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