Whole Foods is a $4 billion Fortune 500 company, the largest natural foods retail chain in the world, and a “Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For” for 8 years running. It donates generously to charitable causes locally and globally, and, among other environmentally-conscious actions, has purchased enough wind energy credits to offset 100% of the electricity used by the entire company.

This is rather extraordinary. By fostering health and growth in so many important domains of human experience—all quadrants (I, We, It, Its)—John has been leading Whole Foods in an intuitively integral direction. John comments to Ken, “Your maps have helped me to make explicit what’s been tacit, and conscious what’s been unconscious.” Ken points out that he is simply providing ways to describe a territory that John did all the work to get to. Integral consciousness is a wave of development appearing in individuals across the globe, and Ken’s AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) approach is an attempt to provide integral pioneers with a comprehensive map of the territory they are already living in.

Indeed, John needs no convincing about the merit of an Integral Approach: “I’m certain that Integral Business is a higher synthesis... that it is going to grow at an extremely rapid rate... and that it will out-compete anything else out there.” Darn right, Ken agrees, because preliminary studies have shown that people functioning from an integral wave of consciousness are about 10 times more efficient than previous waves of consciousness.

Wow! Sign me up for that. But, um, what are these waves of consciousness John and Ken keep mentioning? In his book Integral Psychology Ken compared and contrasted over 100 developmental models and noted that, whatever disagreements there might be between them, they shared the unmistakable drift towards higher and higher levels, stages, or waves of complexity and integration. From this research Ken distilled the concept of altitude, which itself has no content, but is more like a yardstick of consciousness by which one can judge the development of various human capacities. This is the “all levels” part of AQAL. Briefly, some of the altitudes discussed are:

2nd tier

turquoise: (super-)integral, cross-paradigmatic

teal: integral, paradigmatic, “yellow meme”

1st tier

green: postmodern, pluralistic

orange: modern, rational

amber: traditional, fundamentalist, “blue meme”

red: power, egocentric

magenta: magical, tribal, “purple meme”

The defining characteristic of 1st-tier waves of consciousness is that they all believe they have the only fundamentally correct way to understand reality. 2nd-tier waves of consciousness, on the other hand, understand that all levels of consciousness are important and, in fact, necessary.

So why does all this matter for integral business? Because an integral business helps people at every stage of development be the best they can be at that stage (healthy translation). A happy employee is a productive employee, so it is truly a win-win situation. People at amber often feel secure in accounting, people at orange often love the challenge of sales, people at green often feel comfortable in human resources, and so on. Contrary to the critique that stages of development unfairly pigeonhole people, this kind of understanding can help people flourish in the roles that they would chose for themselves. And because Integral Business recognizes the transformative impulse in human beings, people are always invited to step into their next level of growth and fullness—something a 1st-tier organization could never offer, because a 1st-tier organization can’t appreciate any level other than its own.

John and Ken go on to explore the fascinating possibilities for a 2nd-tier libertarianism, and why freedom without responsibility isn’t actually free.

We invite you to come find out why an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur Of The Year and a philosopher endorsed by Bill Clinton agree: the future of business is Integral....