Last
updated: 25 Oct 07
About 'Integral Strategies' website
•
WHO?
• WHAT?
• WHY?
• THE SPIRIT OF THIS SITE
• HELP/INVOLVEMENT/FEEDBACK
• THANKS
• CONTACT
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WHO?
The
Integral Strategies website is written, designed and produced
by me, Matthew
Kalman, a founder member of the Integral Institute. It
was launched on October 25th 2007. In 2000 I also founded
the London Integral Circle (then
called ‘Politics and Spirit’) – an integral/Ken
Wilber-orientated salon/group – which is also featured
on this site.
The
London Integral Circle has had regular monthly meetings since
January 2001 as well as some special events – for instance
I organised a packed public lecture with then-Director of
the leading UK think-tank IPPR, Matthew Taylor, and Integral
Institute member Rabbi Michael Lerner (about Lerner's ‘Politics
of Meaning’ approach, which influenced President Clinton).
The
London Integral Circle has also had great events with Integral
Institute founder members Dr John Rowan, Dr Susanne Cook-Greuter,
and Dr Don Beck.
I
am trained/certified in Spiral Dynamics I and II (Macro-Memetics)
and currently work for a chartered professional body. I was
also part of a team at Henley Management College which developed
the first Integral model for Knowledge Management.
I
also write the ‘Kalman’s Kosmos’ book review
column for Russ Volckmann’s Integral
Leadership Review online newsletter, am a founder
member of the Integral Salons Council (which is an official
‘Integral Friend’ of the Integral Institute) and
am a member of the new Integral Europe Advisory Board.
Other
organisations I have worked for include the Institute for
Social Inventions (and its popular website the Global
Ideas Bank), New Statesman and Society magazine
(I wrote a controversial cover story warning of the dangers
of today’s ‘New Age Nazism’!) and the Independent
on Sunday newspaper. Body Shop founder Anita Roddick
once commented on an investigative political magazine I also
co-edited: “Here’s a good quote which sums up
Open Eye: ‘Be Courageous – it’s
the only place left uncrowded’”.)
I
live in London with my wife and son.
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WHAT?
Integral Strategies aims to showcase integral, and kindred,
approaches and potential solutions to pressing problems –
and to point people towards online and real world groups,
assessments of development in different domains (personal,
cultural, organisational etc), relevant books and suchlike.
Any
'Integral' project aims to take a wide range factors into
account, creating a more balanced approach that is –
we hope – more likely to be successful. It is being
pioneered by theorist-practitioners, including Integral Institute
founder Ken Wilber, Spiral Dynamics co-founder Dr. Don Beck
and many others around the globe. This Integral Strategies
site is not an ‘official’ Integral Institute site
– it’s my own individual effort (ditto the London
Integral Circle).
More: What is the integral approach?
It
should be noted that quite a number of approaches (religious
or political movements, for example) have called themselves
‘Integral’ over the years. Some of the more recent
ones often share some affinity with Wilber’s Integral
approach (eg Patanjali, and Chaudhuri, the founder of the
California Institute of Integral Studies).
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WHY?
Many reasons. Integral approaches (see: What
is the integral approach?) potentially have so much to
offer yet I couldn’t easily find a place that lists
online and real-world integral groups – such as the
London Integral Circle
– worldwide. I could also not find any list of integral
projects and strategies and the people behind them (ie real
evidence that goes beyond the theorising into usable practice).
Having run an integral salon – Wilber calls them "crucibles
of a consciousness struggling to be born" – since
2000, it has sometimes been disheartening how isolated they
are from eachother, with opportunities for cross-fertilisation
of ideas and sharing of practices mostly missed. I hope this
site is one part of a trend in the other direction, towards
synergy and shared learning.
I
am also aware that sympathetic outsiders to this emerging
integral movement (as well as many insiders – eg regular
postings on the Integral Naked e-forum) are also very keen
to see what integral means in practice.
For
instance Mark Satin, the policy-touting author of Radical
Middle - the Politics We Need Now, loves what Wilber,
Beck and like minds want to achieve, but told me: “It’s
a lot easier to sound beyond partisanship when you’re
not proposing concrete and practical (as opposed to ‘principled’
and dreamy) solutions to hot-button domestic and global issues!”
Former
Downing Street policy guru to Tony Blair, Geoff Mulgan, is
similarly careful: “I always take the view that the
test of theories like Wilber’s is what they come up
with.”
“If
they generate genuine insights that aren’t available
elsewhere, then I’m all in favour,” he told me.
“But quite often a huge mountain of theory produces
a rather predictable molehill of new insight.”
Well,
we might well be on target for reaching 10 out of 10 on the
‘mountain of theory’, but how exactly is the practice
shaping up…?
That
is what this site aims to find out!
(NB
It’s interesting to note that a May 2007 e-mail on Integral
Naked forum from the Integral Institute’s new CEO Robb
Smith made clear that he will seek to bring ‘Integral’
down to earth, for everyday people to use: “I constantly
tell the staff ‘would my mother understand this framing?’”
Robb
also added: “The point of communicating Integral...
is not to do so only to those who have read a book (Ken Wilber,
in this case). That's too steep a hill to climb for many,
and I think it's a cowardly approach to our mission. So we
have to get better at communicating what an Integral lifestyle
does for someone who does not want to explore the deeper metaphysics.”)
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THE SPIRIT OF THIS SITE?
I hope the spirit of this site will be about exploration,
openness, flexibility, making a contribution to the world
– not about having the latest, most complex model, the
one ‘right answer’, the Integral practice
etc.
Integral
one-upmanship is a temptation to be avoided! ;-)
Indeed,
models of adult psychological development such as the one
developed by Prof. Bill Torbert and Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter
suggest that the highest stages we might aim to grow into
are characterised by the ability to abstain from automatically
trying to explain everything, by a witnessing of the flux
of unfiltered experience. They are tolerant, open to vulnerability,
fully empathetic – being with whatever is. (This is
the goal, folks, let’s not kid ourselves that it’s
already already a widespread reality!).
I
find this description taken from Susanne Cook-Greuter’s
Harvard PhD (about high-level, 'postautonomous' adult growth)
particularly inspiring: “When the self can take in whatever
it has not yet embraced, while it is at the same time not
holding on to any version of what it was, is, or ought to
be, then we can begin to speak of an ever-widening, all-embracing,
non-personalised, fully Interindividual, that is, a transpersonal
self.”
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HELP/INVOLVEMENT/FEEDBACK
This
is the first full website I’ve produced, so I’d
really value your help/feedback – to encourage this
site along.
•
Please send your own new information to add
to this site:
I
will credit you on the site.
•
Buy from the site's Books
section, via Amazon. A small commission is paid back to Integral
Strategies by Amazon on many of these books (it does not increase
the price you pay!) – which will help towards the upkeep
and development of the site. NB Please click straight through
to a book and order it, rather than trawl around the Amazon
site then order (as this reduces or removes any commission
paid).
•
Join the online integral conversation on
the London Integral Circle e-group.
International participants (and lurkers, sorry... readers)
are welcome.
•
Make a donation to support the development
and upkeep of this site site via PayPal (which accepts credit
cards).
•
Feedback: tell me
what you think of the site, and how I can improve it. What information
would you like to see added? How would you improve
the design or functionality of the site? •
Website design and functionality
I am not a web design professional and I suspect
that this site would benefit from greatly improved design,
and from far more interactive ‘Web 2.0’ functionality.
All advice and suggestions on these topics gratefully received!
:- )
(Eg Maybe you’re good with Dreamweaver – I always
have a few niggling queries? Perhaps I should learn how to
transfer the whole site to run as a Typepad or WordPress blog
or on an open source CMS like Mambo, LimboCMS, Drupal (and
choose a theme/skin that is far more easy on the eye than
this site)? Or would I need to be a techie to be able to do
that? Should the ‘Strategies’
section of the site be a wiki? How do I stream an 'Updates
to this site' blog feed to appear in the middle of the home
page? Should I be using Pageflakes, Zimbio...?)
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THANKS TO...
Many thanks to the people who have offered help and advice
in developing this site – in particular London Integral
Circle member Martin Black. Also Michael Rose, Phil Bradley,
Olly Robinson, Michael Brookes, Leonard Latiff, Alex Rollin,
Isabelle Robinson, Geert Drieghe and Ian Bowker – and
to other London Integral Circle veterans who looked at it.
And please don’t blame them if I didn’t always
follow their advice! (I wanted to be able to produce this
site myself, so have kept it pretty simple).
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CONTACT
E-mail: Matthew
Kalman
Mobile:
07957 787847
Copyright
© 2007 Matthew Kalman
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