Ken Wilber

I just read an article on promoting health enhancing habits in the workplace by Anshel & Kang in a recent issue of Consulting Psychology Journal.  To be frank, this is not the most rigorous of the journals published by the American Psychological Association.  Consulting psychologists like myself, I’ve concluded, simply don’t have as much time to dedicate to the refinement of their work.  Also, to be frank, a number of the articles seem to be limited to n=1 case studies of the authors’ experience with a single organization. That being said, there is a real-world quality to some of the articles that is missing from the more purely academic, higher-quality journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology.  

So I read it.  And learn.

What was particularly interesting to me about this one was that the authors sought to influence members of a target audience (employees) to change their behaviors so that they can be both more effective at their jobs and healthier.  When doing my doctoral dissertation, I decided to use, as my organizing model for influencing decision-making, Fishbein & Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). 

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Ken Wilber

This morning I received an email from a friend who asked a question I've been asked countless times before, "which Ken Wilber book should I read first?"

The question itself is interesting, and I'll get to that in a minute, but I first want to tackle the question, "why is this question asked so often?" Part of it is the sheer volume of Ken's work -- two dozen books and counting, plus a gazillion online essays, gobs of Integral Naked interviews, and more forewards to books than Tom Peters. And now that he's got a blog -- yikes!

It's a pretty important question for those of us who enjoy Ken's work and want to share it with friends. Very few of my buddies, as brainy as many of them are, should start with Ken's magnum opus, Sex, Ecology, Spiritualty ("SES"). Five hundred pages of prose pluse another 300 of endnotes? Nah. That's something to work up to.

I started with Spectrum of Consciousness, his first. Not an illogical place to start, particularly when I did so many years ago, but his worldview has morphed, by his own reckoning, 4 times since, so it's not longer representative of his best thinking.

Much of his work is deliberately narrow-band -- an explanation of the application of his thinking to a specific set of questions. Integral Psychology, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, and Quantum Questions are all such books. Good reads, all, but not a great place to start, in my view.

When visiting Ken in his Denver loft a couple of years ago, I posed the question to him. His suggestion was "A Brief History of Everything." That has been mine, too, since first reading it in 1996. A casually-written summary of SES, in interview format, with nary an endnote in sight, it nonetheless presents a detailed and coherent description of SES's sweeping presentation of Integral Theory. It also has some pretty lovely writing in it (my favorite being on pp. 38-39).