2008-03-17T13:17:00.014-05:00

Welcome from Paul Smaby and Integral Advisors!

In this blog I hope to engage in a dialogue with all of you interested in breaking through the barriers that often stand in the way of performance and well-being at the individual, team, or organization level. In my work as an advisor to business leaders over the last several years, I have seen a number of predictable and potentially harmful pitfalls that befall them along the individual and organization developmental cycle. I became increasingly interested in the underlying cause of these "stick points" and why they were so difficult to address.

In response, I have developed an Integral framework that I will be presenting through the pages of Emergence. I emphasize that I am presenting but one of many versions of the underlying Integral map that Ken Wilber (leading living philosopher)is widely recognized as having developed. I owe a debt of gratitude to Ken and his critically important body of work, without which I believe I would have continued to struggle.

A transformative moment for me that lead to the development of the map I will be exploring with you came as the result of a roundtable discussion I was facilitating with a group of CEOs. We were discussing the kinds of challenges each of them was facing and what they were doing to address these challenges. In the midst of that discussion, the topic of New York Times best-selling business management books came up as perhaps having the answers to the challenges the CEOs faced. I asked each member what they were currently reading and what they thought the book was positing as THE definitive answer to all of their management issues (I am being only partly facetious here…which is precisely part of the problem).

As the conversation continued it was apparent how each of the CEOs was very much enamored with the respective books they had read. I was struck by the thought as to whether any one particular author was correct, or that perhaps that all of them were...to some extent. At this point in my life I was in parallel doing a lot of reading, particularly of Ken Wilber's work and Integral Theory. It hit me that there was a quick and dirty way to apply his work to my situation and see if the map worked. I went home and sat down and started mapping some of the various best-selling business books onto Wilber's framework according to the underlying premise of the author. I believe the results were quite startling. No wonder my clients (and I) were frustrated.

Suddenly I realized why so many of my clients were still getting stuck even though they had the latest and greatest advice from the business gurus. The authors were ALL right, but only partially so. My clients were working with bad maps...or more accurately PARTIAL maps. They were unconsciously ignoring some of the other critical domains of their business...and their businesses were paying the price.

In the next installment of Emergence I will begin to dive into the approach I have developed since that day with the CEOs. I look forward to your input and partnership as we walk this journey of emergence.

All the best,

Paul