Custom Training

Rich Variety of Workshops

In addition to its scheduled trainings and workshops, Integral City offers a rich variety of trainings that can be hosted exclusively for your organization and tailored to your organization’s needs.

The audiences for these trainings include:

executive teams, CEO’s, COO’s, CFO’s
mayors, city councillors and directors
health authorities
school boards, school administrators, superintendents
professors, teachers, early childhood educators
planners and analysts in local, state, federal governments
managers and engineers from municipal planning, education and health sectors
community development professionals
healthy community directors, facilitators
consultants, coaches
facilitators, instructors, OD professionals
HR & OD Directors
designers, architects, developers
leaders, managers, supervisors
interns, students, adult learners
accountants, strategic planners
Civil Society Boards, Staff, Committees
active retirees

The customized trainings we offer are listed below and are organized into these categories:

Leaders
Women
Teams/Organizations/Associations
Communities/Cities
Regions/Nations/Globe
Urban Research Methodologies

Trainings can be in-person or online. Costs vary depending on the program, location, and other factors.

Please contact us if you would like more information about any of these programs, or to arrange one for your organization.

Leaders

Leadership That’s Always One Step Ahead

How do you lead in a workplace that is always changing? Is your leadership approach appropriate to the values and worldviews of the people you are called to lead? How do leaders develop strategies that keep them one step ahead of change? This course will engage leaders with values and change to help them stay one step ahead of those they are leading. This workshop will use online self-assessment, classroom lecture and feedback, small group work, experiential exercises and/or case studies.

Discovering the Artistry of Leadership for a Changing World

This two-day session creates learning conditions where leaders are granted artistic license to experience the never-ending quest in their leadership story. Leaders are guided to gain deep insights, through artistic expressions of their evolutionary, developmental, self-organizing journey. Leaders interpret their leadership values, using multiple art-forms to tell their story and understand it within an Integral City framework in order to open gateways for discovering the future art of their leadership practice.

Women

Quantum Woman: How Are We Awakening to the Integral Age?

This is an inquiry, for women only, about the evolution of women; how women contribute to our species’ survival, adaptation and emergence; and what is natural, needed and next for women at this time in evolution.

The objective of this inquiry is to reframe our understanding of integral and spiral human system dynamics from the paradigm of the double helix to the paradigm of the triple helix. The triple helix recognizes that women and men have separate but intertwining evolutionary journeys with their life conditions. (The double helix of Clare Graves does not differentiate the uniquely embodied realities of women and men.) Quantum Woman makes visible, the woman who has been conflated with the man in the double helix view of the human evolutionary journey. We explore woman as an adaptive, relational, inspirational co-evolutionary partner who has enabled the journey of human emergence through survival hearths and family clans, even up to and including patriarchal hierarchies, bureaucracies, competitive enterprises and social networks. Beyond the emergence of the humanistic acceptance of diversity and equality, Quantum Woman asks, what is woman’s role in re-leasing, re-forming and re-membering the human system through the intelligences of flex-flow into new ways of living, learning and leading? This inquiry integrally supports women to explore who they are called to be in the Quantum Leap era of human evolution.

Co-presented with Dr. Elizabeth Debold, Former Senior Editor, EnlightenNext

Teams, Organizations, Associations

4 Questions That Can Release Potential for Well Being

Discover how the answers to four simple questions can tell us the natural place to apply resources and energy to further the well-being of a leader, team, organization, community or city. Humans naturally create complex living systems. Our integral approach provides clear insight into how resources, efforts and collaboration can be best invested to release the potential for well being.

Dialogue, Deliberation and Design: Connecting All the Dots
Integral City reveals how to focus and mesh authority, power and influence for appropriate collaboration and governance at all levels of human systems. This workshop introduces the insights for designing elegant, natural, systemic problem-solutions that meet people and address situations where they are.

MeshSCAN for Optimizing Team Performance: Accessing Multiple Intelligences in the Dynamic Workplace

This retreat provides an introduction to Integral City through the MeshSCAN process and technology. Participants gain insights about their priorities, values, readiness for change. It explores the foundations of Spiral Dynamics integral as a common language for team effectiveness. Individuals in small and large groups, are coached to apply communication strategies that bridge workplace cultures. Post-Course Coaching available.

Optional Co-Facilitators: Michael Keller

Emerging Organization: Exploring Complex Adaptive Teams and Organizations

Participants consider the paradigms of leadership and organization that emerge from their experience, values, worldviews and environment. They examine the contexts of their organizations in the workplace where leadership and learning occur and learn:

how organizations co-emerge with the people who lead and work in them
the relationship between 21st C Leaders and 21st C Organizations
How different forms of organization co-exist, interconnect and serve stakeholders

Organization Wellness

This session explores the patterns, processes and structures of organizations in relation to their identity, relationships and information sharing. Organization wellness is explored through stages of development, sectoral maturity, priorities and the integral spiral lenses of developmental, evolutionary perspectives. Participants gain discernment between natural system growth, transitions, transformations and dis-ease.

Deep Listening

Participants ground and centre themselves for organizing the way in which they give and receive feedback from self and others. They explore the power of guided reflection through the lenses of perception, thinking, feeling and wanting. This builds a foundation for mutual trust and respect, team performance and communication.

Communities, Cities

Generational Cycles, Saecula and Cities: What do Integral Boomers, Gen X, Y & Z need to let go of? What do we need to create anew?

Are cities living organisms – entities that are born and grow with life cycles like humans? Do you wrestle with large systemic gridlocks or small hyperlocal mashups? In this session we delve into the principles of “transcend and include” through the lens of Integral Cities and generational cycles. We will explore what we might have to release, in order to create wellbeing in our communities and cities. We may not solve this evolutionary challenge in half a day! Engage your multi-generational awareness and integral perspectives to identify actions that awaken the individual and collective intelligences that move us forward. (Keynote, half day, full day workshops) Dr. Hamilton with Cherie Beck

Meshworking Integral Intelligences for Resilient Environments; Enabling Order and Creativity in the Human Hive

How does the practise of meshworking expand integral intelligences for the human hive (aka city)? This session shows how meshworks integrate the self-organizing network of city relationships with hierarchies of structural organization, so that collaborations are recalibrated through networks to communities and holarchies of practise. Drawing on years of “glocal” civic activism, transnational inquiry, organizational capacity growing and public engagement, the presenter links the intelligences of meshworking and navigating with integral vital signs monitors. Join us to discover how the practical application of meshworking stimulates life conditions where integral capacities can naturally evolve and enable resilience in the human hive. (Keynote, half day, full day workshops)

Waking Up the Human Hive to Integral Education and Ecology

In this workshop we explore the role of 12 evolutionary intelligences for thriving in the human hive. Dr. Hamilton will draw on her recent research and her book, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, demonstrating the special role of education to integrate the city back into a whole. The presentation will show the vital intersection of ecology and education and how they contribute to waking up the human hive to its responsibilities and possibilities in the integral era. (Keynote, half day, full day workshops)

Sustainable Community Development Graduate Certificate

The Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Community Development responds to the growing need for leaders in communities to excel at understanding and leading sustainable development. This 6-month interdisciplinary graduate program builds a foundation of leading practices for exploring resilient systems and building community engagement. The program focuses on developing leadership skills to integrate the economic, social, cultural and environmental capacities for developing sustainable communities. The program is designed for professionals with a desire to learn how to build tomorrow’s thriving communities, appealing to practitioners from a diverse range of backgrounds, including NFP, NGO, government, urban and rural planners, legal, financial, health care and transportation professionals, educators and community advocates, city managers and other professionals working in communities.

How the Program is structured

This Graduate Certificate has an on campus residency focused on Uncovering Potentials for Adaptive Change and is followed by two online courses: Building Community Engagement and Exploring Foundations for Resilient Systems. The program concludes with the presentation of a capstone project. This program places emphasis on the development of the people skills required to build sustainable communities. Through multiple experiences of team building, learning in community and working for a Community of Interest, it offers dynamic, evolutionary, intelligent practices, tools and frameworks throughout all course modules.

For the course a Community of Interest is selected who becomes the Beneficiary of the 6 Month’s Studies & Capstone Project

The program is focused around three leverage points:

Understanding Community in Context of its environment, eco-region and evolution:
- Explores case studies of leading practices in systems, science and social structures
Designing Capacity Building Systems for people, organizations, communities and cities:
- Challenges and designs bridges across the silos, stovepipes and solitudes that fragment current community sectors
Developing Strategies for Evaluating, Decision Making and Civic Engagement:
- Offers designs, strategies and tools for community engagement that build social capital

These leverage points provide the structure for course delivery and culminate in the capstone project. The Community of Interest will be introduced in the October Residency and continue to be a focus of applied learning in the two Distance Learning courses and will be the focus of the Capstone Project, evidencing Course Completion.

How Communities Learn to Thrive in Challenging Times

Moving from Concern to Action: Communicating for Change

Are you working to influence personal, social, political, or cultural change in your community? Are you curious about how and why different people understand, respond to, and interpret change? Do you grapple with how to influence change in diverse settings in which people have different perspectives, worldviews, and ways of reacting to and making sense of change?

We are living in a time in which change has as many variations as people who experience it. Whether you are in the business of community health, literacy, economic development, sustainability, local government or transportation management, you are witnessing the emergence of new (global and local) challenges, opportunities, and shifting contexts in which you do your work.
Do you wonder how cohesion and a unifying direction could improve our current direction? How can we find the unifying threads that support social change?
For some, change is new, exciting, and an invitation to innovation and creativity. For others change can be scary, risky, and paralyzing.

This workshop will support you to develop your knowledge, skills, and abilities to effectively influence change through your communications with diverse audiences. It helps you understand how you can translate your message/communication so that people can hear it and align your message so that people can act to support it.

This workshop helps to uncover a common, unifying, and integrating framework that can guide us in times of turbulence and promote physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social values and community capacity building that considers the whole person in the whole community.

The Map, The Mesh and the Human Hive: 3 Module Telecourse

Module 1 The Map (Integral Capacity)

Module 2 The Mesh (Complex Relationships)

Module 3 The Human Hive (Resilient Adaptiveness)

Each session is recorded and three chapters of my Talking Book Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive will be downloadable and included in the fee.

Each session includes: Introductions, a Mini-lecture from me, Facilitated Discussion, Q&A, Summary.

Integral City: The City Behind the Story

This is an engaging and interactive keynote:

Listen to Marilyn’s reflections on how Abbotsford inspired her to think about cities in a new way and influenced her new book, Integral City
Discover how differences make a difference; unusual connections open new pathways; imagination creates city learning
Ask questions! Find out if your name, idea, past or future is in the book!!

Resilient cities adapt best when many different types of intelligences are integrated from diverse sources in a whole systems approach. Marilyn will reminisce about the Abbotsford people, events, life conditions and challenges that contribute to how she sees life in the “human hive” — the most complex system ever created by humans.

Regions, Nations, Globe

Regional Placemaking Through Meshworking

Cities and Regions are too often fractured by solitudes, silos and stovepipes (Dale, 2001). In order to emerge a view and practise of regional place that is whole and integral, meshworking integrates hierarchies and self-organizing webs of relationships, uniting data and people for effective action and outcomes. Meshworking as a practise can originate from the bottom of a system or the top of a system, creating complex structures that flex and flow, able to self-organize, while at the same time direct behaviour in dependable, learned ways. Meshworks, operate like our brains and appear to offer a powerful explanation of how communities, cities and regions function, evolve and place-make. Meshworkers act like catalysts in the system, using imagination, courage and powers of attraction to articulate intelligent designs from the meshing of the diversities in people and places. This session will describe the work of key meshworkers and their practises.

Communicating Planning by Design: A New Way of Lensing, Languaging and Aligning Differences in a Neighbourhood

Communication is the primary work medium of all planning. Yet few planners have learned how to uncover what’s beneath the cacophony of voices and emotions in the neighbourhood, how to translate between voices, or how to communicate for coherence. In this workshop, you will learn how to communicate with people who have different understandings of what counts.

Using an Appreciative Inquiry framework, the presenters will mesh the various interests in the room with discoveries from their work. They will share the results of their learning lab in the Spence Neighbourhood in 2007, and demonstrate how they used eight communication lenses – derived from Spiral Dynamics integral (SDi) – to design a communications strategy. You will learn how to recognize the different lenses, or thought patterns, of people in any neighbourhood. You will see how you can engage with various groups, even when they appear unfriendly. You will discover the secrets of “outing” the voices that need to be heard. Through practice, you will experience the potency of languaging your communication for different sets of ears and different contexts, so it can be heard and acted upon. You will learn how to align or ‘meshwork’ the messages, to reflect the community as a whole.

Sustaining Cities: Rethinking and Reframing Healthy Change

In today’s environment, change in cities can mean anything from rearranging the benches on the street; to implementing responses to systemic inequities like homelessness or drug abuse; agreeing on an official community plan; or responding to the chaos caused by toxic spills, natural disasters and cultural clashes. Regardless of the scale of change, cities need a framework large enough to hold an adaptive, responsive spectrum of analysis. This session will present you with an integral, practical model framework for sustaining healthy change in cities.

Helping Cities Do More With Less

Learn how Integral City Systems (ICS) is a value managed approach to urban management and development. Explore a decision making framework for both the built environment and quality of life. Examine human values systems and engineering techniques that optimize available resources for strategic outcomes. Learn a common language for stakeholder participation, professional expertise and dynamic urban change.

Flower Power In Your Global Village

How has your community become a global village? What do we know about the rich diversity of our communities that thrive below the surface of our observations and assumptions, like a flower bulb beneath the soil? A unique map, lets you appreciate how communities are emerging into global villages with qualities as vibrant as multi-coloured spring flowers. Explore what makes the quality of your work, personal actions, family life and spiritual development thrive or wither. Gain new insights into how your personal, professional and organizational values add “flower power” to the development of your community as a global village.

Bio-Security Challenges in the Global Village

The design for a secure Bio-Security for diseases in the Urban Environment needs to recognize the impact of the “Human Factor”. There are many jurisdictions involved in highly complex bio-threat situation. This brings into play the plurality of human systems and potential disconnections and breaches of any security system design. Solutions are found through urban planning, city leadership, & education.

From Risk to Resilience: Integral Scorecards as a New Standard for Urban Resilience Management

This session aims at reframing the risk management paradigm for the unplanned (and unplannable) risks in Urban Planning. This session introduces a new standard in establishing risk in urban areas.

Bridging the Global and Local Deep Divides: Deep Values, Integral Strategies and Design Tools

Reframe surface level issues around deep value codes that cause disruptions, conflicts and divides. Discover a set of tools and processes that contribute to designing, meshing and integrating invisible diversities. Explore case studies, research, and practical examples.

Integral City, Integral Nation, Integral World: New Maps for New Times

Frustrated with just “being the change” for new times? Get some new maps to “do the change”. Use new [integral] maps for new [ever dynamic] times. Marilyn shares her curiosity about what’s new for your community/city/nation and how you can map your answers to key questions to gain integral insights? Join Marilyn in an interactive session to explore and expand the integral maps she is collecting on what people say is important to them. Discover how the Maple Leaf Meme Project introduces integral and spiral dynamic frameworks to chart cultural values and capacities for change in cities, countries and the world.

Values-Based ROI, Integral Scorecards, and Vital Signs Monitors

Accountants have a new future! Cross-disciplinary research shows how accountants can move beyond even Balanced Needs Scorecards, to develop Values-Based ROI and Vital Signs Monitors. This workshop will explore the patterns from hard and soft sciences that make possible multi-dimensional vital signs monitors to track the health of human systems in teams, organizations and cultures. The presentation will share research, pilot projects and publications, demonstrating how designing integral vital signs monitors offers whole new perspectives for accountants, who can describe benchmarks for what we want to change, how to track the change and how we develop processes to influence change.

Integral Research Methodology

Integral Methods from the Margins: Finding Myself in the Research – A Retrospective of Integral Leadership Development Methods Using Online Dialogue Analysis, a Competency Development Framework and Action Research

This retrospective explores three integral methodologies from the presenter’s decade of self/other discovery as researcher, professor, writer and leadership learning process designer. Dr. Hamilton shares the Ethnographic Codebook developed for her dissertation, studying learning and leadership in the self-organizing online Berkana Community of Conversations. She outlines the integral competency framework, she co-designed for the Masters Leadership degree at Royal Roads University, to provide leadership development feedback by self/peer/instructor. Lastly Hamilton shares her experience in coaching 50 Action Research theses and how the integral competency framework, integral methodological pluralism and participatory action research can enable students gaining two developmental levels in two years. The presentation concludes with comparisons to newer leadership technologies and recommendations for further development.