Agile Transformation: The Movie?

by Michael K. Spayd

In a bygone time, when a popular book would come out, the next big announcement often regarded when the movie based on that book would be produced. Today, my long-awaited book is available in outlets worldwide. Agile Transformation: Using the Integral Agile Transformation Framework to Think and Lead Differently (coauthored with Michele Madore) was eight long years in the making. It provides a thoroughly holistic, Integral approach to that topic so important to many of us. I am genuinely hopeful that it will make the world a bit better place — at the very least, through exposing thousands of new readers to Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory.

In preparing for the book to finally get into reader’s hands, I have been doing some inner work. My reflections have led me back to my roots in Integral, and to a realization: I ran right into the fact that, in writing a book, you make some choices that inadvertently cut off certain lines of inquiry. The long process leading to publication means that at some point, the die is cast — the existing book structure cannot easily accommodate your own emergent thinking. You have to stop thinking new thoughts and concentrate on making the thoughts you had understandable to as many as possible. And so, the truth is, a part of me has moved on; I’m already thinking in some very new ways. I don’t even agree with every single thing we said in the book :-).

This partial truth comes crashing up against the hard fact that, with publication, colleagues across the world will be discovering the power of an Integral approach to transformation for the very first time. As the initiator of this work, I have the opportunity to fully meet their inquisitiveness with joy and my own re-discovery.

So I’ve decided to renew my relationship with Integral Theory, which began in 2007 at the Integral Spiritual Conference in Boulder. Any truly deep system — much like a great movie that can be watched again and again, each time with the experience of subtler nuance and deeper profundity — can be studied for a lifetime. To meet this moment, I have decided to commit to a refreshed study of Integral Theory, with the intention of being more facile with all aspects of the model, able to bring out more of its nuance and finer points, many of which could only be briefly covered in the book.

Though much of the material is updated or new since 2018, a good deal of the foundational principles and the framework itself have been in circulation since 2014, when I published an earlier version of Part I, holding multiple study groups on its content, and teaching it in ACI courses and Bootcamps. In that spirit, today I am announcing an initiative to create a substantial amount of new material — mostly video discussions with colleagues, at other times of me alone — that will at a minimum address the material in each chapter, and perhaps more specific topics that emerge from you, dear reader, as you work your way through the book’s complexity and promise. My hope is to make this an opportunity to bring my own thinking up to date, and to share it with so many of you who have supported me over the years.

I guess I could have just said that at the beginning: today, I’m announcing “Agile Transformation: The ‘Movie’”. But then, neither of us would have really understood why.