Life/Work - Issue 39

Consider something as basic as how we understand and treat depression. Psychotherapy typically focuses on the upper-left dimension: how sadness is felt and experienced, as well as its underlying causes. Prozac represents an upper-right quadrant intervention -- ignoring cause and focusing instead on the symptom and its underlying physiological basis. Family therapy focuses on the lower-left quadrant, trying to understand the social context in which depression arises. Finally, a lower-right approach might address whatever environmental factors accounts for the depression -- poverty, for example. Wilber recognizes that each of those methods of intervention represents a form of truth, a piece of the puzzle, but that none of them offers a complete answer on its own.

As for the levels of development, Wilber has combed through hundreds of maps in disciplines ranging from the cognitive to the affective to the moral, as part of his effort to understand the broad pattern of growth from body to mind to spirit. The vast majority of people, says Wilber, don't advance beyond "first-tier thinking," which is characterized by a belief that one's own values and own worldview are the only correct ones. Second-tier thinking, on the other hand, reflects the capacity of a person to understand the entire spectrum of interior development and the recognition that each level plays a critical role within the larger whole. "The advantage of second-tier integral awareness is that it more creatively helps with the solutions to pressing problems," Wilber writes in A Theory of Everything. "In grasping big pictures, it can help suggest more cogent solutions."

Taken together, the quadrants create a map of a complete life. Wilber, for example, lives his own life on multiple planes. At the physical level, he is a very careful eater (high protein, low carbohydrates), a proponent of vitamins and supplements, and a reluctant-but-dedicated weight lifter: During the past decade, he has added 30 pounds of muscle to his once-spindly 6-foot-4-inch frame. His spiritual practice for the past 30 years has included two hours of meditation each day -- from 3 AM to 5 AM.

Wilber's intellectual interests are wide-ranging. In a house already filled with thousands of books, Wilber still orders as many as 20 new ones each week from Amazon.com with titles like The Morals of Modernity and Why We Are Not Nietzschians. He typically skims at least two or three books each morning, as part of his ongoing research for his next book, and he leaves his TV on the whole time. At night, he relaxes with his girlfriend by watching movies, by reading such magazines as Elle and ID (Industrial Design), and by listening to the music of bands like The Crystal Method, Garbage, and No Doubt. "If I'm going to write about the zeitgeist," he says, "I've got to know what the zeit is geisting."

At its most practical level, Wilber's work aims to define the nature of a more complete and integrated life. The implications are evident in many spheres, including how to envision a more productive and more humane workplace. Most theories of management, for example, focus only on one or two of Wilber's quadrants. Behavioral (upper right) and systems (lower right) approaches to management tend to discount the importance of people's emotions and values (upper left), as well as of the subjective impact of the cultures in which they work (lower left). Upper-left interventions, such as emotional-intelligence training, tend to pay little attention to the role of the external environment.

"You can refract a lot of business problems through the prism of the four quadrants," says Warren Bennis, 75, the noted author and business-administration professor at the University of Southern California. "Wilber has created a unifying system for this chaotic age we're living in. What he has to say should give a lot of thought leaders and businesspeople pause to reflect on the monochromatic way that they see the world."

Or, as Wilber himself puts it: "We are working with demonstrably broken maps -- ones that are partial, fragmented, disjoined, and inadequate. What I've tried to do is create new maps using orienting generalizations for which there is incontrovertible evidence. More-accurate maps of the terrain help you get around more effectively."

Fred Kofman, now a business consultant and formerly a professor who cofounded the Learning Center at MIT with Peter Senge, believes that Wilber offers a more embracing perspective on the subject than the more-renowned Senge does. "Ken sees the full picture -- not just systems theory but also philosophy, psychology, even states of consciousness. He is the scientist who has created the principles of physics. Now we need engineers to apply his principles to build airplanes."