Alfonso Montuori
Alfonso Montuori is Professor in the Transformative Inquiry Department at California Institute of Integral Studies. A graduate of the University of London, he is the author of several books and numerous articles on creativity, transdisciplinarity, complexity, the future, culture, social change, leadership, and education. His work has been translated in Italian, French, Spanish, and Chinese.
Alfonso's books include Evolutionary Competence (Gieben, 1989); From Power to Partnership (co-authored with Isabella Conti, Harper San Francisco, 1993); Creators on Creating (co-edited with Barron & Barron, Putnam, 1997); and Social Creativity, vols. 1-2 (co-edited with Ronald E. Purser, Hampton Press, 1999), Journeys in Complexity (Routledge, 2015), and most recently with Gabrielle Donnelly The Routledge International Handbook for Creative Futures (2022). In 2006 Alfonso became a San Francisco Library Laureate.
Alfonso has contributed articles in publications such as Academy of Management Review, Futures, Human Relations, Journal of Management Education, and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.
In 2003-2004, Alfonso was Wiepking Distinguished Professor in the Fine Arts department at Miami University in Oxford Ohio, and in 2018 Distinguished Visiting Professor at Sapienza University of Rome. Alfonso has also taught at the College of Notre Dame, the Saybrook Institute, and in 1985-1986 in the Management Department at South-Central University in Changsha, Hunan Province, in the People's Republic of China, where he developed and taught the first courses in management and organization theory.
Alfonso is Co-Editor of World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, and on the editorial board of numerous academic journals. He was the founder and General Editor of Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences at Hampton Press, which published important works by Gregory Bateson, Gianluca Bocchi & Mauro Ceruti, Edgar Morin, Ervin Laszlo, and others.
Alfonso has consulted on leadership development, creativity, and innovation with numerous international corporations, including NetApp, UCB (Belgium) U.S. Forest Service, Procter & Gamble, Training Vision (Singapore), Pacific Bell, Stentor Group (Canada), Climate XChange, Kaiser Permanente, Interstate Insurance, Omnitel-Olivetti (Italy), ENEL (Italy), U.S. Department of Labor, University of Missouri Kansas City, Progressive Insurance, and others.
Alfonso was born in Holland, and grew up in Lebanon, Greece, and England before coming to the United States in 1983. His father was Italian and his mother Dutch, and Alfonso spoke several languages from an early age. He picked up English, his 4th language, at age 12 when his family moved to London. In London Alfonso worked as an interpreter for Scotland Yard and mainly as a professional musician on saxophone and flute, making numerous recordings with his own band and as a session-man, as well as gigging extensively throughout England for several years. Over the years he has performed with or produced artists including Roy Hargrove, Joe Henderson, Joe Louis Walker, Charles Brown, and Aztec Camera and collaborates with his wife, the jazz singer Kitty Margolis, playing the saxophone in her band and as co-producer of her award-winning recordings.
Alfonso's books include Evolutionary Competence (Gieben, 1989); From Power to Partnership (co-authored with Isabella Conti, Harper San Francisco, 1993); Creators on Creating (co-edited with Barron & Barron, Putnam, 1997); and Social Creativity, vols. 1-2 (co-edited with Ronald E. Purser, Hampton Press, 1999), Journeys in Complexity (Routledge, 2015), and most recently with Gabrielle Donnelly The Routledge International Handbook for Creative Futures (2022). In 2006 Alfonso became a San Francisco Library Laureate.
Alfonso has contributed articles in publications such as Academy of Management Review, Futures, Human Relations, Journal of Management Education, and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.
In 2003-2004, Alfonso was Wiepking Distinguished Professor in the Fine Arts department at Miami University in Oxford Ohio, and in 2018 Distinguished Visiting Professor at Sapienza University of Rome. Alfonso has also taught at the College of Notre Dame, the Saybrook Institute, and in 1985-1986 in the Management Department at South-Central University in Changsha, Hunan Province, in the People's Republic of China, where he developed and taught the first courses in management and organization theory.
Alfonso is Co-Editor of World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, and on the editorial board of numerous academic journals. He was the founder and General Editor of Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences at Hampton Press, which published important works by Gregory Bateson, Gianluca Bocchi & Mauro Ceruti, Edgar Morin, Ervin Laszlo, and others.
Alfonso has consulted on leadership development, creativity, and innovation with numerous international corporations, including NetApp, UCB (Belgium) U.S. Forest Service, Procter & Gamble, Training Vision (Singapore), Pacific Bell, Stentor Group (Canada), Climate XChange, Kaiser Permanente, Interstate Insurance, Omnitel-Olivetti (Italy), ENEL (Italy), U.S. Department of Labor, University of Missouri Kansas City, Progressive Insurance, and others.
Alfonso was born in Holland, and grew up in Lebanon, Greece, and England before coming to the United States in 1983. His father was Italian and his mother Dutch, and Alfonso spoke several languages from an early age. He picked up English, his 4th language, at age 12 when his family moved to London. In London Alfonso worked as an interpreter for Scotland Yard and mainly as a professional musician on saxophone and flute, making numerous recordings with his own band and as a session-man, as well as gigging extensively throughout England for several years. Over the years he has performed with or produced artists including Roy Hargrove, Joe Henderson, Joe Louis Walker, Charles Brown, and Aztec Camera and collaborates with his wife, the jazz singer Kitty Margolis, playing the saxophone in her band and as co-producer of her award-winning recordings.
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Papers by Alfonso Montuori
I reflect on my educational experiences as a starting point for an exploration of the way that education can be a joyful process if framed as an opportunity for what I call "creative inquiry." I outline some dimensions of an attitude of creative inquiry, focusing on Wonder, Passion, Hope, and Conviviality. I then explore a number of different metaphors for inquiry and the way they can frame our attitude and evoke different moods.
An introduction to Morin's remarkable life and work with an extensive biographical essay by Alfonso Montuori
Includes a letter from Edgar Morin, contextualising the work in recent advances in Science and the Humanities
creativity is understood and practised within social movement spaces, by
addressing some of the existing obstacles within activist cultures as a way
to unleash deeper transformation. We frame the discussion of creativity by
situating it in the context of these transitional times—a time between
stories—where the understanding and practice of creativity is also evolving. In broadening an understanding of creativity and its role in shaping the future, we suggest engaging creativity as a mindset (in contrast to an authoritarian mindset) that can be cultivated personally and collectively. We argue for recognition of creativity as a more fulsome force for change and explore how it can invite individuals into deeper work as activists and change agents, enlivening social movement spaces.
personal growth by placing us in situations where our understanding
of self and world, and of how we believe things “are” or “should
be,” is severely challenged. In this article, the authors argue that in
the United States, the cultural dimension is often overlooked in our
understanding of personal growth because U.S. individualism
obscures the role of culture in the constitution of the self and that
understanding this dimension makes a vital contribution to self-understanding.
They also view cross-cultural encounters as potentially
creative and draw on the psychology of creativity to explore
the implications of this view. The authors conclude by arguing that
to have the greatest effect, humanistic psychology must both return
to its roots in existential-phenomenological psychology and philosophy
and tackle its own understanding of the self as a culturally
situated phenomenon.