Integrally-informed approaches to transformational leadership development. Paper presented at the 1st Biannual Integral Theory Conferece

This paper summarizes the key findings, interpretations and questions that result from a nine-month exploratory study of the emerging field of ‘generative change leader development’, and presents key components of an integrally-informed approach to developing deep-capacity leaders able to effect transformational change at organizational and societal levels. The study was based on interviews with observers of the field and program directors on five continents, as well as on analyses of websites, articles, and books. It benefits from the extensive experience that the research team gathered in decades of founding and leading diverse leadership networks as well as educational and training programs. While keeping in mind the larger leadership development field, we focused our exploration on medium to long-term development programs for what we call ‘generative ’ change leaders who work in and across the public, business and civil society sectors. We used two additional criteria for selecting programs: they must integrate the personal, interpersonal and systemic dimensions of change, and do so in service of individual, organizational and societa