I was born in Vermont, USA, in 1974. I developed my theory and practice of the Four Powers of Integrity during the Noughties, while living in Southern California and Southern England. Studying and working as coach, facilitator, trainer, and consultant. I've continued to deepen my practice since. Here are some of my major influences.

"The nature of Budo [the Way of the Warrior] is Love."

This is a rough translation of the teaching of Morihei Ueshiba, founder of the martial art of Aikido and one the toughest fighters of the 20th Century. Ueshiba's work still influences me as a practitioner of Aikido, and it shapes my understanding of integrity: the true warrior is one who can maintain their own centre and move with the forces of the world, choosing a path that is beneficial to all. I first practiced Aikido in 1995.

What if we could have a permanent culture? What if human society could be a benefit to our global ecosystem, rather than an imposition on it? Permaculture provides a way toward this goal through whole systems design. In 1996 it was my first introduction to the Ecovillage movement, the triple bottom line, and iterative, evolutionary approaches to whole systems design.

Peter Senge, Otto Schwarmer, Joe Jaworski, Margaret Wheatley... the practitioners who led on the development of the Fifth Discipline (and later Presencing and Theory U) and associated work in the mid 1990s helped me to see that the standard organisational structures of the 20th Century needed to be replaced if the world was to prosper. I did my best to build this into the structure of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas (my contribution as a co-founder in 1996-98) but Sociocracy was already a better-tested and more holistic option, and I'm glad the Global Ecovillage Network has now adopted it.

People throw the word shaman around freely, and won't claim to be one until an indigenous lineage holder inducts me into their specific lineage. However, I have practiced with lineage holders. For me this path began in the mid 1990s, with medicine lodges outside Chicago and in the late 1990s through the work of Diamond and River Jameson. Realising that I could learn directly from my relationship with the natural world began the process of healing the profound alienation I'd experienced as a young person. That alienation is a gap in integrity with which so many people struggle in today's society.

I first developed my understanding and practice of integrity as integrity during my 2000-2003 apprenticeship with Drs. Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, whose work was profoundly influential for me and enabled me to rethink many of my earlier influences (such as the work of Joseph Campbell). Their Four Pillars of Integrity model, their core coaching tool (the FACT process), their learning cycle, together with their deep commitment to embodied practice and genuine service to Spirit and humanity, are hopefully still recognisable in the Four Powers model and my work. Body centered transformation and conscious relationships are built on a foundation of integrity.

Joseph Campbell's work, particularly the map of the monomyth, helped me to understand that there are some patterns of experience that are common to all humans, and these shape our lives, our cultures, and our societies. Although I'd already picked this up from Jung, Campbell's monomyth provided a map that I could see matched the Hendricks learning cycle and so many other maps of the human process of learning and transformation.

The work of Ken Wilber, Clare Graves, and Don Beck were an extremely valuable addition when I began to makes sense of how to connect all the pieces of inner transformation, culture change, and social transformation. I took all the courses currently on offer from Beck in 2004-2005! And got a lot from reading unpublished books by Clare Graves, as well as quite a lot published by Wilber.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas, and her protege Michael Thompson, developed a way of mapping social structure (and culture) known as Grid/Group analysis. Although my way of applying the Four Powers model to social groups differs in an important way, their work was a powerful influence and a way of connecting to many other similar and connected models.

The work of Gerard Endenburg, both in what I learned from him directly and in what I learned working and learning with my mentor John Buck (one of Gerard's senior students), has strongly influenced my understanding of Sociocracy, particularly in social systems. This is particularly true of the standard decision-making processes.

Steve Blank's book about safely launching business startups completely transformed how people thought about business planning, risk, and new businesses. His student, Eric Ries, wrote the book Lean Startup, and Lean Startup is the phrase people use when referring to this way of working, but Steve was Eric's teacher. Steve drew on Campbell to map the development cycle of a new startup, and his work shaped my understanding of the wide applicability of the Four Powers model.

From 2010 to 2014 I worked (mostly part-time) at Aptivate, a pioneering self-managed tech nonprofit. There I combined my facilitation, coaching, training, and consulting work with agile ways of working and self management, and process frameworks like Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space Technology. This was a profoundly valuable learning laboratory for me. I learned a huge amount from my Aptivate colleagues about agile, and was able to ground and implement what I was learning and developing elsewhere.

The Human Awareness Institute is devoted to creating a win-win world through the development of the inner and relational skills that make satisfying sex and love possible. I learned a huge amount from HAI, including the most important part of integrity: the ability to hold myself in love. Although every one of my mentors, most notably Katie and Gay Hendricks, had been trying to help me find this possibility in myself, I found the practices I did through HAI to be deeply valuable.

I first read one of Brad's books in the early noughties, but studying with him in 2013 really helped me to open the doors of connection with the Universe in a way that my other shamanic teachers had been inviting me to do fifteen years before. Integrity in a living system can never be a static thing. Brad invited me to be more loopy in my feedback loops; to disrupt the mental control and be more whole.

I encountered Gregory Bateson's work in the late 1990s as I was exploring the nature of living systems, and continued reading everything I could find by him in the noughties. Training as a Warm Data Facilitator in 2020 with his daughter, Nora Bateson, brought me full circle. Integrity relies on warm data. We need the rich, contradictory, paradoxical, historically-contextualised fullness of experience and story in order for any set of numbers to make sense in organisational decision-making, and we need deep rich connections from each part of us to every other part of us in order for the Whole Self to be able to strongly emerge and provide inner leadership.

My recent experience of transformation, and the way that I serve the transformation of others, has been strongly shaped by learning about the work of Richard Schwartz and spending two years working with IFS coaches in my relationships with my wife, my parents, and my the parts of myself.