Transformation: From Potential to Practice

Preface

Why Transformation?

When I was starting out as a consultant to organizations in the 1980s, the term transformation was not heard in business circles. In fact, the only places it was heard at all were in the blossoming Human Potential Movement in programs such as “est” (Erhard Seminars Training), Lifespring, and others. In business, such talk was considered “woo-woo” and not worthy of consideration. Similarly, terms that are now commonplace in business such as purpose, vision, mission, and values were lumped into the same category.

Today, all these terms are part of the everyday currency of business and industry, and no one blinks an eye at their use, even in “hard” industries such as mining and manufacturing. However, as we will see in the first chapter of this book, many of these terms have been misinterpreted and misunderstood.

I have been working in the area of transformation, both personal and organizational, since the 1970s when I led workshops at Jack Canfield’s New England Center for Personal Growth in Amherst. At that time, I brought to participants in the workshops the distinction between being and doing. Increasingly, participants and others at the Center would come to me and say, “You must have done the est Training,” which at the time I had barely heard of.

I am a psychologist by degree and at that time I was a psychotherapist, trained in and practicing a combination of Transactional Analysis, Gestalt Therapy, Family Systems Therapy, and also making a study of Buddhism and other Eastern disciplines.

Around the same time I was doing workshops at the New England Center, I was on the Board of the International Transactional Analysis Association, and as it happened in 1978 I chaired and organized the Association’s annual conference which was held in Montreal that year, and a fellow Board member, Herb Hamsher, proposed a workshop at the conference on est and psychotherapy, with Werner Erhard presenting. Skeptical to the end, I was taken with Erhard’s charisma and in September of 1978 did the est Training in New York City, with Erhard leading a training of five hundred participants. It’s a cliché, but it changed the course of my life.

In est, I saw a methodology to bring the opportunity for transformation to people in a way that they could engage with and practice in their lives. Much has been written about est and its successor the Landmark Forum, both their benefits and their shortcomings, and it is not my purpose to go into that here. I saw enough that was positive that, after the Training, I began to participate and in 1981 moved with my family to California and went to work for the organization, first as a project manager (the title was Director) directly for Werner and then as a Trainer and Forum Leader.

In the mid-eighties I worked with Werner and others on redesigning and updating the Training, a project that resulted in the Forum (it was later that it came to be called the Landmark Forum) and in the redesign of the Forum from a two-weekend program to one that took three days over one weekend. This led me to a deep dive into the origins of the material of the programs and the nature of transformation itself.

As you’ll see, transformation is far from a new idea—it has been around for most of civilization’s history—it is a discipline like any other that has tools and concepts to be learned, practices to be carried out, and aspects that must be taken on faith until they become so ingrained that their value is clear. Unlike many (particularly Western) disciplines, transformation can be counterintuitive. As I will explain in the first two chapters, much of how human beings have learned to see the world leads us down developmental paths that are directly opposite to the path of transformation. As Brian Klaas put it in his 2024 book Fluke,”We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.” Our perceptions have been forged over millions of years, fine-tuned to help us survive, nothing more, nothing less.

As we will see, those matters that were “life and death to our ancestors” are the main barrier to transformation in the current age, both for individuals and for organizations.

A few notes for the reader:

• Nothing in this book is “true.” Also, hopefully, nothing is intentionally factually false. Rather what I am attempting here is, first, a comprehensive summary of what we know about transformation at the personal and organizational levels, colored by my experience in working with both individuals and organizations to get them on the path of transformed living.
• Where I speak of work I have done with individuals and organizations, I have taken care to mask the identities of those I’m speaking about to respect their privacy.
• In another, forthcoming, book I explore religious experience, and distinguish between the experience of Spirit, the sharing of the experience, and institutionalization (not to mention monetization) of those things. Much  the same can be said of transformation. Many people who have carried the message of transformation have gone on to institutionalize their work and some have become rich from it. It is my intention here to separate the work from the workers. No one has a patent on transformation. It has been around for millennia and comes in many forms with many access points, and I hope to present it in a way that is method-agnostic and let the reader explore methods on their own.
• Some of the people who have contributed greatly to the development of transformational thinking have aspects of their lives that are problematic. Martin Heidegger, for example, somehow managed to be simultaneously one of the great existential philosophers and a Nazi sympathizer. In the current climate of “cancellation” we risk “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” (discarding value while retaining the superfluous) when we do not separate a person’s actions from their thinking. I will note these as they arise, lest the reader think I am ignorant of these cases.
• Finally, there is the question of pronouns and other aspects of language that is common, but oppressive. In this book I will try to eschew the cumbersome “he/she” construction and use the plural “they/them/their” unless I mean to refer particularly to people who identify as men or as women. In quoting, particularly from old, male, Caucasian sources, I will take the prerogative of “cleaning up” sexist, racist, or homophobic language. The interested reader can follow the endnotes to the original source.