Looks like that conversation may have inspired this blog:
(Incidentally, thanks for writing it Ken)
What's Happening at Integral Institute?
July 02, 2024 15:01
What’s happening at Integral Institute?
At some point, I will post a 40-page history of Integral Institute (and an account of authentic Integral Leadership—what
it is, and how to develop it to the utmost), which I recently wrote
when Robb Smith became CEO. It’s a first-person account of the
inception of I-I through its many phases to today, which is basically
the beginning of what might be thought of as phase 3, or I-I 3.0. All
of this is explained at length in this document, but I’ll give just a
few items right now.
Integral Institute began as a purely
nonprofit organization, run on volunteer and semi-volunteer energy and
enormous Integral idealism on the part of literally hundreds of
individuals around the word, and, over the years, several dozen local
staff. I often hear people say, Integral Institute must be a really
second-tier organization, exquisitely organized top to bottom. And I
usually say, to their bewilderment, that it’s actually close to the
opposite of all that. By which I mean:
There are essentially
two different ways that I could have started I-I: one was what might be
called “professional,” and one was “wild wild West.” And yes, we took
the latter route. And wild it was….
At one point, when I was in
the process of converting I-I to a more professionally managed
organization, the new management wrote a list of something like 50
projects that I-I was currently doing, and then said, “Pick 5 of them,
that’s all we can do professionally.”
The way I had run it
previously was that if any person or group of persons wanted to start a
particular Integral (AQAL) project, and they were really great at it,
then I would support them and let them get started. This could be a new
Center of discourse at Integral University, now called Integral
Education Network (we have around 20 Centers at this time), or a new
type of Integral seminar (we’ve graduated over 1,000 people through
them so far), or perhaps writing a new book (at Integral Books, of
which a dozen are in the pipeline), or maybe a new topic and session
for Integral Spiritual Center (whose 3rd annual conference is
upcoming), and so on and so on and so on. These were the 50 or so
projects that I-I had started and was currently running, and every
single one of them was powered by AQAL (complete quality control), an
extraordinary feat.
Of course, once these projects were started,
they were often on their own, with not much help from us. If I had run
this as a tightly knit professional system, with full staff support and
human resources, we could never have run more than around 5 or 6 fully
functioning projects—and those other 45 projects would never have had a
chance at all. (About every 6 months or so for 5 years, a
well-intentioned business person would say, “I can run this
professionally and clean this thing up,” and I would smile and politely
decline.)
So I chose to start a “loosely” and “lamely”
organized Integral Institute, instead of a tightly integrated and
organized one. At the beginning, it would have been a kiss of death to
run I-I in a purely businesslike and professional way. Rather, in
simply giving these 50 or so projects a nod and an occasional helping
hand,. we managed to start an enormous number of wonderful projects,
centers, books, seminars, etc., and those that could create their own
momentum and their own resources, thrived beautifully, and do so to
this day (from Integral Naked to Integral Books to our Integral
graduate degrees).
But now it is appropriate that we turn this
Integral wild West show over to professional management, and
dramatically narrow the number of those types of projects, while
deepening the bench on those projects that we are doing, and starting
some entirely new projects, but as professionally-run ones from the
start.
So that is what is happening right now. Integral
Institute’s new CEO is heading up the creation of an entirely new Web
Portal—Integral Life. This will be a very robust technical platform
supporting a large number of fully Integral products, services, and
playgrounds.
Robb is doing an extraordinary job of this, in
what is essentially his own vision of how to make Integral more
available to a much larger audience and membership. I remain as an
advisor, of course, but the whole point of these kinds of things is to
let professionals like Robb take the ball and run with it, with as
little interference from me as possible. I am completely comfortable
with these kinds of things, and I’m as excited as the next guy to see
this Portal as it unfolds. It’s an awesome, wired, exhilarating time….
So
stay tuned for the launch of Integral Life Portal sometime late this
summer or early fall. Robb has brought on an extraordinary team of
highly successful and creative associates as part of this endeavor, all
of which is being designed to make Integral Life the place to play.
Stay tuned to this blog, and of course to integralinstitute.org, for further reports….
Much love and light, Ken
"With whom or with what are you in communion at this moment?"
. . ."I?" he replied, almost mechanically. "Why not with anyone or anything."
"You must be a marvel . . . if you are able to continue in that state for long."
-Constantin Stanislavsky