fascinates me.  I find that by deepening my EMBODIMENT of Integral, I am able to act far more in alignment, far better "right action" in all  situations (save the Red responses). 

It is this embodiment that I find so critical in practice with others.  I find that the more I am aligned and embodied to the AQAL framework, the better able I am to hold that Center of Gravity, and the better able others at their own altitudes are capable of deepening the breadth and depth of their perspectives.

How do you know when you are embodying AQAL? How do you explain that to those you are coaching or leading?  I find it fascinating beyond measure that those I am working with cannot/might not have the words to explain what they are doing or feeling, but they know that there is something different going on.  One of the people I work on Integral community with, says that she reads my words, but doesn't really "feel" into what I am saying, or what it means.  Yet when we are in our group meetings, she tells me that she is beginning to get a feel of something discernably different inside her.

Thanks for all of these great posts!

Lynne

Well, IMHO, integral approaches to leadership, leader development, organizations, culture and their development offer a frame that allows us to build strategic intention, collaboration, competition, etc. to achieve what is important to us. There is a place for each of these and more.

Russ (and others) ... to what extent are integral approaches to leadership and organizational change an extension of one's own integral development, and to what extent is it useful and valuable to deliberately analyze a situation using an AQAL framework ... this is kind of the same question I was asking Molly, where it seemed to me that her response to help resolve a problem came from her "integral intuition" on one hand, but I was/am wondering the extent to which she deliberately thought about what aspects of an integral approach applied to that particular situation.

So, if I am in Lynne's situation within an organization (and not many years ago I was), I assume I will respond more effectively the deeper/higher I develop in a variety of lines (and not just the better I learn various efffective leadership and change strategies)? Is it also helpful to deliberately analyze the situation through an AQAL lens?

Is there an interplay between "integral intuition and integral analysis"?

Dennis

Drat! Please ignore the attachment to my previous message. Formatting makes it unreadable. Another new trick to learn!

Dennis

What does this look like in a real world instance? I once served on a county human resources advisory board and chaired the developmental disabilities committee. I had no particular expertise in the area, which freed me to see the arc of discourse, decisions, evaluations, etc. over a period of several years. At one point, the committee and board were snagged on the reef of a dilemma. Mainstreaming of folks w/ DDs had resulted in a sharp increase in the day-to-day challenges faced by many individuals and families who could no longer rely on sheltered workshops, day treatment, and other structures for support. (This is a much truncated picture.) Budgets were smaller and smaller; schools, neighborhoods, churches, communities with no experience were needing to not only integrate but meet the needs of the DD community, and apart from a few very lovely success stories from projects led by visionary leaders with a high ratio of support personnel to clients, there were no models. The board and committee were stalled because they had just spent 5 years doing what they thought they were supposed to do (and what the families, advocates, and DD clients thought they wanted) and people were falling through the cracks.

One day on a site visit for an annual evaluation, I remarked to our staff person that we might consider that the fact that our current problems were the result of our best ideas was not a bad thing, but merely a natural consequence or progression in a process of learning how to do something we did not know how to do. The mood and attitude of the group shifted remarkably, and we started taking action without needing to "see around the corner" because we had shifted our standard from doing the right things to learning from our choices.

Hey Molly ... can you say more about "where" your remark came from? I am wondering the extent to which you reflected upon the the problem people were facing and simply responded from who you are and/or the extent to which you deliberately analyzed the situation from an AQAL perspective.

I ask that in part because you summarized in 2 paragraphs a way of approaching this particular issue that has taken me 14 pages to describe (an approach which is attached here and will be part of a new topic on Integral Disabilities, Alzheimers and LongTerm Care).

Dennis (who you may recall as a struggling puppy-dog in Westminster, now two years later already an old dog learning new tricks).