Celebrating Canada’s 4 Quadrant Leaders on Canada Day

What better way to celebrate Canada Day than to flash the fireworks of July 1 onto the 4 Quadrants of Canada’s cohort of Integral Leaders?

©2014 Aboriginal Nations Education, Greater Victoria School Board, BC, Canada
Artist Jamin Zurowski
Bear/UL. Wolf /LL. Raven/UR. Salmon/LR.
This Totem is a Gift used with permission on this Canada Issue. Please do reproduce without © Permission.

A whole Quadrivium of Integral Leaders were featured in the Integral Leadership Review – Canada Issue at the beginning of 2015. But the plenitude of contributors and the depth of their insights deserves a special reminder today.

Click here to read the Profiles of all the Authors of the Canada Issue – Integral Leadership Review

Here is the Table of Contents in the Canada Issue – with links to all the contributions – including the original 4 Quadrant aboriginal Totem artwork of the Cover (with poetry, thought pieces, research reports, organizational histories, pedagocial principles for teaching leaders, environmental and sustainability insights, inspiring quotations, in-depth interviews … and more):

Cover

1/15 – Cover

Editor

2/15 – Cover

Editor

Leading Comments

1/15 – A Totem for Curating a Story of Leadership in Canada

Marilyn Hamilton

2/15 – From Totem Guides and Lock Masters to World Legacy Light

Marilyn Hamilton

 

Leadership Quote

1/15 – Marshall McLuhan 

2/15 – Adrienne Clarkson, 26th Governor General of Canada (1999-2005)

Lead Poem

1/15 – Lead Poem

Tim Merry

Leadership Coaching Tips

1/15 – Leading Generative Change

Tam Lundy

2/15 – It’s not just what you do, but also how you think!

Natasha Mantler

Fresh Perspective

1/15 – Integral Coaching Canada with Laura Divine and Joanne Hunt

Marilyn Hamilton

2/15 – Dialogic Development: a Conversation with Gervase Bushe

Russ Volckmann

Leading Self

1/15 – Inching Towards Leaderless Leading

Edith Friesen

1/15 – Re-membering My Inherent Wilderness

Beth Sanders

Leading Others

1/15 – Is True Integral Leadership Possible?

Linda Shore

2/15 – Deep Presencing: Illuminating New Territory at the Bottom of the U

Leading Organizations

1/15 – Building Water Leaders and Waterpreneurs

Julia Fortier and Karen Kun

1/15 – Giving birth to Authentic Leadership in Action

Michael Chender

Leading Cultures

1/15 – A Circle of Aiijaakag, a Circle of Maangag: Integral Theory and Indigenous Leadership

Janice Simcoe

Leading World

1/15 – Integral Transformation of Value Chains: One Sky’s Integral Leadership Program in the Brazil Nut Value Chain in Peru and Bolivia

Gail Hochachka

2/15 – How ARE We To Go On Together? Our Evolutionary Crossroads

Brian and Mary Nattrass

Continuous LearningContinuous Learning

1/15 – Integral Dispositions and Transdisciplinary Knowledge Creation

Sue L. T. McGregor

1/15 – The Long and Winding Road: Leadership and Learning Principles That Transform

Brigitte Harris and Niels Agger-Gupta

2/15 – From Practice to Praxis – as Transformative Education: Leading at the Integral/Professional Interface?

Ian Wight

2/15 – Will the Next Buddha be a Sangha? Responding to the Call to Influence the Future of Collaboration

Rebecca Ejo Colwell

Book Reviews

1/15 – The Pulse of Possibility – A Retrospective Review of the Work of Bruce Sanguin

Trevor Malkinson

2/15 – (Re)Joining the Conversation: Commenting on Integral Voices on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: Critical Inquiries

Diana Claire Douglas

Column

1/15 – Integral Design Leadership: Healthcare Design as Extraordinary Service: An Interview with Peter Jones

Lisa Norton

Poetry Gallery

1/15 – 1. Forgotten Places

Tim Merry

1/15 – 2. What’s It Gonna Take to Stay Awake?

Tim Merry

1/15 – 3. Thank You

Tim Merry

1/15 – 4. Build the Arks (King Kong Song)

Tim Merry

2/15 – 1. The Mother

Tim Merry

2/15 – 2. Human Family Tree

Tim Merry

2/15 – 3. Superman

Tim Merry

2/15 – 4. Switch it on

Tim Merry

Notes from the Field

1/15 – Integral City Development in the Russian City of Izhevsk

Eugene Pustoshkin

 

 

We wish you a Happy Canada Day of Reading and Inspiration – with Gratitude to  all the Integral Leaders in Canada.

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Integral City Reflective Organ – June Solstice 2015 – Pope, Planet of Integral Cities, People, Playgrounds

This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is People.

International developer Gail Hochachka proposes that people’s feelings, beliefs and worldviews affect how they are ready and willing to participate in sustainable behaviors (2005, p. 1). Moreover, she points out that traumatic experiences, like natural disasters and war, can damage people and leave them disabled from appropriate responses. Although these interior realities of a city’s population have been largely ignored or discounted because they are subjective, invisible and difficult to study, they are just as real as the exterior physical realities of the city. Interior realities create an interior environment that has just as many or more layers, contours and textures to it as geographic environments. We have studied them through the lenses of psychology, philosophy and the humanities, but until recently we have not recognized that, like our exterior qualities, they evolve and develop. We map the paleontology of our interiors through the shifts in worldviews that enable the growth of our interior landscapes and, therefore, our capacities for response, adaptability and resilience. The key centers of those internal views are the self, the other (family, clan) and the world  (society, sectors, spheres of influence, regions, globe).

Hamilton, M. (2008). Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive. Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers, p. 14-15

Pope Francis Offers Blueprint for Impacting a Planet of Integral Cities

With his encyclicals on the Environment and Climate Change (May, June, 2015), Pope Francis seems to be thinking as big as a Planet of Integral Cities.

Pope Francis has gifted the world with a Kosmic view of the environment and the implications for climate change. He instructs the faithful that God has not given dominion to man to dominate the environment but to respect all Life. He explicates what Integral City calls the Master Code – emphasizing that man’s individual expression must be viewed in relationship to others (particularly those in the developing world and the poor) and nature.

By implication that so many of the poor now live in cities, Pope Francis’ encyclical reveals the inextricable interconnected relationship of cities to their eco-regions and that cities everywhere have an obligation to steward not only the health of people but the health of the environment.

Pope Francis’ sweeping views that marry spirituality and science bring together the inner and outer worlds of peoples everywhere. He explicitly references our need to embrace Beauty and Goodness with our pursuit of Truth.  Without question Pope Francis has opened the door to an explicit Integral Ecology (the name of a whole chapter of the May 2015, Encyclical). In fact, in the May/June 2015 Encyclical the Pope has used the word “integral” 23 times.

Now is the time for all good people to come to the support of our sister/Mother Earth to optimize our impact on our Planet of Cities.

Many of Pope Francis’ points to make impact resonate with our series “How to Optimize Integral City Impact” (inspired by Roger Walsh’s 2014 Keynote at Integral Europe Conference). In this set of blogs we framed optimizing injunctions for the implementation and impact of Integral City Principles:

1.     How to Optimize the Impact of Integral City Work

2.     How to Optimize Integral City Impact Through Adult Development

3.     How to Optimize Integral City Impact by Getting Ideas Out Into the World

4.     How to Optimize Impact of Integral City Work from Direct Experience & Deep Wisdom

5.     How to Optimize Integral City Impact through Transconventional Religion

6.     How to Optimize Integral City Impact with Community of Practice

7.     How to Optimize Integral City Impact as Spiritual Practice

8.     How to Optimize Integral City Impact as Accomplice to the Divine

Read more on this story here.

Integral City Blueprint

People in Dialogue: Imagine Durant Harvests Community Insights

How does Integral City work with a whole city? Durant Oklahoma is emerging as a gem of a generative action research process. We started with a visit in 2013 at the invitation of 2 City Leaders (Greg Massey, President of First United Bank, and Gary Batton, Chief of the Choctaw Nation). At that time we did due diligence with Integral City’s 12 Intelligences and came back to a small group (that became Durant’s Core Team for the next year) with a long term Proposal for Discovering, Imagining, Designing, and Delivering a unified vision for Durant and the strategies to implement it. From that Core Team, Imagine Durant was born as a project, financed by the 4 Voices of the city and guided by Executive Director, Kara Hendrickson.

On April 17-19, 2015, Imagine Durant began its visioning process, along with the Integral City team of: Beth Sanders, City Planner and Civic Meshworker; Linda Shore, City Management Advisor; Scott Moore, Architect and Community Planner; David Jaber, Natural Step Sustainability Expert; under the AQtivating leadership of Marilyn Hamilton.

We convened the first (of nine) dialogues where community thought leaders met to exchange and brainstorm possibilities for the future of Durant, Oklahoma. The special focus of this first round of dialogues was on the Economy and Community of Durant.

Twenty-four Thought Leaders pulled inspiration from their surroundings at the historical Three Valley Museum, located in downtown Durant. Leaders and community members from a wide variety of organizations, businesses and industries took time from their family and friends to share their stories, hopes, concerns, and visions for the city of Durant, Oklahoma.

The dialogue began with reflections among participants over an evening meal where they each shared stories of their personal connection with the community. Over the next 3 days participants asked good questions, explored four revealing scenarios (Dark Days Ahead, Status Quo, Durant Leads the Way, The Stars Aligned in Durant)  and finished with commitments to take the next steps together.

On June 13, 2015, a Public Dialogue continued the Visioning process, as citizens gathered to explore Burning Questions about Leadership Capacity, Engaging Community, Civic Management & Performance and Influencing Business Development. Participants offered generous resources including designing apps for “Discover Durant” and engaging veterans’ skills and interests with city projects.

Imagine Durant Public Dialogue

In September 2015, this first round will conclude with a dialogue with Durant’s Policy Makers, presenting the Harvests from the Thought Leaders and Public and seeking input for taking ideas forward for early wins, supporting resources and aligning long-term strategies.

Read the full Thought Leaders story in the harvest report in the Resources Link below.

Pop-Up Playground: A Unique Way to Constellate Integral City Intelligences

Have you observed the “Pop-up” phenomenon that is emerging as a form of urban engagement, experiment and enterprise? Pop-ups are usually temporary co-creations of citizens, artists, performers, entrepreneurs and even serious city developers. It is often associated with “tactical urbanism” and can emerge as restaurants, retail, and/or entertainment in places like urban streets, flood plains, under bridges.

Integral City has borrowed the Pop-Up process and is combining it with Systemic Constellation Work to co-create three lunch playgrounds at Integral Theory Conference 2015

Joining MetaIntegral’s Integral Theory Conference for its fourth international event (and sponsoring the conference for the third time) Integral City has designed Pop-Up Playgrounds where we invite conference participants to harvest conference insights with the help of the Knowing Field. Lead Constellator, Diana Claire Douglas (Founder, of Knowing Field Designs) will help us to explore and experiment with our conference experience – drawing on the systemic constellation process that taps into our collective intelligence and releases energy for surprising reflections and fun results.

In the context of our Integral City engagements, we call this method AQAL Systemic Constellation Work. Guided by Integral City’s Master Code, we will co-create conditions for participants to engage conference outcomes that take care of Self, Others, ITC2015 and the Places of our hearts and homes.

We hope that you can join our Pop-Up Playground Lunch, any or all days (July 17, 18, 19, at12:30-1:45pm.)

Click here for 10 reasons to Join our Pop-Up Playground.

 

Integral City Calendar for People Quarter

• July 16-17: Integral Theory Conference 2015 – Integral City will sponsor 3 Lunchtime Pop-Up Playground Constellations
• September 11: Imagine Durant Policy Makers Dialogue

 

Celebrating “People-focus” in the Third Quarter 2015

June 21 marks the start of what Integral City calls the People Quarter (from June 21 toSeptember 20). What people perspectives have been inspired by the Pope’s Integral Ecology message or Durant’s Integral City practices? What inspirations, actions, methods revitalize you?  We notice that People are gaining deeper, wider, broader insights of our Planet of Cities connecting not only because of disasters and sustainability challenges but because they are motivated to wake up, grow up and clean up. Visit us at Integral City Collective on Facebook and post a short update or a photo.

Meshful Blessings for June Solstice from

Marilyn Hamilton and the Integral City Core Team

PS

Here are some some Free Resources for learning how Integral City practitioners work with People:

1. Imagine Durant Thought Leaders Harvest Report

2. Tam Lundy’s leadership tip (offered in Integral Leadership Review – Canada Issue offered a Leadership Tip on Generative Change) explains how leaders generate change through both integral thinking and practice.

Connect to Tam’s key pointing out instructions for generativity that align well with Integral City’s 12 Intelligences here and download her Generative Change: A Practical Primer.

3. Here are three blogs that give “gentle” Integral City guidance to share as “Householder Dharma”:

Householder Dharma: Optimizing Home Base with Values

Householder Dharma: Connecting People, Improving Health

Householder Dharma: Fifty Shades of Green Make Walking Delightful

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Integral City Reflective Organ – March Equinox 2015: Signs & Wonders of Planetary Shifts

This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is Planet.

Popular wisdom urges us to examine human behavior so that the quality of human life can be improved. We focus on overpopulation, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as evidence of the mess and stress that humans have contributed to life on Earth. It is obvious that our behaviors affect not only our own species but virtually every other species with whom we share this planet. However threatening these undeniable conditions are, they are the very signals that indicate our next awakening to a deeper consciousness.   

Hamilton, M. (2008). Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive. Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers, p. 70

Equinox Signs & Wonders Mark a New Story for our Planet of Cities

Super Moon. Aurora Borealis. Solar Eclipse. Spring/Fall Equinox.

So many signs and wonders mark our shift of perspective in 2015 from the calendar quarter of Power to the calendar quarter of Planet. It is impossible not to be awed by these celestial events – but it is also possible to use them as a Kosmic fulcrum for thinking about a New Story for the city that is planetcentric.

Thinking like a planet brings into focus not only the fractal scales of life that impact the city (see the comments below in From City 2.0 to Nation 2.0) – but it also frames a New Story for all cities as members of a Planet of Cities. This New Story may be a stretch for those who do not follow the science and technology that is taking humans into space (whether that is close to planetary home like Virgin Galactic’s or Elon Musk’s Space X Tourism Trials – or at the farther reaches of the solar system where water has been discovered on Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons).

But every culture has a cosmology that explains the origins of their tribe (if not our species) and thus creates a lineage that explains how human settlements have come to pass. As those lineages have survived, matured and complexified through the stages of traditional, modern, post-modern and even integral, they have created a trajectory of stories that account for the emergence of each stage.

Some storytellers, are not merely historians – but are visionaries of futures yet to emerge. The idea of an Integral City as a complex living, evolutionary, integral human system has its roots not only in this trajectory of human histories – but also includes the lineages that trace our emergence from Kosmic consciousness, stardust, molecular building blocks and earliest lifeforms that account for our capacities and resilience today. (We remember fondly theaccounts shared in IC20C Interviews with the Thought Leaders of Eco-Intelligence William Rees and Brian Eddy; Emergence/Resilience Intelligence, Buzz Holling; and Living Intelligence Elisabet Sahtouris.)

However, when we gathered the 60 Thought Leaders, Designers and Practitioners for Integral City 2.0 Online Conference 2012, it was surprising to us that so many did not know each other’s work. Each had a New Story to tell about one or more of the Integral City 12 Intelligences – but many authors were still struggling for recognition within their field of expertise, not to mention outside that field.

An explanation for the asymmetric distribution of New Stories that relate to one another has been offered by Brian and Mary Nattrass, who ask: How ARE We To Go On Together: Our Evolutionary Crossroads.  As pioneer practitioners of The Natural Step (to leading global manufacturers like Nike) the Nattrasses have learned the hard way that all New Stories have a growth curve. When the first visionary tells the New Story, it is considered as fantastic, futuristic and unrealistic. It is rejected by most as mere fable, but captured by a few “imagineers” who become champions of the New Story and even activists for its realization.

But every New Story encounters a gallery of critics and naysayers, with vested interests in the continuation of the Old Story. This sets up an active round of dissonances with the stability of Old Story pitted against the reframing of the New Story in negative terms. The Nattrasses speak to the early proponents of Sustainability creating the narrative for “Unsustainability”. This Critical Stage is a hard fight – and in the Planet of Cities started (and continues) with criticisms of urban pollution, overpopulation, sprawl and inner city blight.

The Critical Stage is a “refiner’s fire” where many activists burn themselves out. But those who survive (by dint of not just effort but by the energies of passion and purpose) discover a shift point away from the negative dissonances into encounters with positive dissonances.

In this Transformational stage design, science, experimentation and practice uncover new possibilities. Taxonomies of “Unsustainability” become replaced by taxonomies of “Smart Technologies”, “Smart Cities, “Renewability”, “Natural Systems” and “Resilience”.

The New Story is finally able to gain hold, after the Transformational stage has emerged new patterns of behaviour, economic successes, and technological results. When the New Story is at its peak, we can look backward and notice the resilience cycle that can be traced from early stage dissonances, to late stage breakdowns, through the desert of despair and finally into the refreshing sunlight of discovery that the New Story awakens for all.

Thanks to the Nattrass’s Story about the crossroads of evolutionary stories, it is easy to see that Integral City and a Planet of Cities is a new story about the life of cities. It may be a while before the stages of Criticism and Transformation complete. But from the perspective of a Planet of Cities, we can be attentive to the telling and re-telling of the New Story of Integral City.

The greater the dissonances the New Story creates in the audiences of the Old Story, the greater the tensions that will attract the New Story into our orbit (like the Super Moon), light up the skies of awakening (like the Aurora Borealis) and more quickly eclipse the Old Story with the New Story. Perhaps like the Equinox our stories hang in the middle of their trajectories between the dark of the Old Story about the city and the light of the New Story about Integral City?

(PS: For inspirations from How ARE We to Go on Together? Our Evolutionary Crossroads by Brian and Mary Nattrass, check out 3 Blogs that explore how the New Story of Integral City is being transformed at the individual, organizational and the climate issue level – see the links in the Resources section below.)

From City 2.0 to Nation 2.0: Prototyping Leadership for a Planet in Transition

The planetary view of the city seeded by Integral City 2.0 Online Conference (IC20C)  has been transplanted to exploration of a Nation 2.0.

The last six months gave Integral City AQtivists an unexpected opportunity to focus on the scale of the Nation in human systems – specifically the Nation of Canada. As Guest and Associate Editors of Integral Leadership Review – Canada Issue, Marilyn Hamilton and Joan Arnott had the honour to curate contributions from 25 Canadian authors. These authors explored leadership on all scales from Planet to Cultures, Organizations, Others and Self, using integral lenses from multiple lineages. They cast light on the special role that nations play in creating the trans-urban, trans-cultural habitat that connects cities in a single country. (See further observations in the Free Resources Items 2 and 3 below.)

Of special interest to readers of this newsletter, key contributors from IC20C demonstrated ongoing leadership with Integral Design and Practice expertise in this issue.

• IC20C Integral Thought Leader, Ken Wilber found a voice through the Book Review by Diana Claire Douglas of Vanessa Fisher and Sarah Nicholson’s recent release of (Re)Joining the Conversation: Commenting on Integral Voices on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: Critical Inquiries
• IC20C Cultural Designer, Gail Hochachka explored Corporate Values Chains inIntegral Transformation of Value Chains: One Sky’s Integral Leadership Program in the Brazil Nut Value Chain in Peru and Bolivia
• IC20C Eco-Designer, Ian Wight explored Transformative Education in From Practice to Praxis – as Transformative Education: Leading at the Integral/Professional Interface?
• IC20C Inquiry Designer, Tam Lundy offered both Leadership Tip and a Practical Primer Guide for Leading Generative Change
• IC20C Producer and Interviewer Marilyn Hamilton brought Coaching Wisdom to the issue through an interview with Integral Coaching Canada co-founders Laura Divineand Joanne Hunt
• IC20C Speaker Coordinator, Linda Shore explored City Leadership in Is True Integral Leadership Possible?
• IC20C Evolutionary Intelligence Practitioner, Bruce Sanguin’s work was highlighted with a retrospective review of his 5 books by Trevor Malkinson.
• IC20C Interviewer & Chief Harvester, Beth Sanders explored Self-Leadership in Re-membering My Inherent Wilderness

Team ARGO: Meshworker of the Year 2014

Team ARGO in Izhevsk, Russia created Russia’s first citizen initiated and produced urban conference. Accomplishing “lift-off” in the first half of 2014 and subsequent dissemination of the best practices through 360 degree communications, Team ARGO are the natural winners of the Meshworkers of the Year Award, 2014….

Team ARGO’s meshworking is effectively catalyzing a shift in many city systems, so that new – living city capacities are emerging. Effectively the city systems appear to be reorganizing themselves into something more internally resonant to their urban fabrics and externally coherent with (even turbulent) life conditions. (This is a very different story than what we hear about Russia in the western news/media.)

…Team ARGO seems to have tapped into the inner domains of intention, purpose and culture in all four city voices.

Team ARGO’s meshworking intelligences are actively contributing to research, planning and management in cities across Russia with a vital center in Izhevsk.  Integral City is proud to award Team ARGO the Meshworker of the Year Award, 2014.

Read the full story here.

Logo for ARGO –  Association of City Development, Izhevsk, Udmurtia, Russia

 

 Integral City Calendar for Planet Quarter

• March 22, 2015: UN World Water Day
  • Kosmos Journal, Water of Life Newsletter
• April 22, 2015: 45th Annual Earth Day – A Billion Acts of Green
  • Earth Day Ecological Footprint Calculator
• April 7, 2015: International New Town Institute, Rotterdam NL Conference
  • Urban Africa New strategies for the world’s fastest urbanizing continent
• May 20–23, 2015: UrbanFest 2015 Forum of Living Cities, Izhevsk, Udmurtia, Russia
• Online TV: Earthcare Documentaries

​PLUS Advance Notice

• July 16–17: Integral Theory Conference 2015 – Integral City will sponsor the Conference-Within-A-Conference

 

Celebrating “Planet-focus” for Extra Altitude in the Coming Quarter of 2015 

March 21 marks the start of what IC calls the Planet Quarter (from March 21 to June 20). What planetary perspectives do you bring to honour Earth and her Planet of Cities at this time of year? What alignments, assets, resources and lineages revitalize you?  We notice the Planet of Cities connecting, collaborating, and networking a little more each year. Visit us at Integral City Collective on Facebook and post a short update or a photo.

Meshful Blessings for March Equinox from

Marilyn Hamilton and the Integral City Core Team

PS 

Here are some some Free Resources for gaining perspective on the New Story of our Planet of Cities:

1.     Integral City Blogs inspired by How ARE We To Go On Together: Our Evolutionary Crossroads by Brian and Mary Nattrass:

• Women Tell the Stories that Transform Old Story into New Story 
• Transportation Crossroads in the City
• Cities are Evolving Climate Story

2.     A Totem for Curating a Story of Leadership in Canada – explores the Scales of Leadership in Human Systems

 

3.     From Totem Guides and Lock Masters to World Legacy Light – explores the vertical emergence of leadership capacity in Human Systems

 

4.     Je Suis Charlie = Ebola Vaccine for the Human Soul?

 

5.     Integral City New Story Links

a.     Blog Series celebrating the New Story of the City for World Cities Day.

b.     The Story of The Integral City 2.0 Online Conference: A Fractal Non-Local Leap Toward Kosmocentricity has just been released in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, Vol. 9, No. 1

 

6. January – February, 2015 issue of Integral Leadership Review – a special issue on Canada (guest edited by Integral City Founder, Marilyn Hamilton) with contributions that build leadership capacities for an emerging Planet of Integral Cities across teams, organizations, sectors and cities.

 

 

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