Articles from Integral Leadership ReviewTransdisciplinary Reflections2012-06-08 14:06:05 Alfonso Montuori

A Personal Introduction

Alfonso Montuori

Alfonso Montuori

The networked society, with the amazing power of new technology, gives us accessto more information than ever before. The problem now is not access to information.It’s how to organize that information, turn it into knowledge, and use that knowledgewisely. This is the challenge of Transdisciplinarity.

I want to begin by giving some personal history, the roots of my quest forTransdisciplinarity. In the process I want to make some connection between theTransdisciplinary, the Transcultural, and the arts. Central to Transdisciplinarity is theintegration of the inquirer in the process of inquiry, and that for many of us ourpassion for Transdisciplinarity emerges out of a felt need to go beyond some of thelimitations of more traditional disciplinary academic approaches, and certainestablished ways of thinking. These originate in a view of the Universe as a Machine,a view that has had a profound influence on how we understand human beings,Nature, and the also the nature of knowledge, thinking, inquiring, and organizing. Iwant to show the limitations of the old view, and the emergence of a new view. Theimplications of Transdisciplinarity go far beyond a set of tools for academic inquiry.They call for a reflection on who we are, how we make sense of the world, and howwe might find ways to embody different ways of being, thinking, relating, and actingin the world.

I want to begin with a narrative and an overview of some, if by no means all, theissues that have brought me to Transdisciplinarity. In subsequent columns I willexplore in more detail some of its many fascinating dimensions, with a broad focuson leadership, and with particular attention to diverse topics such as creativity,spirituality, the emergence of new ways of thinking, the role of the inquirer, thenature of social change, and the actual applications and implications ofTransdisciplinarity.

Beginnings

In the mid-1980’s I left London and a life in music behind for California where Icompleted my Masters degree. It started out as an excuse to leave behind drearyweather for sunny California, but as soon as I started my studies I was filled withexcitement about any number of ideas. After graduation, an experience teachingmanagement students at Central South University in Changsha, China for a yearhad inspired even more questions. I was looking for a university where I could do myPh.D. and frankly it was all a bit disconcerting. Every time I walked into a departmentand sat down to speak with the Chair, he or she would mumble something abouthow interesting my research project was and then politely add that this was probablynot the department for me and I should try a different department. But Psychologywould point me to Sociology, Sociology to Political Science, Political Science toPhilosophy, Philosophy to Anthropology, and then, ironically, Anthropology wouldlead me back to Psychology.

Wondering around these departments I couldn’t help but be reminded of an earlierexperience. In my late teens and early twenties in London I played in a variety ofbands, and eventually led my own band. What kind of a band? There’s the rub. Wewere pretty good – after all, our music had been described as “astonishingly well-played” by the British weekly music newspaper Record Mirror, surely a source withimpeccable taste. We performed to packed houses and everybody had a good time,but nobody could quite label us. In fact, the same newspaper wrote that our music“impertinently side-steps any classification.” But when the record companies wouldcome to hear us they hemmed and hawed about signing us. They wanted to signus, but the trouble was, they didn’t know what record store “bin” to put us in. Was itRock? Punk? Funk? Comedy? We may have impertinently sidestepped anyclassification, but it turned out that this added considerable complexity to our so-called musical careers. What the hell “were” we? As far as I was concerned, thefact that we couldn’t be classified was not a bug, but a feature – record companiesbe damned! And that’s probably just as well, because I later realized the wisdom ina famous line attributed to Hunter S. Thompson that “The music business is a crueland shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free,and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” (He was actually referringto TV business, but his words were “appropriated” and “remixed” over the years.)

Compounding matters, I am also a “Third Culture Child,” a “rootless cosmopolitan,”“transcultural,” a “mutt” to use President Obama’s term. I didn’t live in the countrythat issued my passport until my late 40s when I became a (dual) US citizen. At thatpoint I’d lived in the US for over 20 years. Again, the question was—who or what amI? Where do I fit in? Am I Italian? (My first passport and my father were Italian?)Dutch? (I was born in Holland; my mother is Dutch?) English? (Nothing like highschool and undergraduate to build a sense of identity…) But I do my best swearingin Greek, a language I learnt when I lived there as a boy for 8 years, and I learnedbefore English, which is my fourth language. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s statementreflects my experience: “For me a passport is a travel document. It’s not astatement about my soul.”

I believe the underlying issues I was dealing with are very much the same. Withmusic and education, I was passionate about something, and there seemed to besome indications, even if grudging at times, that I was not completely off the wall.The band was successful, my ideas were not bad—but none of it fit anywhere, notinto pre-existing categories. And I apparently didn’t fit anywhere as a person, not inany traditional flag-waving sense, not in any conventional discipline, in anyestablished musical style.

Not lacking in youthful hubris, I of course assumed there was something wrong withthem, with university departments, with record companies, with jingoisticnationalists. It seemed that categories had the ability to deny or at least marginalizethe existence of people and things and issues that were patently there. Humanbeings are very good at creating categories, but we also become trapped in our owncategories. Growing up in a number of different countries it soon become clear thatwhat appears real and unquestionable and simply “the way the world is” in oneculture may be viewed as bizarre and wrong-headed and even dangerous in adifferent culture. Much of what was considered “given” or “just the way things are” or“the way something is supposed to be” in one country turned out not to be the caseat all elsewhere.

These experiences made me very aware of the nature and power of perspectives,of different ways of seeing the world. They instilled a fascination with epistemologyat a fairly young age. More specifically, they made me aware that human beings seethe world in many different ways and that we typically become habituated to one wayof viewing the world, and the more time we spend with “our” people, in “our”discipline, “our” country, playing “our” music, the more likely we are to becomesomewhat ossified and blinkered. And a key question was, what are the implicationsof living across cultures, playing across a number of musical styles, thinking aboutissues across disciplines?

Little boxes on the Hillside…

…our thinking is ruled by a profound and hidden paradigm without ourbeing aware of it. We believe we see what is real; but we see in realityonly what this paradigm allows us to see, and we obscure what itrequires us not to see.

Morin, 2008

The emergence of disciplines has often led to the forgetting of their impetus in livinghuman subjects and their crucial role in both the maintenance and transformation ofknowledge-producing practices. The results are a special kind of decadence. Onesuch kind is disciplinary decadence. Disciplinary decadence is the ontologizing orreification of a discipline. In such an attitude, we treat our discipline as though it wasnever born and has always existed and will never change or, in some cases, die.More than immortal, it is eternal. Yet as something comes into being, it lives, in suchan attitude, as a monstrosity, as an instance of a human creation that can never die.Such a perspective brings with it a special fallacy. Its assertion as absoluteeventually leads to no room for other disciplinary perspectives, the result of which is

the rejection of them for not being one’s own. Thus, if one’s discipline hasforeclosed the question of its scope, all that is left for it is a form of “applied” work.Such work militates against thinking. (Gordan, 2006)

In graduate school one of my required texts was Thomas Kuhn’s classic TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1996) Kuhn’s work added an importantelement to my thinking. Suddenly, the insight that cultural differences created verydifferent ways of seeing the world found a parallel in the world of academic inquiry.This was particularly important because it further showed how our understanding ofthe world and of ourselves involves a process of construction – we eventually takeresidence in these constructions for better or worse, and forget that we are the oneswho have built them. Another required text, Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision,showed three very different ways of framing and understanding the Cuban missilecrisis, and served as a further illustration of how the different ways we can constructperspectives starting with different fundamental assumptions (Allison, 1971).

Ernest Becker bemoaned disciplinary fragmentation in his underappreciated TheStructure of Evil, showing how underlying assumptions structured and organizedthe way we think about the world Becker, 1976). These assumptions form the basisfor our approach to inquiry. They are the taken for granted (but rarely questioned)starting points for scholars. In his study of scientific revolutions, Kuhn argued thatthe majority of scientists engage in “normal science,” which means they areexpanding the research agenda of a certain way of seeing the world, introducing thenow popular (and arguably over-used) term “paradigm.” Scientific revolutionsinvolved engaging so many anomalies in the dominant paradigm that its veryfoundations needed to be challenged. Given my background, this, of course,fascinated me.

Something clicked when I read Kuhn and these other authors. It was directly relatedto my experience of cultural heterogeneity my experience of “relativism.” I hesitate touse the latter term since it has become so tainted by a nihilistic “anything goes”gloss. I mean more broadly knowledge relative to our time and space, our history,traditions, discourse and practices. It became clear to me that the material I wasstudying originated in particular scholarly “cultures,” and that the very way inquirywas organized was the function of a set of underlying assumptions about theorganization of knowledge. Around the same time, I also read Bucky Fuller, ArthurKoestler, and Fritjof Capra’s ambitious The Turning Point, in which he discussed atsome length the “Newtonian Cartesian” paradigm, and, like Koestler and Fuller,made the case for a systems theoretical way of thinking (Capra, 1984). It seemedthere was potentially a change afoot, and this change involved new ways of thinkingand organizing knowledge. It was becoming clear I was not the only one whothought disciplinary fragmentation was a problem.

As much as I enjoyed my Californian immersion in scholarly inquiry, I wondered whyclasses seemed to function as fairly airtight compartments. Students were neverencouraged to bring material from one class to another, even if the material seemedobviously relevant. Discussing cross-cultural differences and particularly how thevery different experiences of World War II might have influenced US-Soviet

negotiations about nuclear weapons and troops in Europe was verboten in a courseon US-Soviet relations (albeit in the nicest possible way a university professor canbe dismissive).

The cross-cultural issues that fascinated me because of my background seemed tobelong only in the course on cross-cultural issues. I found out that this was generallythe norm in academia. Watertight courses, watertight disciplines, and indeedwatertight sub-disciplines. Mentioning personality psychology in a course on socialpsychology brought hoots of derision from the TA. Discussing material fromSociology with psychologists studying creativity was also decidedly not a way to wina popularity contest. Philosophers dismissed systems theory as deterministicscientistic nonsense. Here is a neat summary of that view:

For the systems theorist, human beings are part of a homogeneous,stable, theoretically knowable, and therefore, predictable system.Knowledge is the means of controlling the system. Even if perfectknowledge does not yet exist, the equation: the greater the knowledgethe greater the power over the system is, for the systems theorist,irrefutable. (Lechte, 1994, 248)

Something was wrong. This was disciplinary fragmentation as its worst, and thecritiques of systems theory were redolent with Snow’s “two cultures” split: do notbring material from the natural sciences into the human sciences. At times hearingacademics dismiss disciplines other than their own and worry about the “threat” ofsystems thinking and interdisciplinary work felt like England around the time theChunnel was about to open, with tabloid headlines warning about the prospect ofinvading “hordes of garlic-breathing frogs.” (Yes, an actual headline.) Theinternecine squabbling among disciplines, and the efforts to keep disciplines pureand un-polluted by other disciplinary perspectives, described so carefully andthoughtfully in Bruce Wilshire’s The Moral Collapse of the University:Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation didn’t seem very “scholarly” let alone“scientific” (Wilshire, 1990).

“In the beginning,” of course, there was only Philosophy. Over the years, with theaccumulation of more and more knowledge and the development of specialists andspecializations, various disciplines had spun off and “gone it alone.” Aristotle, thegreat classifier, had given his books titles that reflect today’s disciplines, like Politics,Ethics, Physics, Rhetoric, and Meteorology. But of course, he dealt with them allhimself. This was simply not possible now, it was argued, but in the process,disciplinary silos were formed, and it seemed there was little if any interest incommunication, let alone integration.

The organization of knowledge paralleled the organization of industry and followedAdam Smith’s principle of the division of labor as disciplines gradually split off fromMother Philosophy (psychology didn’t cut the cord until the late 19th century). Therewas ncreasing specialization and expertise, with a focus on depth, on drilling deep,rather than the broad but arguably “thin” overview. Buckminster Fuller argued thatthis was also a principle of divide and rule: only the “bosses” at the top had the “big

picture.” There is no doubt that this division of labor and specialization has lead toremarkable advances. It’s at the heart of Modernity and the Industrial Revolution. Butwe are increasingly beginning to realize that a lot was lost in the ensuingreductionism.

Reductionism was the driving force behind much of the twentieth century’s scientificresearch. To comprehend nature, it tells us, we must first decipher its components.The assumption is that once we understand the parts, it will be easy to grasp thewhole. Divide and conquer; the devil is in the details. Therefore for decades wehave been forced to see the world through its constituents. We have been trained tostudy atoms and superstrings to understand the universe; molecules tocomprehend life; individual genes to understand complex human behavior; prophetsto see the origins of fads and religions… Now we are as close to knowing everythingthere is to know about the pieces. But we are as far as we have ever been tounderstanding nature as a whole (Barabasi, 2003, p. 6).

I was soon attracted to “eccentric” thinkers like Gregory Bateson, Edgar Morin, ErichJantsch, and Magoroh Maruyama. Bateson made contributions to psychiatry,communication, family therapy, cybernetics, anthropology, evolutionary theory,ecology and a number of other disparate fields. Morin has written important booksabout death, cinema and popular culture, ecology, education, and politics.Maruyama has written about cybernetics, management, cross-cultural differencesand futures research. Jantsch wrote remarkable works of synthesis, drawingextensively on the work of Ilya Prigogine, applying them to topics where “it didn’tbelong,” like society and social change, and explicitly addressing spirituality andmystical traditions. What I found particularly compelling about these thinkers wasthat they explored a wide range of issues, and sought to bring not just a newperspective to them, but new ways of thinking. Not just new information, or evenframes, but new meta-frames, and efforts at integration, all motivated by the needfor application in light of world problems.

Like me, these thinkers never belonged to any particular discipline. In some casesthey suffered for it. Bateson was largely forgotten and out of print for a number ofyears in the USA. His classic Steps to an Ecology of Mind was available as an audiobook in Italy, which tells us something about the importance of cultural differences inthe history of ideas (G. Bateson, 1972). Jantsch’s work was largely ignored andpicked up by equally omnivorous thinkers like Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber, both ofwhom are influential but outside the academic mainstream, and is now out of print.Maruyama drifted from department to department in any number of countries, andwhile his work was published in major journals in several different disciplines—hisThe Second Cybernetics is a citation classic (Maruyama, 1963) – he also wroteextensively (and complained privately) about what he called “subunderstanding,” orthe tendency by scholars to understand works that crossed several disciplines verypartially, typically ignoring or misunderstanding the elements that did not fit in theirdiscipline, and reading them from a narrow disciplinary lens (Maruyama, 2004).Morin is probably France’s most influential living thinker, at this point, celebrated bythe prestigious newspaper Le Monde with a special magazine issue devoted to hislife and work. The day before François Hollande’s recent election victory Le Monde

published a dialogue he had with Morin, and in Latin America and countries like Italyhe is viewed as one of the most important contemporary thinkers. But Morin’s lackof disciplinary home, not to mention his complete refusal to ride on the coat-tails of“French postmodernism” (which in France is considered an Anglophone creation),still makes him suspect with many traditional French academics. Until recently hewas virtually unknown in the US. Morin describes himself as an intellectual poacher,and the title of one of several recent biographies is tellingly titled Edgar Morin,L’Indiscipliné, or “Edgar Morin, the Undisciplined.”

Morin and these other thinkers shared a particular concern:

We need a kind of thinking that relinks that which is disjointed andcompartmentalized, that respects diversity as it recognizes unity, andthat tries to discern interdependencies. We need a radical thinking(which gets to the root of problems), a multidimensional thinking, and anorganizational or systemic thinking (Morin & Kern, 1999, 130).

The reform in thinking is a key anthropological and historical problem. This implies a mental revolution of considerably greater proportionsthan the Copernican revolution. Never before in the history of humanityhave the responsibilities of thinking weighed so crushingly on us (Morin& Kern, 1999, 132).

The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way.

Bateson, 1972, p.462.

(Here we find an immediate opportunity for “subunderstanding,” because neither ofthese thinkers neatly separates thinking and feeling, for instance—or more generallyperhaps, thinking and being.)

It is not surprising that Bateson, Jantsch, Maruyama, and Morin have all drawnextensively from General Systems Theory (GST) and cybernetics. Both GST andcybernetics emerged as attempts to develop a “transversal” language, a way ofthinking that could re-connect what had been torn asunder in disciplinaryfragmentation. Both were supposed to provide a language that could go beyond thebarrier of hyper-specialization so that scholars could talk to each other using basicconcepts like open system, feedback, etc. Bateson and Morin have explored theepistemological implications of GST and cybernetics in considerable depth. It is alsoimportant to note that in France the term epistemology is used to refer more broadlyto the philosophy of science.

Reductionist thinking ignores context and these thinkers saw the implicationsclearly.

Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is truenot only of human communication in words but also of allcommunication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind, includingthat which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amoeba what he

should do next. (G. Bateson, 2002, 14)

There are many catastrophic dangers which have grown out of theOccidental errors of epistemology. I believe that this massiveaggregation of threats to man and his ecological systems arises out oferrors in our habits of thought at a deep and partly unconscious level(G. Bateson, 1972, 487)

All four thinkers critiqued the dominant “machine” way of thinking. The focus onsimplicity, inherited from Descartes, meant eliminating complexity. But the complexis that which is woven together, so in the process of simplifying our subject, weunraveled the weave, lost the context. What we got was still extremely useful, but itdid not provide us with what used to be called “the big picture,” Barabasi’s “whole,”and it completely ignored relationships and interconnectedness. We see theindividual threads, but not what Bateson called the pattern that connects.

There was more that was missing because of disciplinary fragmentation. Forexample, a number of topics did not “fit” into any discipline. When I first startedresearching creativity in the mid-80’s it was viewed as individual, personal, theprovince of the genius and his (and rarely her) personality, imagination, and thinking.Because of this focus, which reflected (once again largely unchallenged andunspoken) cultural and historical assumptions, it “lived” in psychology. But thismeant that creativity in relationships, groups, and organizations was either ignoredbecause it was simply not “seen” through the lens of (individual) psychology. Andsometimes, alternative views were flatly rejected: creativity is only a function ofindividuals, and there is no such thing as relational creativity – it’s always theindividual. A camel is a horse designed by a committee. Brainstorming was the onlytip of the hat to “collaborative creativity,” and tellingly it’s a somewhat artificialprocedure of dubious value. What about simple dialogue with colleagues, playingwith ideas over coffee, arguing over dinner and a bottle of wine, the excitement ofsharing ideas with friends late into the night, the more convivial, everyday,unstructured processes where, if pressed, we all know ideas emerge, even if theresult of conflict and differences of opinion rather than artificial “collaboration?” Thescholarly models and frames did not seem to reflect the lived experience of peopleengaging in the improvisational exchanges William Irwin Thompson has called“mind-jazz?”

I came to creativity research from my experience as a musician, particularlyinterested in collective improvisation. But when I reviewed the literature, I found thethree P’s of traditional creativity were Person, Process, Product. The very way thetopic of creativity was framed could not account for what I was interested in. The“who” of creativity was only the Person. The person was the subject of Psychology,where creativity research “lived.” And consequently there was little or no researchon musical groups, or any other relational dimensions of creativity, until quiterecently. And yet the magic of improvisational music, whether in jazz or in “rock”bands like the Grateful Dead and King Crimson was an emergent property of theinteraction between musicians. This could not be accounted for at the time, and hasonly recently become the subject of systematic research.

Another troubling issue was that the deeper philosophical assumptions underlyingmost disciplinary perspectives were mostly ignored. From Plato to Hobbes andLocke, political philosophy was based on well-articulated assumptions about humannature. Some of the early philosophers showed up in histories of several disciplines—both Plato and Locke in histories, political science and psychology, for instance.But if “human nature” was discussed at all when in political science and internationalrelations, it was still in the terms outlined by the philosophers, and then mostlythrough Machiavelli’s famous dictums. None of the important research in psychologyI was interested in at the time –humanistic psychology and the emergingtranspersonal field – were addressed. Any “official” reference to psychology orhuman nature dated back to when the split from philosophy occurred, and no effortshad been made to keep a dialogue going.

Economics was even more dismal. Rational Choice theory may have its place, butleaving out consumer motivations, values, ethics, and psychology in general, not tomention larger social and cultural factors, is surely bordering on reductio adabsurdum.

“How did economists get it so wrong?” asked Paul Krugman in a 2009 NYT article,after the recent economic meltdown (Krugman, September 6, 2009). Up to that pointmacro-economists thought they had it all figured out. Apparently not. Economics,the most “scientific” of the social sciences, was also the most isolated, thediscipline least likely to “play well with others.” Its reductionist quantophrenia led toan illusion of security, of a solid scientific foundation. Individual disciplines are unableto provide us with the knowledge we need to address the overwhelming complexityof global problems.

I have taught various branches of behavioral biology and cultural anthropology toAmerican students ranging from college freshmen to psychiatric residents, invarious schools and teaching hospitals, and I have encountered a very strange gapin their thinking that springs from a lack of certain tools of thought. This lack is ratherequally distributed at all levels of education, among students of both sexes andamong humanists as well as scientists. Specifically, it is a lack of knowledge of thepresuppositions not only of science but of everyday life. (G. Bateson, 2002, 23)

When I was living on the Monterey Peninsula in 1988 I met Riane Eisler and DavidLoye. David had written brilliant books on a variety of topics, ranging from the brainto future studies to political psychology, racism and prejudice. I had only just readRiane’s The Chalice and the Blade, and when I told her about my interest increativity she asked me to look into the creativity of women (Eiser, 1987). Onceagain a number of doors opened and gave me glimpses into a different world, theemerging literature on the psychology and sociology of women, Lorraine Code’spowerful work of feminist epistemology (Code, 1991), and the remarkable fact thatmuch of women’s experience was simply not addressed in the literature. Exploringthe creativity of women once again led me to read in a variety of disciplines. Anynumber of arguments were being made about why women were not represented inlists of eminent creatives, ranging from the essentialist to the insulting. A clearargument could be made that women were for years simply not given access to the

very domains in which “eminent” contributions to creativity could be made. But thiswas a “social” argument that was not part of the general discourse of creativity. Asteady interweaving of perspectives followed, and it became clear that it wasprecisely this process of weaving together, or complexification, that led to morenuanced perspectives on vexing topics living in fragmented isolation.

I began to see not only the nature of fragmentation, but also the way in which ourdualistic thinking, driven by binary oppositions, was profoundly limiting. And the workof Morin and others stressed the need to go beyond these traditional dualisms,including for Basarab Nicolescu, a key figure in the development ofTransdisciplinarity,

Transdisciplinarity transgresses the duality of opposing binary pairs: subject/object,subjectivity/objectivity, matter/consciousness, nature/divine, simplicity/complexity,reductionism/holism, diversity/unity. The duality is transgressed by the open unitythat encompasses both the universe and the human being. (Nicolescu, 2002, 56)

To this we should add, female/male.

Multidisciplinary Disciplines

Environmental Studies, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, Genomics, Robotics,Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Nanotechnology are some of the mostinteresting and vital new disciplines. These new disciplines are all mutts,incorporating elements originating in a wide variety of other established disciplines,but now themselves taking on the status of “disciplines.” Environmental Studies isan explicitly interdisciplinary field, studying human interactions with theenvironments. It is informed by ecology as well as ethics, sociology, biology, andeconomics, among others. Women’s Studies is also multi- or interdisciplinary,drawing from politics, psychology, sociology, economics, neuroscience, and more.These disciplines arose out of the need to address specific issues, such aseconomic inequality, racism, sexism, and so on, and the underlying assumptionsthat fueled them.

The curricula of most management programs already draw on a variety ofdisciplines and research traditions. Students in the Harvard MBA take requiredcourses: Finance, Leadership and Organizational Behavior, Marketing, Technologyand Operations Management, Business Government and the InternationalEconomy. They can choose electives on Innovation, Negotiation, The Moral Leaderin Literature, Film, and Art, area specific courses which include studying specificcultures (China anyone?), and much more. A recent Introduction to Leadershipcourse at Harvard covers topics like Ethics, Charisma, Appreciative Inquiry, PositivePsychology, Slavery, and Mindfulness. Clearly this already provides a multi-disciplinary perspective. We should, therefore, acknowledge the extent to which weare already drawing on other disciplines within some of our established “disciplines.”And it is perhaps not surprising that this is mostly happening in what are perhaps theleast traditionally “academic” disciplines, the ones that prepare practitioners,because approaching complex practices like leadership from the perspective of onediscipline is enormously limiting.

But if our dominant way of thinking is still rooted in the machine view of the world, inanalysis, how do we connect all these different sources? How do we go beyond asmorgasbord of courses that simply provide a set of diverse tools? This is aquestion that is now being addressed out of necessity, because as Bateson (2002)had already seen,

While so much that universities teach today is new and up-to-date, thepresuppositions or premises of thought upon which all our teaching isbased are ancient, and, I assert, obsolete. (p. 203)

The pattern which connects. Why do schools teach almost nothing ofthe pattern which connects? (p.7)

The implications of Transdisciplinarity are revolutionary. Fortunately they arebeginning to be explored, and on several continents, as McGregor and Volckmannhave shown in their book on emerging trends in Transdisciplinarity, Transversity:Transdisciplinary Approaches in Higher Education (McGregor and Volckmann,2011). Lively debates are emerging, and there are ambitious efforts to develop inter-or transdisciplinary curricula. Things are changing, and for me participating in thesenew dialogues and explorations is tremendously exciting. These debatesthemselves reflect some of the core issues of transdiscipinarity, namely the largersocietal and professional context: how do students with innovative and unusualdegrees present themselves in an academia and more generally, in professionalcontexts that are still driven by disciplinary fragmentation?

I have devoted much of my life to several of the interrelated topics that have arisenout of my desire to make sense of a complex world in a way that truly reflected itscomplexity rather than eliminate it or reduce it to simple categories and essences. Inacademia, I teach in two Transdisciplinary programs I was fortunate enough to beable to design, one of which includes a semester long course entitledTransdisciplinarity and the Pattern that Connects. My quest is continually enlivenedby the constant challenge of assessing how to make a Transdisciplinaritycurriculum exciting, vital, rigorous, relevant, and practical for new generations ofstudents who share a passion for going beyond traditional approaches and haveoften come from educational experiences with extremely limited and limitingdisciplinary perspectives. There are many challenges, and much unlearning to doalong with the learning.

In collaboration with my wife, a jazz singer, I continue to play music and producerecords that span many musical styles because that’s how we hear it, that’s whatwe play, and that’s who we are. There is now a greater openness to musicalhybrids, even if what is often referred to as “the jazz police” still looks askance atcertain non-jazz grooves or unusual instruments. As a member of the NationalAssociation of Recording Arts and Sciences I am once again witnessing a debateabout the nature of categories and musical styles. The Grammys recentlyrestructured their awards and eliminated over 30 categories in the process. Thedialogue is heated, harsh words have been spoken, and a lawsuit filed by musiciansfrom a category that has been eliminated. The questions are vital, mostly having to

do with the difficulty in establishing what musical categories should be representedin what can only be a limited number of awards, and even what actually constitutesa musical category in this age of mash-ups and fusion and remixes. The questionsand issues parallel many of the ones explored in the context of Transdisciplinarity.

I continue to be a mutt, and proud of it. But now there are new ways of approachingmuttness, and concepts like cosmopolitanism, hybridity and liquid identity arecasting a new light on my questions. These new approaches reflect different culturalrealities, new demographics, and new ways of thinking. And they provide me withnew opportunities to explore not just my own identity, but ways of dialoguing andthinking about identity.

All of which tells me that Transdisciplinarity is an idea whose time has come.Exploring and articulating it will be a passionate endeavor for me and many others,and one of the most exciting adventures in inquiry today.

References

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About the Author

Alfonso Montuori, PhD, is Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies,where he designed and teaches in the Transformative Leadership M.A. and theTransformative Studies Ph.D. He was Distinguished Professor in the School of FineArts at Miami University, in Oxford Ohio and in 1985-1986 he taught at the CentralSouth University in Hunan, China. An active musician and producer, in a former lifeAlfonso worked in London England as a professional musician. He is the author ofseveral books and numerous articles on creativity and innovation, the future,complexity theory, and leadership. Alfonso is also a consultant in the areas ofcreativity, innovation and leadership development whose clients have includedNetApp, Training Vision (Singapore), Omintel-Olivetti (Italy) and Procter and Gamble.