Transcend and Include: how everything grows
When I was a teenager a strange thing happened in my family.
My dad and my brother became obsessed with an American philosopher called Ken Wilber.
Honestly, it was quite annoying.
They had a thing that they shared (that I couldn’t or wouldn’t get excited about). And they talked about it all the time.
But much MORE annoying is that they were right about Wilber. He has some amazing ideas.
Ideas I keep coming back to. (Luckily, they talked about them so much that I understand many even though I’ve only ever read one of Wilber’s books).
It’s an incredible idea that is useful over and over and over again.
Essentially it is this: we think that as we grow we leave behind the previous stage of growth or development and move on to a new one.
But in reality, we transcend and include the previous stage: we take it with us, but in the next stage we are bigger, including not just what we were, but more.
This is as true in our psychological development as it is in our careers. We may think, for example, that we are leaving everything from our previous career behind, but in reality we are transcending and including it. We take everything from our previous career with us, but we also grow more capacity: we can choose when to use what we had at the previous level, and when to use what we have now that is new.
In a way, that is one of the crucial contributions of Ken Wilber (at least, I think it is - you’d have to ask my brother or my dad to be sure).
What seems to hold us back is the idea that we must move from one level stage of development or one worldview to another, entirely different one.
In fact, the crucial move - the integral move, which is at the core of Wilber’s Integral Theory - is to take what is good about one extreme AND what is good about the other extreme, and integrate them together to form our new perspective: transcending and including both.
I’ve seen this show up for my clients in their careers.
I’ve seen it show up for myself in my business.
I’ve seen it show up in relationships and worldviews.
It definitely happened to me with my politics.
My brother and I found it happening to both of us in a conversation this week about technology: at first singing the praises of musical streaming services before then waxing lyrical about the power of the physical mix tape.
In the end, our only way out was through: to integrate. It isn’t that the old technology is uniquely better; it isn’t that the new is. With awareness, we can transcend and include both: having our hearts and minds touched by the instant and incredibly broad access to music we have today and by the amazing conditions that were created when only a certain number of songs would fit on a CD, and when it took absolutely ages to put them there. We can now do both, and we can choose, too.
Humans - in the face of complexity - often default to simple, black and white stories. That’s one of the many things I learned from the developmental psychologist Jennifer Garvey Berger.
Black and white stories don’t stand up to the world and run us into all kinds of trouble.
Once we have awareness that often the development of our worldviews or opinions comes from taking one black and white extreme or another…
And once we know that the move that will enable us to be more skilful in the world, instead, is to transcend and include both extremes: taking with us the useful parts of both points of view…
Then, we can be more active in shifting things. Looking for the ways to transcend and include what came before.
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PS My best coaching work often happens with leaders dealing with the complexities of a team and ambitions to create change. You can read more about what is at the core of much of that work in my latest long-read article: Leading With Honour.
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.