The art of integrating Integral Theory
The following page is an introduction to how we look at the world and what we do as a company and team – in other words how we integrate Integral Theory in GROW.
Firstly
The integral theory is a ‘map’ we use to understand the road we are traveling personally and as a team – as illustrated above.
Secondly
The integral approach is also a great tool to help us understanding reality – the R in our GROW coaching model (Goal, Reality, Options and What action). When people ask for help with getting direction (which is what a lot of coaching is essentialy about) it is very difficult to help them if they do not have a clear understanding of their starting point. “Could you tell me the shortest route to London” is a hopeless question to answer if I do not know where you are starting from. And it’s the same problem in coaching. Whether you would like to win a marathon or start your own business – you need a clear picture of where you are starting from and the Integral Map is a great tool to grasp the bigger picture of a person, a team or an organization – and to understand their starting point.
Thirdly
The integral model is a wonderful tool for us in the way it helps us develop training that is not just focused on one aspect of human and organizational development but helps us to stay balanced in our approach.
What is Integral?
The following text describes the theory in more detail and has to a large extent been adapted and abreviated from the original text published by the Integral Institute under the Title “What is integral”? You can read the orginal paper here. If you are in the mood for the full monty I strongly recommend that you dive in to Wilbers blockbuster: “Sex, Ecology and Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution” – or you can start with smaller steps and start with the short sweet and to the point version: “The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything” (Paperback).
A search for a map of human potentials
Over the last several decades there has been an extensive search for a comprehensive map of human potentials. This map uses all the known systems and models of human growth – from the ancient shamans and sages to today’s breakthroughs in cognitive science – and distills their major components into 5 simple factors. Factors that are the essential elements or keys to unlocking and facilitating human evolution.
An Integral or Comprehensive Map
What are these 5 elements? We call them quadrants, levels, lines, states
and types. As you will see, all of these elements are, right now, available in your
own awareness. These 5 elements are not merely theoretical concepts; they are
aspects of your own experience, contours of your own consciousness, as you can
easily verify for yourself as we proceed.
What’s the purpose?
What is the point of using this integral map or model? First, whether you are
working in business, medicine, psychotherapy, law, ecology or simply everyday
living and learning, the Integral Map helps to make sure that you are “touching all the
bases.” If you are trying to fly over the Rocky Mountains, the more accurate a
map you have, the less likely you will crash. An integral approach insures that
you are utilizing the full range of ressources for any situation, with the greater
likelihood of success.
Comprehensiveness and effectiveness
The integral approach helps us see both ourselves and the world in more comprehensive and effective ways. But one thing is important to realise from the start. The Integral Map is just a map. It is not the territory. We certainly don’t want to confuse the map with the territory, but neither do we want to be working with an inaccurate or faulty map. The Integral Map is just a map, but it’s
the most complete and accurate map we have at this time.
States
Everybody is familiar with major states of consciousness, such as waking, dreaming and deep sleep. Right now, you are in a waking state of consciousness (or, if you are tired, perhaps a daydream state of consciousness). There are all sorts of different states of consciousness including meditative states (induced by yoga, contemplation, meditation, and so on); altered states (such as druginduced); and a variety of peak experiences, many of which can be triggered by intense experiences like making love, walking in nature or listening to exquisite music.
Temporary states of conscioussness
Everybody experiences various sorts of states of consciousness, and these states often provide profound motivation, meaning and drives, in ourselves and others. There’s an interesting thing about states of consciousness: They come and they go. Even great peak experiences or altered states, no matter how profound, will come, stay a bit, then pass. No matter how wonderful their capacities, they are temporary.
Stages or levels of development
Where states of consciousness are temporary, stages of consciousness are permanent. Stages represent the actual milestones of growth and development. Once you are at a stage, it is an enduring acquisition. For example, once a child develops through the linguistic stages ofdevelopment, the child has permanent access to language. Language isn’t present one minute and gone the next. The same thing happens with other types of growth. Once you stably reach a stage of growth and development, you can access the qualities of that stage – such as greater consciousness, more embracing love, higher ethical callings, greater intelligence and awareness – virtually any time you want.
Different stage conceptions
Generally, in the integral model, we work with around 8 to 10 stages or levels of consciousness development. One stage conception often used is that of Spiral Dynamics Integral, founded by Don Beck based on the research of Clare Graves. We also use stages of self development pioneered by Jane Loevinger and Susann Cook-Greuter; and orders of consciousness, researched by Robert Kegan. But there are many other useful stage conceptions available using the integral approach.
Example of using stages
To show what is involved with levels or stages, let’s use a very simple model possessing only 3 of them. If we look at moral development, for example, we find that an infant at birth has not yet been socialized into the culture’s ethics and conventions. This is called the preconventional stage. It is also called egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely self-absorbed. But as the young child begins to learn its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude care for those not of one’s group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the postconventional stage, the individual’s identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all people, regardless of race, color, sex or creed, which is why this stage is also called worldcentric.
Thus, moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us”
(ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric) – a good example of the unfolding stages
of consciousness.
Lines of development
I’m good at some things, not-so-good at others….
Have you ever noticed how unevenly developed virtually all of us are? Some
people are highly developed in, say, logical thinking, but poorly developed in
emotional feelings. Some people have highly advanced cognitive development
(they’re very smart) but poor moral development (they’re mean and ruthless).
Some people excel in emotional intelligence, but can’t add 2 plus 2.
Multiple intelligences
Howard Gardner made this concept fairly well-known using the idea of multiple intelligences such as cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence etc. Most people excel in one or two of those, but do poorly in the other multiple intelligences.
Intelligences unfold in stages
Various multiple intelligences include: Cognitive, interpersonal, moral, emotional, and aesthetic.
Why do we also call them developmental lines? Because those intelligences show growth and development. They unfold in progressive stages. What are those progressive stages? The stages we just outlined. In other words, each multiple intelligence grows – or can grow – through the 3 major stages (or through any of the stages of any of the developmental models; whether 3 stages, 5 stages, 7 or more). You can have cognitive development to stage 1, to stage 2 and to stage 3, for example.
Types combined with levels, lines and stages
Types simply refer to items that can be present at virtually any stage or state. One common typology, for example, is the Myers-Briggs (whose main types are feeling, thinking, sensing and intuiting). You can be any of those types at virtually any stage of development. These kind of “horizontal typologies” can be very useful, especially when combined with levels, lines, and states. To show what is involved, we can use “masculine” and “feminine.”
The 4 Quadrants: I, We, It and Its
Now, if we just had states, stages, types and lines they would be a heap and not a system or map. In order for them to form a system or be useful as a map of the organizatinal world that we operate in we need to combine them. This is where the quadrants come in.
Upper-left and upper-right quadrant
For example, in the Upper-Left quadrant (the interior of the individual), you find your own immediate thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on (all described in first-person terms). But if you look at your individual being from the outside, in the terms not of subjective awareness but objective science, you find neurotransmitters, a limbic system, the neocortex, complex molecular structures, cells, organ systems, DNA and so on – all described in third-person objective terms (“it” and “its”). The Upper-Right quadrant is therefore what any event looks like from the outside. This especially includes its physical behavior; its material components; its matter and energy and its concrete body – because all those are items that can be referred to in some sort of objective, third-person, or “it” fashion.
Lower-left and lower-right quadrant
In the Lower-Left quadrant, cultural development itself often unfolds in waves, moving from what the pioneering genius Jean Gebser called archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral and higher. In the Lower-Right quadrant, systems theory investigates the collective social systems that evolve (and that, in humans, include stages such as foraging to agrarian to industrial to informational systems).
For this simple overview, details are not as important as a general grasp of the unfolding nature of all four quadrants, which can include expanding spheres of consciousness, care, culture and nature. In short, the I and the we and it can evolve. Self and culture and nature can all develop and evolve.
All of the above decribes the Integral Map with a certain amount of detail – the kind of detail that you would find on a world wall map. If you want further details you will need to dive into especially the writings of Ken Wilber.
For all pratical purposes we sometimes need an even simpler map than the one we have provided above.
When we look at organizations and try to understand what is going on, we can draw the simplest of maps on the back of a beer mat – it would look some thing like this:
And even with a map as simple as that we can start to explain a lot of what goes on in organizations – what is new is maybe not so much what is going on but how things are connected. Combining the 4 quadrants like this is also referred to as a ‘holon’ – a term first used by Arthur Kostler (The Gost in the Machine).
Rules of holons
Holons are governed by a number of rules. Wilber lists 21 - in our simplified map we only need to list a few to make them useful for our purpose:
Everything is part of something (and all is therefore connected)
Everything has both an interior and exterior aspect, and whatever can be observed in one quadrant will somehow be reflected in the other quadrants. In order for the whole to function optimally there must be a balance or congruence between all four quadrants.
Culture is reflected in our systems – giving us a common language
Again very simply put - the culture that we have in our organization will be reflected in our systems and in the motivation and behaviour of each individual. But if we create systems that are in conflict with our culture (or the culture we would like to have) then we will not get the motivation or behaviour that we are hoping for. As you may now see this not only gives us a wealth of information and understanding of how things function or do not function, we also now have a common language that we can use to address these problems.
The problem on focusing on only one quadrant perspective
Most business theories only look at part of this map. B.F. Skinner – who coined Behaviourism – was only looking at the upper right quadrant. Jung and all the managment theories that have been inspired by his thinking tend to look at human development only from the upper left perspective. Karl Marx wrote hundreds of pages on how to solve the world’s problems see through the lower right quadrant – and big thinkers like Thomas Kuhn and Max Weber wanted us to believe that it was all a question of culture. They are of course all right – and all wrong. Using the Integral Map we see that looking at the whole always mean that there are at least 4 perspectives to everything and within each of these four perspectives there are always states, stages types and lines. Wilber calls this AQAL – all quadrants at all levels.
Awareness of interior and exterioe realities
Most of the management training and leadership development that you can find today is focused on “right hand” path – teaching objective, empirical and behavioural ways of knowing. But from an integral perspective developing leaders capable of operating beyond the conventional action logics must also include the left hand path, the interior “I” of the upper left quadrant and the intersubjective “we” space of the lower left quadrant. Developing post conventioal stage capacities start with awareness of interior as well as exterior realities.