Deconstruction, Choice, Reconstruction, and Integration: Insights from Ignatius of Loyola’s Conversion Process on the Professional Formation of Organizational Leaders

This article, the first of a two-part series, examines how Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s (1548/1991) nearly 500 year-old approach to the transformation of others in their leadership journeys is still being actualized, with applications to transformations in workplaces and the graduate education of business leaders, by drawing upon both the handbook Ignatius wrote to guide his work—called the Spiritual Exercises—and upon the account of his own transformation experience captured in his Autobiography. Our exploratory prelude to practice is guided by the following questions that approximate (both in content and order) Ignatius of Loyola’s approach to personal and spiritual transformation: First, “What are my deepest desires?” (and this question has two distinct parts: “What don’t I want?” and “What do I want?”); once that has been clarified, the next question is “What does this require of me?” (In other words, what must be done to avoid the things you don’t want and achieve the things that you do want?); and finally, the last question requires an answer that lasts a lifetime: “How does this shape the person I am becoming?”. After characterizing the stages of Ignatius of Loyola’s (1548/1991) own transformation as: Deconstruction (the cannonball at Pamplona); Choice (while convalescing at Loyola); Reconstruction (during his retreat at Montserrat); and Integration (actualized by his mystical experience in Manresa), our contribution concludes by returning to the questions that frame our interrogative inquiry, but with an eye toward the professional formation of online graduate students of organizational leadership. In the second article (Tran and Carey 2023), our exploration continues by integrating academic theory with andragogical practice. Particular attention is paid to the qualitative reflections from online graduate leadership education students at a Jesuit university in the Inland Northwest of the United States.