Department Chair of Transformative Studies (Transformative Studies Ph.D., and Transformative Leadership MA)

Online and In Person

Growing up in Holland, Lebanon, Italy, Greece, and England, Alfonso Montuori was a well-seasoned traveler by the age of 11. Born in Holland to a Dutch mother and Italian father, Alfonso spent his early childhood in Beirut where his father was the cultural attaché for the Italian government. “At that time,” said Alfonso, “Beirut was referred to as the ‘Paris of the Middle East.’ It was a city filled with cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. Looking back, I can see how the theme of diversity, and the way that it has the potential to lead both to great creativity and also to great conflict and destruction, was forged for me in those early days. This relationship between creativity and diversity can be found in all my work, including the design of the two programs in this department.”

From Beirut, the Montuoris moved to Athens for eight years, and then to London, where Alfonso spent his adolescence and undergrad years. “English was my fourth language,” Alfonso told us. “My father always spoke Italian with me, and my mother always spoke Dutch with me. Then when I was five I had to learn Greek to play with the local kids. English really wasn’t on the radar. In Greece I used to watch Star Trek and read the Greek subtitles to understand what they were saying. When I got to England I was twelve and had to expand my vocabulary beyond ‘Beam me up Scotty’ pretty fast. In my high school entrance language exam I had to write an essay about a fairground. Unfortunately I had no idea what a fairground was. I wrote so much about completely unrelated things, while always subtly suggesting I really knew what I was talking about, that they had to let me in.  I was obviously destined to be an academic…”

A professional saxophonist by the time he was 20, Alfonso and his band, The Remipeds, a psychedelic world-beat group, headlined at some of England’s hippest clubs throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, and even performed on the BBCs legendary John Peel radio show. “Music has been a tremendous force in my life. At its best it can be extremely moving, ecstatically rhythmic, intellectually challenging, and deeply spiritual all at the same time. Much of my academic work has been informed by what I have learned and experienced as a musician. Music also offers some of the best examples of systems and complexity principles. The practice of improvisation in music can teach us a lot about how to navigate the existential reality of a complex, pluralistic world that is full of uncertainty. The whole ‘world music’ phenomenon is fascinating because it can be viewed as an attempt to integrate many musical traditions into one performance—again, the challenge of diversity and creativity. Clearly it doesn’t always work artistically, and like anything else it can be trivialized and commodified. But it offers a very interesting entry point into the exploration of globalization and the emerging planetary culture.”

Today, Alfonso still engages his love of music with noted jazz singer Kitty Margolis (www.kittymargolis.com). They have been together for 18 years. “They say you can’t pick your family—well that’s not entirely true. Every day I thank my lucky stars that the one family member I did get to pick was Kitty! We’ve had great fun working on Kitty’s records together and traveling all over the world, and just being a family together.”

After receiving his Bachelor’s at the University of London, Alfonso decided to pursue a graduate degree in International Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. “By 1983 my band had broken up because of too many warring egos, England was at war with Argentina, and London, for all its charms, still hadn’t turned into a tropical paradise with great food. I decided it was time to go. I arrived in Monterey and immediately fell in love with California and with graduate studies. Along with music, I had always loved writing and the world of ideas, and this was my opportunity to engage my ‘other’ love. I haven’t looked back.”

In graduate school, Alfonso continued to approach academia with a critical eye. “At the University of London, I did my thesis on the poetry of my uncle, Hans Lodeizen. He died before I was born, but is still a very well known in Holland. I was intrigued by the way he was portrayed in the press and in academia. It was a very one-sided view, focusing on his melancholy and his premonition about his death. This did not match any of the anecdotes I heard about him from my mother, my aunt and uncle, and my grandparents. I always heard about him as a trickster, witty, elegant, and also very gifted as an entomologist—he was invited to join the Royal Dutch Entomological Academy on the basis of a paper he wrote when he was barely in his teens. On top of that, the “new criticism” was very popular in those days. It completely eliminated historical or biographical context, and focused entirely on the internal structure of poems. It seemed very problematic to me. So I attempted to provide a more complete, a more well-rounded view of the man, and consequently also a different interpretation of his work.”

“In graduate school, I became increasingly frustrated by the way issues were approached in the social sciences. I couldn’t stand the way disciplines and sub-disciplines were closed and in fact often antagonistic towards each other. The complete lack of historical and cultural sensitivity in much of our foreign policy amazed me. You could study ‘Cultural Factors in International Relations’ in one class, but it was clear that cultural factors were not integrated in other classes. This matched the reality of policy-making. It’s obvious from recent events that nothing has changed—we continue to make one blunder after another when it comes to dealing with other cultures, and that’s largely because cultural differences don’t even appear on the radar screen, except perhaps as crude stereotypes.”

“But more deeply, there seemed to be something wrong with the underlying foundations of the very way we approach issues, with the very organization of knowledge. Real life is not cut up into neat little disciplines, and in any situation—whether it’s everyday interactions or foreign policy—we always draw on knowledge that, in academia, is parceled out into little air-tight compartments that don’t communicate. So when we approach situations with an extremely limited perspective, and completely fail to address key issues, it’s no wonder we run into problems.”

“Life is also far more complex and ambiguous and uncertain than the social sciences historically allowed for. Seeing the success of physics and its methods, social scientists wanted to control the world as if they were physicists performing an experiment in a lab. But life isn’t like that. The more you try to control and predict and eliminate complexity and ambiguity and uncertainty and so on, the more you and those around you land in deep trouble. The issue is not how to eliminate them. It’s how to thrive on them.”

Continuing to indulge his love of travel and culture, the newly graduated Master’s student spent a year in China teaching the first course in management and organization theory at the South-Central University in Changsha, Hunan Province. “It was a wonderful experience,” said Alfonso. “This was in the mid-’80s, before Tiananmen Square. China was really opening up. He explained that “as a European, to go from the U.S., which is extremely individualistic, to China which is considered a very collectivistic society, was fascinating.  I learned so much, and the whole experience confirmed once again the importance of developing a planetary perspective. When I got to graduate school in 1983, the Soviet Union was the main focus of attention, Japanese management was all the rage and Japan was the big economic threat, Europe was considered dead in the water, China and India were at best marginal if colossal world players. If I or anybody else had predicted what would happen—no Soviet Union, no Cold War, the rise of terrorism, India and China becoming major global players and economic threats, the rebirth of Europe and the killer Euro, etc., I would have been laughed out of school. In an increasingly fast-changing, uncertain, and interconnected world, we cannot remain ignorant of the rest of the world. And yet poll after poll still shows a terrible lack of global awareness, or ‘planetary consciousness.’

Martin Luther King wrote that,

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity….All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not, each of us is eternally “in the red.” We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for a soap that is created for us by a European. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half of the world.

That, I think, is the beginning of planetary consciousness.”

In 1986, after his year in Changsha, China, Alfonso had the opportunity to study and work with Frank Barron, widely recognized as one of the great innovators in creativity research. “I was lucky enough to have Frank on my dissertation committee. Oddly enough, I didn’t come to the creativity research because of my background in music. I’d been doing research on prejudice, racism, intolerance, and the authoritarian personality, a subject Frank was also interested in. I was struck by the fact that research on creative individuals showed they had personality characteristics that were exactly the opposite of those of authoritarian, prejudiced persons. Although I’m very interested in creativity in the arts, the main focus of my research lies in the potential for creativity to help us live together in a pluralistic society. Racism, stereotyping, and authoritarianism are more often than not the result of an inability to cope with the complexity of the world around us. We feel overwhelmed, out of control, desperately wants to control and hierarchize and homogenize the world. I see this tendency as the result of a fundamental failure of creativity. Our present educational system simply doesn’t prepare us for the world we live in. I see an education that cultivates individual and collaborative creativity as an antidote not only to prejudice and intolerance, but also to the prevailing trend towards simplistic solutions and black and white thinking.”

“Creativity therefore became my entry point into this exploration of inquiry, education, and arguably of a different worldview. And the ability to improvise in life—the root of the word improvise is the Latin improvisus or unforeseen—to both respond to the world creatively and to generate the unforeseen, the unexpected, the delightful, the source of wonder, is something jazz musicians have specialized in. So in that sense my academic inquiry has brought me right back to music and improvisation and diversity and creativity.”

Alfonso eventually developed a very close friendship and collaboration with Barron and later co-edited a book together, Creators on Creating. Earlier, Alfonso had turned his Ph.D. dissertation first into an academic book and then, after receiving great interest from Harper Collins, into a trade book for a wider audience. “I really enjoyed being able to spend a year writing and thinking about how to turn the ideas I had developed during my dissertation work into something that a non-academic audience could also explore. It turned out that the business world at the time was extremely interested in my research on creativity and complexity, and so I was invited to consult with corporations, non-profits, and government organizations.” 

Alfonso is now the Principal of Evolutionary Strategies, a firm focusing on executive and high-potential management development. “I really enjoy working one-on-one with people,” Alfonso told us. “I have always been fascinated by potential, and I see my role as a catalyst for individual and organizational potential. The work involves a really in-depth assessment of the person in his or her organizational context, through interviews, a series of sophisticated assessments, and an extensive in-person 360 feedback. All this information is then compiled and presented to the individual. We discuss the feedback, interpret it, and develop action steps. It’s all customized to the needs of the individual. I’m not a fan of cookie-cutter approaches to anything, let alone working with individuals on their own personal development. Although this kind of work is very time-intensive, it’s also far more rewarding, and I know clients get so much more out of a truly individualized approach than from a more generic workshop or set of recommendations.  One of the courses in the Transformative Leadership MA program I designed draws on many elements of my consulting work. Students have found it an eye-opening experience, and I’m delighted that they are also learning practical skills they can later use in their own work.”

Along with his consulting work, Alfonso has also kept up his writing, publishing numerous books and essays on creativity and change, publishing in journals ranging from Human Relations to the Academy of Management Review to The Journal of Humanistic Psychology. “I love to write,” he told us, “and I also enjoy turning students on to publishing. It’s very rewarding for me to see students get their essays published in academic journals. Writing should be fun and challenging, and I want to make sure that students recognize this. When students publish they join a wider dialogue with scholars all over the world, and it’s really exciting for them to see their first book review or article in print. It really makes them jump to a new level when they realize they’re not just writing for their faculty and student peers, but for the larger community of people who care about the same issues they do. Publish early and often, I say!”

Alfonso is Series Editor of Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences at Hampton Press, which has published work by Edgar Morin, Ervin Laszlo, Gregory Bateson, Gianluca Bocchi and Mauro Ceruti, and other leading European thinkers. “There are many important European authors whose voices need to be heard here. Edgar Morin, for instance, is famous all over the world. I recently attended a conference on his work in China, and there is a new university based on his work in Mexico. And there is some really remarkable work in European traditions that are mostly unfamiliar to readers in the US. We tend to associate ‘continental thought,’ French, and to a lesser degree Italian philosophy, with postmodernism. But the funny thing is that in France, postmodernism is viewed as a predominantly Anglophone phenomenon. There’s a lot that’s lost—and gained, apparently!—in translation.”

“Sadly, our understanding of global culture, and even the contexts in which some of the most important academic trends of the last 100 years emerged, are not widely understood here. Our approach to education and knowledge is largely decontextualized. We’ve also decontextualized spiritual traditions and spiritual leaders that have come to this country. This is partly the reason so many experiments with so-called “Eastern Spirituality” in this country have gone awry. We forget (and in all fairness, they forget too) that we can’t just transplant ideas and practices and values without taking a long hard look at their contexts.”

Alfonso has been on the CIIS faculty since 1995. We asked him what brought him to CIIS, an institution that is deeply concerned with the role of spirituality in education. “Ever since I was about 6 or 7, I had experience of non-ordinary states, in some cases through sports, or music, and later, also through meditation and a variety of practices. I tend not to discuss my own practices too much, and I strongly believe that one has to tread lightly and respectfully in this area. There’s a good reason why people speak of secret or hidden traditions: when they are discussed as if they were the latest hit show on television it’s easy to trivialize them. We don’t need to hit people over the head with our ‘spirituality.’ By over-indulging the jargon of spirituality we tend to lose sight of spirit all around us.”

In 2003-2004, Alfonso was Distinguished Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He was invited to explore the creative process with students, faculty, and administrators in the School of Fine Arts. He has also held several administrative positions at CIIS, most recently as the Department Chair of Transformative Studies. “In the last 10 years or so, I’ve seen CIIS go through some wonderful changes. It’s always been a very special place, but recently there’s been a new feeling of confidence, excitement, and innovation. I have become increasingly interested in the role and mission of alternative educational institutions, particularly at a time when education is verging on bankruptcy all over the world. I know education and inquiry can be deeply creative processes. At the same time, they are rarely articulated as such in academia, and most of our educational experiences have certainly not been about creativity or self-inquiry. CIIS is changing all that, and developing forms of education that stress creativity and self-inquiry while at the same time promoting academic rigor. It’s a great challenge, and a really necessary one.”

“Creativity is central to both the MA and PhD. Programs I designed at CIIS,” Alfonso explains. “And that creative process is not just about creating a product in the form of a dissertation or capstone project. It’s also about (re-) creating ourselves, about renewing ourselves, finding new ways of thinking, of relating, of doing and being in the world. We explore how students can draw on a variety of disciplines to address their research topic in a way that brings pertinent knowledge to bear on it, rather than knowledge from only one discipline. And we explicitly address the challenges of doing leading edge research. What does it mean to do leading edge research, to push the envelope? What does it look like? How can we make sure we don’t fall off the bleeding edge? The truth is, most of our students come to us because they want to explore topics that push the envelope a little or a lot, they want to find the ‘gaps’ in the research. So we help them to do that, and we encourage them to be bold and imaginative and yet stay rigorous. That’s a great challenge, and tremendously rewarding.”

“In my own research, I’ve constantly come across many fascinating ‘gaps’ in the research literature. For instance, in the 80s, when I started looking at creativity research, there was nothing on creative groups, on creativity and collaboration. People I talked to looked at me as if I were crazy. They said creative groups was an oxymoron. This seemed bizarre to me, because I had grown up listening to and playing in bands, and knew that the creativity was not just the result of one individual, but an emergent property that was the result of the interaction between individuals. Movies and R&D labs and so many other examples of collaborative creativity abound. But no research. I became fascinated by these blind spots. Another one: we all know the expression, ‘travel broadens the mind.’ But oddly enough, there’s barely any research on the psychological effects of travel.  People ask me how I find these blind spots. You have to remove any disciplinary lens, and you always have to relate back to your own experience. Don’t let other people label your experience for you, because much of it can disappear!”

One of the other ways in which CIIS’s Transformative Leadership and Transformative Studies programs are pushing the envelope, education-wise, is that they are almost entirely online. As the Internet continues to make its way into our lives, students worldwide are relying more and more on the Web as a primary source of information and tool for communication, as well as a means of bridging cultural, social, and geographical gaps. “I’ve taught courses from all over the world and have had students from Israel, Dubai, Japan, Brazil, Bulgaria, Kenya, Ecuador and any number of other countries. The diversity creates an enormously generative environment.”

“There are some common misconceptions about online education,” Alfonso continued. “People fear that it’s telegraphic or cold and instrumental, not very in-depth, that it’s all about email, and even that writing somehow is not ‘integral.’ But in fact, my experience is that our online programs are very integral, very intimate, often deeply transformative, and offer students an outstanding educational experience. And writing is such an enormously important form of expression. When people fall in love, they write love letters. When they’re upset they write letters to the editor or editorial articles or complaints. During moments of great personal transformation, people keep journals to capture their innermost feelings, and there’s a reason for this,” he said. “Writing evokes a different kind of reflection in us—it’s very personal; we often disclose more in writing than we would normally when speaking in public. In our online classes you can actually look at your thoughts on a page and see in detail the context and flow of an interaction with another person in a way that you're unable to when it’s said aloud.”

“These programs are for people who care passionately about the work they want to do. And for the students who come to us during times of transition, and may not have anything they’re completely passionate about right now, but really want to find it, we help them explore. We have created an environment where people can truly bring all of themselves to the dialogue. They can be open about who they are: They don’t have to hide their weird research interests, their spirituality, their background, their choices, their interests, or anything else for fear they’ll be summarily rejected or considered too crazy for academia. In fact, we actively encourage students to really get in touch with what they’re passionate about, because it fosters creativity, inquiry, and dialogue. And above all because we think integral education is not just about ideas, or just feelings or just spiritual experiences, or, for that matter, only about any one particular thing. It’s about an attitude of creative inquiry that recognizes the complexity of life, and remembers that the word complex is made up of com-plexus, Latin for “woven together.”

A creative inquiry into the way the world is woven together.  That seems about as good as any description of Alfonso Montuori’s life mission, and the contribution he makes to CIIS.

Transformative Studies Program
Transformative Leadership Program