Master of Arts in Transformative Leadership (Online Program) California Institute of Integral Studies

CIIS's innovative online Transformative Leadership MA focuses on mobilizing the imagination, creating a vision, developing skills for personal and social transformation, and applying them in the world.

In an era of rapid change and social transformation, contemporary models and myths of life and leadership are crumbling and alternative opportunities are emerging. The Transformative Leadership program mobilizes students' creativity to facilitate personal and social transformation in order to develop novel ways of living, working, and leading. Students find a supportive and stimulating environment where they can explore creative and practical opportunities to reflect on life, work, and leadership. Students can explore and apply insights gained through an engagement with cutting-edge research, and experiential and practical pedagogies in areas such as leadership, creativity, spirituality, and social justice, to support them in and developing valuable skills to make their vision a reality.

The Transformative Leadership program invites students to engage in a profound questioning of the assumptions about what matters most to them and to address the implications and applications to practice. Reflection and theory are united with practice by focusing on the development of capacities to envision, initiate, and engage in transformative change processes.

About the Program

Change yourself - Change the world.

The world is transformed by how we are in it. We are all participants-both leaders and followers.

How does this integral awareness open the way to becoming a transformative leader, one, who in a relationship with diverse others, perpetually sees beyond the horizon of convenient knowing and conventional doing and being?

Those of us who seek a more compassionate, just, and the wise world, come together in this program, to inquire, learn, reflect, and practice meaningful leadership at personal, community, and organizational levels.

Transformative leadership is a cyclical, generative process, that is adaptive to ever-changing contexts, people, and social realities and supports self-transformation in the service of transforming the world.

Become the adept leader you want to be with the capacities and skills that transform. A transformative leader:

• Recognizes that leadership is a process, not a role
• Engages in self-inquiry with tools such as 360-feedback process, Synergic Inquiry, cycles of action and reflection, and contemplative practices
• Understands principles of complexity, using systems thinking to recognize leverage points for change
• With others, re-frames problems in ways that inspire multiple approaches and novel solutions
• Artfully holds space for different and competing perspectives
• Works synergistically with diverse stakeholders
• Practices centering processes and mindful action
• Continually reflects deeply about personal leadership philosophy and values and enacts them
• Fosters a caring, receptive presence in group work
• Facilitates multiple ways of knowing to access entrenched assumptions
• Embraces uncertainty
• Communicates thoughtfully and effectively in print, online, and face-to-face
• Conducts Basic Qualitative Research to understand individual and group ways of making meaning and interpreting experience.
• Steps more assuredly down one's perpetually uncertain path.

Capstone Action Project

Throughout the program, hone more complex and creative ways of knowing and relating, and doing. Allow these capacities to evolve a leadership philosophy to guide the design and implementation of a culminating project that is personally meaningful. Receive ongoing support from faculty, learning peers, guest speakers, texts, practicums, and the communities and coalitions drawn to each project.

The Capstone Action project potentially seeds small and large changes. The project can become a catalyst for deepening a current career or creating a new one.

Transformative Leadership is designed as a 36-unit online master's program. Students meet in person twice a year in the Bay Area for a six-day residential intensive and complete the remainder of the coursework online.

Because intensives are an essential aspect of the learning experience, participation in the intensives is mandatory.

I. Required Core Courses-27 units

II. Electives-9 units

Electives may be taken from both the Transformative Leadership and Transformative Studies programs.