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Ken Wilber’s quadrants from Developing Leadership Capacity: Searching for the Integral

Those familiar with my work will know that a lot of what I do is informed by the models designed by Ken Wilber which explain an integrated approach to, well, everything. Wilber’s classic four quadrants model inspired Michael Herman’s quadrants which underpin his book Inviting Organization, and that book has informed a great deal of my own work.

So that’s the lineage.

I found an excellent paper today, Developing Leadership Capacity: Searching for the Integral, which translates Wilber’s work into some very useful questions and then describes leadership styles according to Spiral Dynamics, a system for characterizing cultural memes and styles.

All very esoteric, but if you are at all interested in using Wilber’s work in an organizational or community development context, I suggest you look at this paper and specifically the lists of questions which are designed to uncover the depth of leadership practice in all four quadrants. It is the most comprehensive list of these kinds of questions I have yet seen, and a nice compliment to a number of other questioning approaches I have worked with over the years, such as those Michael and I offer in our Open Space practice workshops.