Personal and Organizational Development – Some Maps for the Trip

Most organisations and leaders are now facing higher levels of complexity, change, diversity, and uncertainty than ever before.    In these times, how can we help develop organisations and leaders so that they are less likely to get “in over their heads”, as Robert Kegan aptly named his 1994 book.  Kegan suggests that the demands of modern life are often mismatched with our order of consciousness or mental capacity. How can we develop and expand our individual and collective “agility”, where new challenges and opportunities can be met with elegance and effectiveness?…

Two OD “gurus” are challenging us to re-look at development.  Bob Marshak, in “Is there a new OD?”, ponders what is different about OD in a postmodern world.  What impact does a socially constructed world have on life in organisations?  In the realm of leadership, Warren Bennis advocates for new models of leadership to be created, ones that better reflect the world we live in.  New models would provide new methodologies and roadmaps for expanded capacity for future success.

The field of developmental psychology offers some models of OD and leadership, with ideas on how to build their capacity in today’s environment.   Kegan (1994) defines developmental psychology as a theory of the psychological evolution of meaning-making systems.   Having a more evolved way of making sense of the world would increase a leader’s capacity to deal with higher levels of complexity, diversity, and uncertainty.  This could add a valuable dimension to leadership and organisation development.

A more evolved sense-making system is a “vertical” journey, rising up to more expansive ways of seeing the world, like climbing a mountain to get a better view.  Most of the development in the world now is done on horizontal playing fields, with the intention that people will elevate to new heights.    But what if we had a map of the ascent, in order to raise the possibility of more expansive perspectives for the world we live in?

The field of developmental psychology offers a map of the territory, by identifying stages that people pass through on their development.  The further along a person is on the path, the more able they are to manage complexity and uncertainty, and the map provides direction for possible future growth.   Once people are made aware of the map, they can choose to consolidate within their current stage and/or to plan on how to begin their transition to a higher, or later, stage.

The early days of developmental theory focused on children, and how they developed thinking abilities.  Jean Piaget pioneered child development stages. While he did not include stages for adulthood, it was the good start to the understanding of how humans develop.

Abraham Maslow introduced the idea of stages of adult development, with his hierarchy of needs.  While his theory is well-known throughout the world, there is little empirical evidence to support that his hierarchy reflected how adults actually develop.  Later, psychologists like Erik Erikson, Jane Loevinger, Lawrence Kohlberg, Clare Graves, and others, focused on researching and offering different frameworks to better explain the stages of adult development.   They began to try to understand how some adults were able to develop to different levels of orienting themselves to their world and to their life.  Each of the researchers identified meaning-making systems, or stages, that are more effective in dealing with the complexities of life than the previous stages.   These researchers all found that the stages unfold in a specific sequence, and that each stage transcends and includes the previous stages.

Bill Torbert brought developmental theory into leadership and organisation development with his 1987 book “The Corporate Dream”.  He calls the process Action Inquiry. He writes that Action Inquiry is “a way of simultaneously conducting action and inquiry, as a disciplined leadership practice that increases effectiveness” (2004, p1).    Regardless of positional power, anyone can practice action inquiry.   A diligent practice of Action Inquiry can expand a person’s Action Logic, which is described as a person’s strategies and schemas for reflecting on and making sense of their life experiences.  So the later and more developed a person’s Action Logic, the more effective they are in managing complexity.

Since 1987, a number of authors have written about stages of making sense of the world, and how it relates to leadership and organisations.   To name a few, Kegan’s In Over Our Heads  (1994) includes a chapter on management; Beck and Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change(1996); Barrett’s  Liberating the Corporate Soul: Building a Visionary Organization (1998); and a number of books by Ken Wilber, including A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality (2001).

In the domain of Leadership Development, Bill Joiner and Steven Josephs built on the work of Torbert with what they call Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change (2007).  They say that being mindful about following a development plan can increase leadership agility, make a difference in the world, and help leaders enjoy the person they become in the process.

The book “Personal and Organization Transformations” (Fisher, Rooke, and Torbert, 2003) speaks to our profession’s passion for supporting development and transformation.  Their work is being elaborated on here because of their focus on both personal and organizational shifts, within the context of organisations.

Torbert and David Rooke (2005) believe that leadership philosophy or styles are not as important as a leader’s stage of development, their “Action Logic”, in determining effectiveness in times of uncertainty.  The terms they use for the Action Logics, from the earlier to the later stage, are Impulsive, Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist, Strategist, Alchemist, and Ironist.    They also have done research that points to organizations needing someone with at least a “strategist” action-logic on the team in order to transform itself.

They have also identified a parallel track for organisational development, and the stages are named Conception, Investments, Incorporation, Experiments, Systematic Productivity, Social Network, Collaborative Inquiry, Foundation Community of Inquiry, and Liberating Disciplines.

These Personal and Organisational stages (“action logics”) provide us another way of looking at how we orient ourselves to our work and our business.  With this developmental perspective, we can gain an extra view of our motivations, communications, and how we make decisions.  Individuals and Organisations do not operate at just one stage, but along a spectrum, so the framework allows for meaningful reflection for how much of our thinking and action is in the various action logics.  Aspirational questions like “What would a Strategist or Alchemist do?” or “How would a Foundational Community of Inquiry look at this?” can help expand our thinking and actions to new levels.

Measuring someone’s complexity of thinking is in itself a complex process.  Creating valid and reliable ways of measuring a person’s current stage of development can be a challenge.    However, it is possible, and what follows are two reliable and valid methods.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey developed Subject-Object Interviews, which involve intensive interviews by a psychologist, to determine a person’s “order of consciousness”, on the developmental scale that Kegan developed.  The content of the messages in the interview are analysed in order to determine the stage of a person’s development.

Jane Loevinger developed the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT), a sentence completion form. Sentence completion forms are commonly used by psychologists, to measure various aspects of personality.   Loevinger developed the WUSCT to measure stage of what she called “ego development”.  The WUSCT has since been updated by Harthill Consulting and Suzanne Cook-Greuter, and renamed the Leadership Development Profile.

Both of these methods are labour-intensive, and require highly trained professionals to conduct.

There are two main criticisms of developmental theory.

One is that it can be considered as elitist, because later stages are considered “better”, and this can create people being judgemental.   However, while operating at a later developmental stage is helpful in some contexts, there are many more competencies that go into being an effective organisation and leader.    Being at a later stage does not mean a person is a better human being, just that they have a more sophisticated sense-making system.  And effective leaders are only required to operate at a stage that matches the complexity of the environment they are working in, so later stages may not always be necessary.

A second criticism is the difficulty and/or expense of assessing someone’s stage of development.     However, maps can be useful, even if they are imperfect and even if a person is not 100% sure of where they are.  Or to adapt an old saying “Tell someone to keep moving ahead, and they may get lost.   Give a person a map of the territory, and they at least know where they are going.”   I have facilitated many workshops where there is no assessment of the participant’s stages, and the impact has still been transformational.    There is a  “pull factor” that seems to get activated when people understand this fairly new view of the terrain of development.

Albert Einstein said “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”.  If this is true, then purposefully transforming ourselves to later action logics (or using any other model of developmental psychology) will be useful for being effective in the future.

By presenting a developmental roadmap as part of leadership and organization development, we can decrease the chances of the leaders getting caught “in over their head” and increase the possibilities they can manage a world on increasing complexity, diversity, and uncertainty.