‘The Path of Vertical Leadership’ is first of all, a path.  From where and to where I can hardly say, because this path leads out of the darkness, into the light of This Moment, and then back into the darkness.

Our thinking minds are filled with ideas of who we are, who others are & what the world is. On this path we cultivate the capacity to objectify these habitual ways of seeing so that we might enter what professor Bill Torbert calls the state of ‘Action Inquiry’. Action Inquiry is both a description of the way of being of the Alchemist (Turquoise) level, and a practice to help cultivate the state, and eventually stage.

This path fosters growth from the conventional levels of development – which mostly orient from internal mental maps – to post-convention levels – which slowly surrender the impulse to try to represent reality, preferring to stay as present as possible, and to work in real time with – and as – the field of one’s direct experience, rather than with mental representations of supposedly outer things and people.

Within an integral context the term vertical often refers to ascent.  In this case, that is included, however the verticality of this path is more about going down – more fully into and as life – than up and out of anything.

Finally this is a path for leaders: Not the kind of leader who cultivates followers, but rather leaders who make everyone around them into leaders as well.  Leaders like Greta Thunberg – who don’t boss anyone else around, but rather empower others through their own stand for more beauty and integrity in the world.