Integral Transformative We-Spaces and the Practice of Causal Leadership Communities
Chapter 4 in Cohering the Integral We Space, eds. Olen Gunnlaugson & Michael Brabant (Integral Publishing House, 2016), pp. 79–93
Fitch draws on more than ten years of Pacific Integral's work with over 200 participants to describe integral transformative we-spaces — the collective containers at the heart of the Generating Transformative Change program. His central move is developmental: our conception of "we" is not fixed, but evolves through six distinct person perspectives, from the concrete We of groups and rules, through the subtle We of contexts and paradigms, to a causal We in which the collective is the Kosmos itself. Each shift changes what a group is for, what it can hold, and what practice within it looks like. The chapter reports lessons learned — including where the field's dominant frameworks reached their limits — and offers key practices for we-space development.
This chapter describes the experiences, lessons learned, and essential practices of Causal Leadership communities, a form of integral transformative we-spaces central to the work of Pacific Integral. For over ten years, Pacific Integral has been exploring, facilitating, and researching transformative change in an integral, developmental context through its Generating Transformative Change (GTC) program, its own organization, and other communities of practice it has convened and participated in.
In this time period we have facilitated and engaged with dozens of different integral collective we-spaces, involving over 200 individuals and over durations ranging from months to several years. The core of this exploration has been the GTC program, which enacts and facilitates a new way of being and relating, which we refer to as Causal Leadership. This chapter describes our intentions, theoretical orientations, experiences and learning with our experiments in integral we-spaces, as well as offers what we see as key practices for we-space development.
Pacific Integral did not set out primarily to develop powerful we-spaces, but rather to facilitate the transformation of individuals and collectives, and to deepen our understanding of how the process of transformative change and development occurs. As we began to appreciate how this transformation must occur in real, intimate community, this endeavor led us directly into working more broadly with we-space, which ultimately became central to our work.
— From the chapter’s introduction.
We-space; Subtle We; Causal We; Kosmic We; Six person perspectives; Interpenetration of I and We; Collective intelligence; Shadow; STAGES model
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