As you can see from the tombstone data to the left, I just joined I-I a few weeks ago.
There are as of this writing 4433 members. 500 members have posted one or more times. Therefore approximately 10% of the members are contributing.
Of those 500 contributing members, 320 have contributed more that one post and 120 more than ten posts.
Of those 120 members, about 25 have contributed 100 or more posts. They have posted 10,111 of the total 12,896 posts. About 80% of all posts. Alfredo Pareto strikes again.
The behavior of an individual is impossible to predict but the behavior of any group of individuals can be predicted with 80% certainty. In any group, you will have an 80% certainty that after it reaches about 150 members, cohesion will begin to fail and the group splinter. In any group, you will have an 80% certainty that after it reaches 12 members, a leader or disruptor will emerge (a disruptor is someone who brings a different agenda or agendas with equal force as a leader). Therefore with our 25 top contributors we can assume that we probably have at least two individuals who are attempting to lead the group or disrupt it. This is significant because if they are both disruptors they represent approximately 1,289 posts collectively. I have reviewed a sampling of the posts of each of the top 25 contributors and there is among them no disruptor. From a leadership point of view, this is excellent news for those of us who are new here.
A leader or disruptor is not made so simply because of their number of posts (i.e. getting your attention). What matters is to what degree do their messages align with the groups stated agenda and how much persuasive power they bring to their posts. Persuasion builds relationships and relationships build power.
The process of developing relationships (on which leadership or disruption depend) of any kind follows four steps: attraction, relevance, empathy, and authenticity. If you make eye contact, smile at me and initiate a conversation or positively communicate in some other way towards me (actively or passively) then I will find you attractive. If you resonate with my desires, needs or goals then I will find you relevant. If you feel as I do about things, I will feel empathy with you. Finally, if you walk the talk, I will feel you are authentic. At that point a validated trust bond forms and I will become your real friend. Fail any one of these steps and the relationship will not grow beyond that point. Although there are disruptive individuals in the group of 25, none of those individuals pass the relevance test. Without relationships, they have little power to disrupt the groups goals and the leaders task.
Again, for someone new joining this forum, its good to see there are no surprises and no serious conflicts. What I do see is a struggle with the challenge of organization. No surprise there either given the size of the undertaking and the psychographics and even the demographics of most of the members. Building an organization does take years, but I-I was established in 1998. As I see it, the fact that it is still struggling with organizational issues is not due to any lack of vision, mission, goals or values – it is clearly because it does not have a corporate/government culture. As one our members so passionately put it in a recent post, “If Bill Gates were in charge of I-I, 90% of America would be integral by now!” Perhaps, but at any rate Bill Gates is not in charge, Ken Wilber is, and Ken is very aware that organizational science is not his strong suite, thus he seeks a CEO.
Here I would be so brass-faced as to advise Ken, whose work I admire shamelessly and who I feel considerable personal affection for. Because I am responsible for about 40 staff and have four direct reports as well as overall responsibility for the operations and human resource management of the company that employs me, I take my leadership duties very seriously. Among other things, to constantly improve my leadership skills, I study other organizations. I have about 8,000 pages of printed documents relating to leadership and organization in the US armed forces. I also study the organizational and leadership practices of the church, sales and marketing businesses, political parties, organized crime and police forces and a variety of other organizations that have been very successful in achieving their objectives.
Granted these are mostly BLUE cultures with doctrine, policies and practices that are consistent with the blue meme, much of which you would find as deplorable and unacceptable as I do. However there are babies there in the bathwater. There is a great deal these organizations do right and well. They are effective. The trick of course is to find and apply their excellent methods without being seduced by their proximity to various kinds of power. Here is where the Integral approach is such a useful practice with its spiritual focus and shadow work.
I will recommend to I-I one book. We are all readers here and no doubt all read many books. Yet towards this issue, the challenge of organization, I recommend just one. That is because this book incorporates all the best practices of all the organizations I mentioned earlier. The book is called “The Purpose Driven Church” by Pastor Rick Warren. I am not a Christian by definition and not recommending this book for its religious message. One can apply the organizational principles in this book to any subject and it will work. On a complimentary note, I-I has something very important that is key to the success of this or any organizational model – doctrine. Like the term or not, doctrine is key to the success of any large undertaking and I-I certainly has plenty of it. Organizing around a foundation of doctrine is fairly straightforward as you will see if you read the book. A word of caution: if you read the book you will need to constantly mentally translate terms like ‘Christ’ and ‘Church’ to terms like ‘science’ and ‘organization’.
I am interested in Pastor Warren because of the organizational lessons that can be learned from him. I am not the only one. Forbes magazine called Warren’s book “the best book on entrepreneurship, business and investment in print”. Management guru Peter Drucker considered churches like Warren’s to be “the fulfillment of his business theories”. This is high praise from organizational gurus.
By now, I suspect I am up to my neck in the blue/orange pigeon hole in your indoctrinated mind. As I recall however, turquoise sees the entire rainbow as true, good and useful. I think I-I needs more blue/orange, and within the context of the integral approach its dark side will not flourish. A quick content analysis of I-I forum posts indicates a significant imbalance – there is a marked leaning towards spiritual and intellectual matters and far too little on matters of organization and operations. As I understand it I-I is all about balance.
Now, I am from Canada. We are mostly left wingers up here. Social values researchers working for a political party would put us about where they would put Minnesota. We would have elected Senator Kerry by a landslide. In particular, I am from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Other Canadians refer to us in a condescending manner as living in “Lotus Land” because we are so “far out”. We do things like read a lot of socialist material by authors like Noam Chomsky, meditate, enjoy hiking and eat tofu. Guilty on all counts. So even though I am recommending you read a book by a man that the neo-cons just love, I come from a culture that is antithetical to their value system and I am suggesting that you read the book wearing turquoise glasses. There are babies in that bathwater.
If you are interested in this type of information, links etc. can be found on my blog at
http://socialcirclescanada.blogspot.com/2006/10/social-circles-canada-in-applebees.html
Rick Bateman
Founder
Social Circles Canada - A New Kind Of Health Club
socialcirlces.ca
+48° 25' 43.45", -123° 20' 10.20" (hint: Google Maps)