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What Do We Mean by Development?
Words like development and growth are widely used in business and other professions. If you’re the leader of a company or one of its shareholders, you want it to develop. As an employee, you want to work at a place where your career can develop over time.
When people refer to a company growing or developing, they are generally talking about an increase in revenue, profits, stock price, personnel, markets, lines of business, office locations, or subsidiaries—increases in the “size” of the business. When individuals talk about the growth or development of their career, they generally mean an increase in their seniority, their scope of responsibility, their authority, their compensation—increases in the “size” of their position. If deliberately developmental organizations did not also develop in this sense, and if their people did not find their careers also developing in this sense, it isn’t likely they would last or find employees.
But when we talk about a DDO, we use the term development very differently. We mean, not the development of a career, but the development of the person having the career. We aren’t first talking about the business becoming bigger, but becoming a better version of itself. Businesses expand and careers flourish within a DDO, but these changes are consequences of the kind of development we’re talking about; they are not the development itself.
What is “the development itself”? For more than a hundred years, researchers have studied the ways human beings construct reality and have observed how that constructing can become more expansive, less distorted, less egocentric, and less reactive over time. They began with the study of children, teasing out, first, the underlying logic used by their young subjects to make sense of themselves and the world around them; then researchers discovered the principles and processes by which this logic gradually evolves to enable growing children to overcome their cognitive distortions and see more deeply and accurately into themselves and their worlds. Testing the robustness of this logic and the sequence of its development, researchers found that the basic patterns hold up across genders, cultures, and social classes.
Forty years ago this science took a significant, and controversial, turn with the investigation of adult development. Many theorists and researchers, ourselves among them (Kegan and Lahey), advanced an understanding of a succession of more complex mental logics after adolescence. Informed by our research subjects whom we followed over many years, we began to see further possibilities in adulthood for overcoming limitations in the ability to understand oneself and one’s worlds—even if not every adult traveled the full course of this trajectory.1
The Trajectory of Adult Development
When we began our work, the accepted picture of mental development was akin to the picture of physical development; human growth was thought fundamentally to end by our twenties. Most people don’t get any taller than the height they reach in their twenties, and it was believed they didn’t get any “taller” psychologically, either. If, forty years ago, you were to place “age” on one axis and “mental complexity” on another, and if you asked the experts in the field to draw the graph as they understood it, they would have produced something similar to figure 2-1: an upward sloping line until the twenties, and a flat line thereafter. And they would have drawn it with confidence.
In the 1980s we began reporting the results of our research, suggesting that some (though not all) adults seemed to undergo qualitative advances in their mental complexity akin to earlier, well-documented quantum leaps from early childhood to later childhood and from later childhood to adolescence. When we talked about these results on distinguished panels, our brain-research colleagues sitting next to us would greet them with polite disdain.
“You might think you can infer this from your longitudinal interviews,” they would say, “but hard science doesn’t have to make inferences. We’re looking at the real thing. The brain simply doesn’t undergo any significant change in capacity after later adolescence. Sorry.” Of course, these hard scientists would grant that older people are often wiser or more capable than younger people, but this they attributed to the benefits of experience, a consequence of learning how to get more out of the same mental equipment rather than qualitative advances or upgrades to the equipment itself.
Forty years later? Whoops! It turns out everyone was making inferences, even the brain scientists who thought they were looking at “the thing itself.” The hard scientists have better instruments now, and the brain doesn’t look to them exactly the way it did forty years ago. Now they talk about neural plasticity and acknowledge the phenomenal capacities of the brain to keep adapting throughout life.
What if we were to draw the graph showing age and mental complexity now? On the basis of forty years of longitudinal research by us and our colleagues—as a result of thoroughly analyzing the transcripts of hundreds of people, interviewed and reinterviewed at several-year intervals—the graph would look like figure 2-2.
Two things are evident from this graph.
- With a large-enough sample size you can detect a mildly upward-sloping curve. That is, looking at a population as a whole, mental complexity tends to increase with age, throughout adulthood, at least until old age. When an evolution occurs from one level of complexity to another, adults take greater responsibility for their thinking and feeling, can retain more layers of information, and can think further into the future, to name only some of the well-researched consequences of mental development. So the story of mental complexity certainly does not end in our twenties.
- There is considerable variation within any age. For example, each of six people in their thirties (the darker dots) could be at a different place in their level of mental complexity, and some could be more complex than a person in her forties. People move through these evolutions at different speeds, and many of us, if not most of us, get stuck in our evolution and do not reach the most complex peaks.
FIGURE 2-2
Age and mental complexity: The revised view today
If we were to draw a quick picture of what we have learned about the individual trajectory of mental development in adulthood, it might look something like figure 2-3.
This picture suggests several elements.
- There are qualitatively different, distinct levels (the “plateaus”); the demarcations between levels of mental complexity are not arbitrary. Each level represents a different way of knowing the world.
- Development does not unfold continuously; there are periods of stability and periods of change. When a new plateau is reached, we tend to stay on that level for a considerable time (although elaborations and extensions within each system can occur).
- The intervals between transformations to new levels—the time on a plateau—get longer as time passes.
- The line gets thinner, representing the decreasing likelihood of reaching the higher plateaus.
What do these levels of mental complexity in adulthood look like? Can we say anything about what someone at a more complex level can see or do that he cannot do at a less complex level? Indeed, we can now say a great deal about these levels. They do not mark how smart you are in the ordinary sense. Mental complexity is not about how much you know or how high your IQ is. It is not about developing increasingly abstruse apprehensions of the world, as if “most complex” meant finally being able to understand a physicist’s blackboard filled with complex equations.
FIGURE 2-3
The trajectory of mental development in adulthood
Then what does it mean? Read on.
Three Plateaus in Adult Mental Complexity
Let’s begin with an overview of three qualitatively different plateaus in mental complexity we see among adults, as suggested in figure 2-4 and table 2-1. These three adult meaning systems—the socialized mind, the self-authoring mind, and the self-transforming mind—make sense of the world, and operate within it, in distinct ways. One way to see how this difference shows up at work is to focus on any significant aspect of organizational life and then consider how the same phenomenon—for example, the flow of information—differs through the lens of each perspective.
FIGURE 2-4
Three plateaus in adult mental development
TABLE 2-1
The three adult plateaus
The socialized mind
- We are shaped by the definitions and expectations of our personal environment.
- Our self coheres by its alignment with, and loyalty to, that with which it identifies.
- This sense of self can express itself primarily in our relationships with people, with schools of thought (our ideas and beliefs), or both.
The self-authoring mind
- We are able to step back enough from the social environment to generate an internal seat of judgment, or personal authority, that evaluates and makes choices about external expectations.
- Our self coheres by its alignment with its own belief system, ideology, or personal code; by its ability to self-direct, take stands, set limits, and create and regulate its boundaries on behalf of its own voice.
The self-transforming mind
- We can step back from and reflect on the limits of our own ideology or personal authority; see that any one system or self-organization is in some way partial or incomplete; be friendlier toward contradiction and opposites; seek to hold on to multiple systems rather than project all except one onto the other.
- Our self coheres through its ability not to confuse internal consistency with wholeness or completeness, and through its alignment with the dialectic rather than either pole.
The way information does or does not flow through an organization—what people “send,” to whom they send it, how they receive or attend to what flows to them—is a crucial feature of how any system works; nowhere is it more important than in a DDO, which stresses unprecedented forms of transparency. Experts on organizational culture, organizational behavior, or organizational change often address this subject with a sophisticated sense of how systems impact individual behavior, but with a naive sense of how powerful a factor is the level of mental complexity with which the individual views the culture. Let’s look at how this factor operates.
The Socialized Mind and Information Flow
Having a socialized mind dramatically influences both the sending and receiving aspects of information flow at work. If this is the level of mental complexity with which I view the world, then what I think to send will be strongly influenced by what I believe others want to hear. You may be familiar with the classic groupthink studies, which show team members withholding crucial information from collective decision processes because (it is later learned in follow-up research), as one participant might put it, “although I believed the plan had almost no chance of succeeding, I saw that the leader wanted our support.”
Some of these studies were originally done in Asian cultures, where withholding team members talked about the need to “save face” of the leaders and not subject them to shame, even at the price of setting the company on a losing path. The studies were often presented as if they were uncovering a particular cultural phenomenon. Similarly, Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience-to-authority research was originally undertaken to fathom the mentality of “the good German” and to identify what about the German culture enabled otherwise decent, nonsadistic people to carry out orders to exterminate millions of Jews. But Milgram, in practice runs of his data-gathering method before he went overseas to Germany, was surprised to find “good Germans” all over Main Street USA. And although we think of sensitivity to shame as a particular feature of Asian culture, the research of Irving Janis and Paul ’t Hart has made clear that groupthink is as robust a phenomenon in Texas and Toronto as it is in Tokyo and Taiwan.2 In sum, groupthink and obedience to authority may owe their origins less to culture and more to complexity of mind.
The socialized mind strongly influences how information is received and attended to, as well as how it is sent. Because maintaining alignment with important others and valued “surrounds” is crucial to the coherence of one’s being at this stage, the socialized mind is highly sensitive to, and influenced by, what it picks up. Because of this sensitivity, it often picks up information far beyond the explicit message. It may well include the results of highly invested attention to imagined subtexts and cues that may have more impact on the receiver than the sender intends. (“I could just tell he was impatient by his tone of voice.” “When she leans in like that, you know she doesn’t agree with what you’re saying.”) This kind of inference is often astonishing and dismaying to leaders and others, who cannot understand how subordinates and team members could possibly have interpreted a communication in an unintended way.
Keep in mind that levels of mental complexity are not the same thing as levels of intelligence in the IQ sense. People at the socialized level of mental complexity can differ widely among themselves with respect to IQ, and, like any level, it may include those with very high IQs. Recall Sergio, from Bridgewater, introduced in chapter 1. He probably has a very high IQ, and it is also likely, at the time he appears in chapter 1, he is working on the transition out of the socialized mind. He tells us he “feels an acute need, almost at random, to please others,” that he feels torn between a desire, on the one hand, to please founder Ray Dalio by staying at Bridgewater, and the pull, on the other hand, of leaving and going to medical school. “The thing I worry most about,” he says, “is pleasing whoever is in front of me.”
We all spend some portion of our adult lives in the socialized mind, and at any time, in any organization, a large percentage of people, in a DDO or otherwise, will organize their experience according to this psychologic. But notice that, in Sergio’s case, the culture of a DDO may usefully trouble this mind-set and support his transition.
Even to please his boss, Sergio will pick up that Dalio will be most pleased by Sergio’s speaking his mind, by his saying what is true for him, even if that truth is an inconvenient one for Dalio. When a culture acts in such a way to upend our current level of mental complexity, even as we are acting to preserve that level—in this case by seeking to align with (or get in sync with) the values and norms of authorities surrounding us—that culture is operating in a fashion that induces development.
You can see the effect on Sergio, who is having the opportunity, in the context of his work, not only to enact his socialized mind but also to identify how it works—and how it may no longer work very well. “This can get me in trouble,” he says. He has not yet moved fully beyond the socialized mind, but clearly he is not so completely embedded in it as he once was. There was a time when he did not know he was a people pleaser, to use his term. This is what development always looks like. That which we were “subject to,” or run by, gradually becomes “object,” or something we can look at rather than only look through.
What if the life of a DDO is filled with such development-inducing opportunities, not only for those in the socialized mind but also for those at any point in their development?
The Self-Authoring Mind and Information Flow
Let’s contrast the socialized mind with the self-authoring mind. If I view the world from this level of mental complexity, what I send is more likely to be a function of what I deem others need to or ought to hear to best further the agenda or mission of my design. Consciously or unconsciously, I have a direction, an agenda, a stance, a strategy, or an analysis of what is needed—a prior context from which my communication arises. My direction or plan may be an excellent one, or it may be riddled with blind spots. I may be masterful or inept at recruiting others to invest in my plan. These matters implicate other aspects of the self. But mental complexity strongly influences whether I orient my information toward getting myself behind the wheel so that I can drive (the self-authoring mind) or getting myself included in the car so that I can be driven (the socialized mind).
We see a similar mind-set operating when I, as someone with a self-authoring mind, receive information. I create a filter for what I allow to come through. The filter puts a high priority on some information—e.g., information I seek, or information I may not seek but that I can see is relevant to my plan, stance, or frame—and a lower priority on other information—e.g., information I haven’t asked for that seems unimportant to my design.
It’s easy to see how someone having a self-authoring mind could demonstrate an admirable capacity for focus, for distinguishing the important from the urgent, for making the best use of her limited time by having a means to cut through the unending and ever-mounting claims on her attention. This speaks to the way the self-authoring mind is an advance over the socialized mind. But the self-authoring mind may also be a recipe for disaster if her plan or stance is flawed, if it leaves out a crucial element of the equation not appreciated by the filter, or if the world changes so that a formerly effective filter becomes antiquated.
Consider Jackie from Next Jump, whom you met in chapter 1, and the way the world changed for her. “I have to be honest,” Jackie told us. “When cultural contributions were first introduced to the company, I pretty much dismissed them. Why am I going to do them?” Her words convey more than a refreshing candor; they convey a long-lived internal authority that can consider a new companywide expectation and a reset of the definition of success, and just say, “Nope. Doesn’t fit my filter. I’m tossing that in the wastebasket.”
Imagine how differently someone with a socialized mind would be affected by a new norm that essentially says, “To be loved and respected around here, now you have to give as much attention to your contributions to culture as to revenue.” If that person had a work profile like Jackie’s, ignoring contributions to the culture, we would expect him to turn around on a dime and start attending to culture.
Not Jackie. The same self-direction, focus, and personal initiative that have no doubt contributed to her success as a marketing leader, as a champion of any project she can run on her own, also make it possible for her to independently evaluate the new information bumping up against her filter. Nothing about it forwards her self-authored agenda, so it doesn’t register—until there are consequences. In Jackie’s case, she was removed from the company’s most prestigious leadership committee, which was a blow to her own self-authored definition of being successful.
But again, as with Sergio, we can do more than use these live examples to demonstrate how the differing minds show up in the real world. We can begin to see that a DDO is deliberately developmental precisely because it intersects continuously with its members’ developmental position, whatever that position is, offering invitations for them to grow beyond the limits of their current mind-sets, if they are ready for the move.
Jackie could have responded to her setback by taking up contributions to culture in the same self-authoring way in which she was previously having nothing to do with it. “Okay,” she could have said to herself, picking herself up and dusting herself off. “I’m Jackie. I get the A’s. If the grading system has changed, and it remains my self-authored goal to be restored to my rightful place on the leadership committee, I will come up with a new plan to realign, not with what others want, but with what I want.”
Initially, this is probably just what she did. But it’s important to see that even if this were all she did, it would not be a defeat for her, or the company, or the purpose of a DDO. Not everyone is always ready to undergo the transformation it takes to climb to a new plateau. There also is a kind of human progress in making our way further along the horizontal line. There are many ways to be self-authoring, many agendas or filters that Jackie could create.
But notice that even if her initial move is a more lateral one, the particular one the DDO encourages brings her into experiences that may make it more likely for her to move beyond the self-authoring level. She may initially grit her teeth and spend more time trying to be helpful to others only to accomplish her self-authored goal. But doing so will give her the opportunity to do more than just accomplish her agenda; it may well lead her to a different definition of self, to different metrics for success and accomplishment and satisfaction—new ways of seeing that are genuinely more unselfish because they transcend the self-authoring level. A key indicator may be whether getting reelected to the leadership committee comes to pale in importance, for Jackie, to the satisfaction of being the new person she finds herself becoming.
The examples of Sergio and Jackie may make it tempting to consider that Next Jump’s work to help people become less insecure or less arrogant (recall that these are the company’s terms) amounts to powerful ways of helping people with socialized minds to become more self-authoring, and helping people with self-authoring minds to become more self-transforming, respectively. But the realities are not always so simple. Some people who lean arrogant do so with socialized minds. Their overcertainty and high confidence might be an expression of how well connected and well regarded they feel themselves to be. (If you’re certain you have God on your side, for example, your faithful adherence can show up as “leaning arrogant.”)
And some people with self-authoring minds can lean insecure. If, for example, your frame or personal philosophy puts a high premium on not being found wanting, or not being one who lets his heart cloud his good judgment, you may have an outlook of chronic caution or tempered enthusiasm that comes across as leaning insecure. An optimally effective DDO will offer a different set of developmental supports and provocations to arrogance or insecurity suited to differing levels of mental complexity.
The Self-Transforming Mind and Information Flow
In contrast to the self-authoring mind, the self-transforming mind also has a filter but is not fused with it. Someone with a self-transforming mind can stand back from his own filter and look at it and not only through it. And why would he do so? It’s because he both values, and is wary of, any one stance, analysis, or agenda. He is mindful that, powerful though a given design might be, it almost inevitably omits something. A self-transforming mind is aware it lives in time and the world is in motion. It is aware that what might make sense today may not make as much sense tomorrow.
Therefore, when communicating, people with self-transforming minds are not only advancing their agenda and design but also making space for its modification or expansion. Like those with self-authoring minds, what those with self-transforming minds send may include inquiries and requests for information. But rather than inquire only within the frame of their design (seeking information that will advance their agenda), they also inquire about the design itself. They seek information that may lead them or their team to enhance, refine, or alter the original design or make it more inclusive. Unlike the socialized-minded person, for the self-transforming person, information sending isn’t about being included in the car; and unlike the person with a self-authoring mind, it is not only about driving the car, but also about considering whether to remake the road map or reset the direction.
Similarly, the way the self-transforming mind receives information includes the advantage of having the self-authoring mind’s filter, but the self-transforming mind is not a prisoner of the filter. People at this level of mental complexity can still focus, select, and drive when they feel they have a good map. But they place a higher priority on information that may also alert them to the limits of their current design or frame. They value their filter and its ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, but they know it can also screen out the “golden chaff”: the unasked-for, the anomaly, the apparently inconsequential datum that may be what is needed to turn the design on its head and bring it to the next level of quality.
Those with self-transforming minds are more likely even to have the chance to consider such information, because people are more likely to send it to them. Why? It’s because those with selftransforming minds not only attend to information once it gets to their door but also realize their behavior can have a big effect, upstream, on whether people even decide to approach the door. Others are not left guessing whether to send potentially “off-mission,” but potentially important, communication. They send it because people with self-transforming minds have found ways to let them know such information will be welcomed.
Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, for example, places a high premium on what he calls “radical open-mindedness,” by which he means something qualitatively beyond a mere willingness to listen to a competing view when and if it comes to call. “To be radically open-minded,” he says, “you need to be so open to the possibility that you might be making a mistake and/or that you have a weakness that you encourage others to tell you so.”
The developmental journey of Decurion’s Nora Dashwood, whom you met in chapter 1, is instructive in this regard. She is clearly and consciously at work on questions that come down to, “Can I be bigger than the self-authoring self that feels as if it has been so integral to my professional success and personal sense of well-being?” (“Can I lead others without withdrawing my goodwill when they don’t see the world my way?” “Can I keep holding high standards for excellence in the business, while at the same time allowing others to step forward with their own ideas and solutions even when they run counter to my own instincts?”)
Recall in chapter 1 that Dashwood talks about her growth as a leader, explaining that a low-ranking employee brought her up short when he told her that he felt “the air in the room turn cold” when things didn’t go her way in meetings. Dashwood traced her take-charge tendency to her upbringing as the child of immigrants, who taught her, “You need to take care of yourself because no one else will . . . if you want all that life has to offer you, you need to count on yourself and take charge. That if you are not leading, you might as well be failing.” But because of Decurion’s practices, which pushed Dashwood “to be a [different kind of] leader, to be a mentor, to be with a community, and to count on other people,” she has changed. “I am a better listener,” she says. “I am more aware. I have a community that supports and challenges me . . . What I have learned at Decurion is that I can be a part of something that produces results much bigger than I can produce on my own. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and it has been the most meaningful growth and development I’ve ever experienced.”
Her words express a developmental journey beyond the self-authoring mind, and they show how a deliberately developmental organization, through its community and its practices, slips its hand under its people, wherever they may be in their developmental journey, and supports their forward movement when they are ready.
Mental Complexity and Performance
The foregoing descriptions of the three plateaus of mental complexity, structured around a single important element of organizational life—information flow—begin to show you how a DDO is deliberately developmental. They show how an organization’s actions—its communities and its practices—intersect with individuals, wherever they are in the developmental journey.
There is no denying that the descriptions suggest a value proposition for mental complexity. Theoretically, each successive level is formally “higher” than the preceding one, because people at the next level can perform all the mental functions of the prior level as well as additional ones. Each new level transcends and includes the prior level.
But the discussion so far has been about more than the formal theoretical properties and functions of the developmental levels. We have implied that the levels translate into real actions having real consequences for organizational behavior and work competence. The implication is that people having a higher level of mental complexity outperform those at a lower level in real life.
Is this only a hypothesis, albeit with plausible face validity, or has it been tested and systematically demonstrated? There are now a number of studies that correlate measures of mental complexity with independent assessments of work competence or performance. For now, let’s peek into them to see the trends they suggest.
Leadership researcher Keith Eigel assessed the level of mental complexity of twenty-one CEOs of large, successful companies, each company an industry leader with average gross annual revenue of more than $5 billion.3
Using separate performance assessments, Eigel also evaluated the CEOs’ effectiveness in terms of the ability to:
- Challenge existing processes
- Inspire a shared vision
- Manage conflict
- Solve problems
- Delegate
- Empower
- Build relationships
For comparison, Eigel did similar assessments in each of the same companies, interviewing promising middle managers nominated by their respective CEOs. Figure 2-5 summarizes his findings.
Several results stand out. First is the clearly discernible upward slope, signifying that increased mental complexity and work competence, assessed on a number of dimensions, are correlated. Thus, not only is it possible to reach higher planes of mental complexity, but also such growth correlates with effectiveness, for CEOs as well as middle managers. This finding has been replicated in a variety of fine-grained studies of small numbers of leaders, assessed on particular competencies. Taken together, the cumulative data supports the proposition that for those at a higher level of mental complexity, a complex world is more manageable.4
FIGURE 2-5
Individual mental capacity and business effectiveness: Eigel’s results
*3 = socialized mind; 4 = self-authoring mind; 5 = self-transforming mind
Source: K. Eigel, “Leader Effectiveness” (PhD dissertation, University of Georgia, 1998).
Shifts in the Demands on Followers and Leaders
We can take a more sweeping view of the same issue by considering the new demands on leaders and their subordinates in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world in which we live. Take another look at figure 2-4, the chart of the plateaus in adult mental complexity.
Now let’s consider what was once asked of people at work, generally, in any organization, compared with what is now asked. Formerly, it was usually enough if people were good team players, pulled their weight, were loyal to the organization, and could be counted on to follow conscientiously the directions and signals of their boss. In other words, the socialized mind would be perfectly adequate to handle the nature of yesterday’s demands on employees.
But things have changed. In 1995, psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden writes as follows.
In the past two or three decades, extraordinary developments have occurred in the American and global economies. The United States has shifted from a manufacturing society to an information society. We have witnessed the transition from physical labor to mind work as the dominant employee activity. We now live in a global economy characterized by rapid change, accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs, and an unprecedented level of competitiveness. These developments create demand for higher levels of education and training than were required of previous generations. Everyone acquainted with business culture knows this. What is not understood is that these developments also create new demands on our psychological resources. Specifically, these developments ask for a greater capacity for innovation, self-management, personal responsibility, and self-direction. This is not just asked at the top, it is asked at every level of a business enterprise, from senior management to first-line supervisors and even to entry-level personnel . . . Today, organizations need not only an unprecedentedly higher level of knowledge and skill among all those who participate but also a higher level of independence, self-reliance, self-trust, and the capacity to exercise initiative.5
What is Branden—and many others who write about what we now look for from our workforce—saying, as it relates to level of mental complexity? He is saying that it used to be sufficient for workers to be at the level of the socialized mind, but now we need workers who are at the level of the self-authoring mind. In effect, we now call on workers to understand themselves and their world at a qualitatively higher level of mental complexity.
And what is the picture if we look not at lower-level employees but at bosses and leaders? Organizational theorist Chris Argyris raises similar issues about the growing insufficiency of traditional conceptions of managerial and leadership effectiveness that still dominate our thinking. There may have been a day, Argyris suggests, when it was enough for leaders to develop worthy goals and sensible norms, cultivate alignment, and work “to keep organizational performance within the range specified”—all the while exercising the strength of character to advocate for one’s position and hold one’s ground in the face of opposition.6
Skillful as such managers may be, however, their abilities no longer suffice. Needed now are leaders who can not only run but also reconstitute their organizations—their norms, missions, and cultures—in an increasingly fast-changing environment. For example, a company that chooses to transform itself from a low-cost, standardized-product organization to a mass customizer or a provider of organization-wide solutions will need to develop a new set of individual and team capabilities.
Argyris and Donald Schön describe the challenges of such a shift.
[It] requires that members of the corporation adopt new approaches to marketing, managing, and advertising; that they become accustomed to a much shorter product life cycle and to a more rapid cycle of changes in their pattern of activities; that they, in fact, change the very image of the business they are in. And these requirements for change come into conflict with another sort of corporate norm, one that requires predictability in the management of corporate affairs . . . A process of change initiated with an eye to effectiveness under existing norms turns out to yield a conflict in the norms themselves.7
For more than a generation, Argyris (and those who have been influenced by him) has been calling for, in our terminology, a new capacity of mind. This new mind must have the ability to author a view of how the organization should run and have the courage to hold steadfastly to that view. But more, the new mind also must be able to step outside its own ideology or framework, observe the framework’s limitations or defects, and author a more comprehensive view—a view it will hold with sufficient tentativeness that it may discover its limitations as well. In other words, the kind of learner Argyris rightly looks for in a leader may need to be a person who is making meaning with a self-transforming mind.
Thus, organizations are asking workers who once performed their work successfully with socialized minds—good soldiers—to shift to self-authoring minds. And organizations are asking leaders who once led successfully with self-authoring minds—sure and certain captains—to develop self-transforming minds. In short, organizations are asking for a quantum shift in individual mental complexity across the board.
Meeting the Demand
How big is the gap between what we now expect of people’s mental capacities and what their minds are actually like? Are we expecting something that is a big reach? After all, if the world has become more complex in the past half-century, then perhaps the world also has become a better incubator of mental complexity, and the supply of mental complexity has kept up with the demand.
Two sophisticated, reliable, widely used measures exist for assessing mental complexity along the lines we talk about here. (This is something quite different, obviously, from IQ testing, which has only a modest correlation with mental complexity; you can have an above-average IQ—say, 125—and operate at any of the three plateaus.) These measures are the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (SCT) and the Subject-Object Interview (SOI) we introduced earlier.
Two large meta-analyses of studies using one or the other of these measures have been performed, with several hundred participants in each study. Figure 2-6 summarizes the results.
Two observations stand out from the data in figure 2-6:
- Both studies, each done with different samples, arrive at the same finding: that in a majority of respondents, mental complexity is not as far along as the self-authoring mind (in fact, the separate studies show nearly the exact same percentage—58 or 59 percent—is not at this level). Because both studies are skewed toward middle-class, college-educated professionals, the actual percentage in the general population may be higher.
- The percentages of people beyond the plateau of the selfauthoring mind are quite small.
FIGURE 2-6
Results from two large-scale studies of the distribution of levels of mental complexity among adults
Sources: Study A: R. Kegan, In Over Our Heads (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Study B: W. Torbert, Managing the Corporate Dream (Homewood, IL: Dow-Jones, 1987).
The data suggests that the gap is large between what we now expect of people’s mental complexity and what our minds are actually like. We expect most workers to be self-authoring, but most are not. We expect most leaders to be more complex than self-authoring, but few are.
These same macro trends are confirmed at the micro level in the Eigel study (have another look at figure 2-5). Note that only about half of the “promising middle managers” are self-authoring (and those who are, do better than those who are not), and only four of the twenty-one CEOs from industry-leading companies are beyond self-authoring (and those who are, do better than those who are not).
What We Mean by Development in a DDO
Where are we in defining the development that occurs in a deliberately developmental organization?
- Development is a specific, describable, and detectable phenomenon (the growth of our mind-sets, or meaning-making logics; qualitative advances in our abilities to see more deeply and accurately into ourselves and our worlds; the process of successively being able to look at premises and assumptions we formerly looked through).
- Development has a robust scientific foundation (forty years of research, by investigators across the world, with a wide diversity of samples and reliable means of measurement).
- Development has a business value (organizations need more employees in possession of the more complex mind-sets, and this need will intensify in the years ahead).
This specific, theoretically robust, reliably measurable, and business-valuable phenomenon is the underground river running through a DDO. Chapter 4 takes a more thorough look at the practices of all three DDOs, including the way they support development as we define it here. But even the glimpses in chapter 1, seen now through the lens of developmental theory, should help you begin to see a kind of method to the madness in a DDO.
At first glance, it may seem strange, even unfriendly, to, for example, continuously provide people with critical feedback, or to move them out of a work role as soon as they have mastered it. But this chapter raises the possibility that these DDOs in the wild are accomplishing their ends because, by trial and error over years, they have hit upon practices that actually put them in sync with the contemporary science of adult development.
As it happens, Decurion’s leaders were deeply familiar with this science and our work; Bridgewater’s originally were not at all familiar with it; and Next Jump, a voracious digester of management science, may have had a passing exposure. What is common to all of them is not their explicit theoretical grasp of the science, but rather their ingenious and intuitive practical grasp of what it might mean to craft an organizational culture more likely to accelerate the development of personal mind-sets than any previously seen.
As you will see in chapter 7, when we turn to the subject of fledgling DDOs (organizations we are helping find their own path to DDO-hood, in light of the science elaborated in this book), it is our hope that keeping the theory in mind can be a means for you to test and strengthen the pervasiveness and diversity of your culture’s support for development.
Incubators of Development
But for now, we can just as easily use the theory to deconstruct the hard-won wisdom reflected in the three exemplar DDOs (“Sure, sure, it works in practice; but does it work in theory?” Yes, indeed it does.)
Consider, for a moment, not only the pervasiveness but also the nature of feedback in the three DDOs. Ordinary organizations seldom make feedback a continuous experience (and in some sectors it can be as infrequent as an annual review), but even in organizations where feedback is frequent, the feedback strongly tends to be oriented to tracking and correcting behavior. In contrast, feedback in a DDO is considered incomplete or superficial unless it penetrates (“probes,” in Bridgewater language) beneath behavior to the assumptions and mind-sets that underlie it. Admitting people’s interior life into the realm of what can be improved, acted on, and managed is what makes a DDO’s culture truly developmental—namely, the development of mental complexity.
Notice how evergreen or developmentally universal this kind of feedback is, whether we’re talking about someone at the limits of the socialized mind presented with the opportunity to evaluate, rather than be defined by, the feedback; or someone at the limits of the self-authoring mind having the opportunity now to use the feedback to upend the sufficiency of his personal theory, rather than taking it as the occasion to further fortify his personal theory. In a DDO the experience of feedback, although meaning different things to people at different stages of adult development, is a continuously rich curriculum. A good curriculum is something with which the learner interacts daily, not once a year in an annual review.
Let’s look at additional ways the DDO culture is, in effect, a multisurface, multistage incubator of development. Consider Bridgewater’s use of the metaphor of the machine. At first, this may raise an off-putting specter of robotic dehumanization; but when you look into what the organization intends by the metaphor, it is actually a developmentally apt plurasignative (a term from semiotics—the science of signs and symbols—for those words that bundle multiple meanings).
One such meaning—one way the metaphor of the machine works on an individual’s reality-making—is that any outcome or result (an external event or internal conclusion) gets now seen as the product of a bigger system, which produced the result. Every effect has a cause. Sergio, the self-identified people pleaser, ends up with a suboptimal set of slides for a presentation. Bridgewater’s culture, rather than engage this shortcoming only at the level of improving the slide deck (the effect), pulls Sergio into a bigger field of consideration (the cause): What was his visualization of the process by which he was going to produce the slide deck? What was his bigger purpose, in the first place, of which the slide deck is only a part? How does his people-pleasing give him a bigger inner context for understanding how he ends up defending the merits of slides he doesn’t even agree with?
The message behind the Bridgewater idea of the machine is that “things don’t just happen” (a bigger system produced them); and “things don’t just happen to you” (you have some responsibility, upstream, for this downstream outcome). This is exactly the message of the self-authoring mind: your thoughts and feelings, for example, don’t just happen to you, and other people can’t “make” you feel a certain way; rather, you create your thoughts and feelings, including the thoughts and feelings you “make” in response to the things other people do. The “making” of our thoughts and feelings is a mystery to us when we are in the socialized mind, precisely because we do not yet see ourselves as the author of them.
The gradual move from the socialized to the self-authoring mind is the most well-traveled passage in the journey of adult development. Is it any wonder the metaphor of the machine is one of the most pervasive in Bridgewater’s conceptual toolkit?
But the move from the socialized to the self-authoring mind is not the only passage. For example, a place like Bridgewater—which puts a premium on relentlessly pursuing the question, “How might I be wrong?”—understandably has as much interest in disturbing the self-reinforcing loops of the self-authoring mind. Can the machine idea be as helpful to this later passage? Absolutely. Whereas the machine metaphor forces the socialized mind to look at the result or outcome (the effect) and step back to the level of the bigger system that produced it (the cause), the same idea can lead the self-authoring mind to look at (take as object) not only the result but also the machine itself. The machine idea can raise the question of your responsibility, not only for systematically producing the result, but also for producing the machine.
If you are not yet ready to move beyond the self-authoring mind, then perhaps your progress here will be of a more lateral sort (you will stay on the self-authoring plateau but use the opportunity to correct some flaw within the system); this is still a form of progress or development. But if you are ready to climb the next slope, you may use this opportunity to detect limits in the (meta-systemic) nature of your machine creating more generally. You may discover not only a further implication of your underlying principle or design—an implication you had been blind to—but also limits to the principle itself (an improvement beyond the system). Ray Dalio is very clear, in the company’s principles, that his concept of the machine is ultimately evolutionary, and not only mechanistic. The machine can evolve.
Moving to the Next Plateau
When Decurion says, “The crew runs the business,” it is saying to the popcorn attendant, for example, “Don’t think of yourself as just making popcorn; you’re going to rotate through many roles in the theater.” More importantly (because more interiorly), it is saying, “Don’t think of yourself as just a popcorn maker; you are a businessperson, part of a group of businesspeople running this theater.” If you’re working popcorn at a Decurion theater, the tools and materials to make popcorn aren’t the only things available to you; you also see all the cost and revenue numbers, all the targets and actuals for your shift. “What do I need with all that?” you might ask.
What is going on here, developmentally? You might well be an adolescent just moving into the socialized mind. You need an educative environment that draws you out of a self-construction oriented mainly to your own concrete needs and short-term ends (completing my shift hassle-free, staying out of trouble, getting paid). Your initial motivation in taking part in any beyond-the-popcorn, bigger-goal activities (such as thinking more generally about the theater operation) might simply be related to that same self-construction (“Doing this other weird stuff is how they roll here; the no-hassle choice is to go along”).
But in the same ironic way that Sergio, at a whole different developmental juncture, may initially tell his boss his inconvenient truth more to please his boss than to transcend his people pleasing, the very activity of the concession worker now participating in team activities—having his thoughts and feelings held by others, being let in to other people’s thoughts and feelings, coming to be part of something bigger than his own short-term goals and concrete needs—may begin to create new satisfactions, new ways of prizing the self and valuing others, that draws him more fully into the socialized mind (the very position that Sergio is leaving). The research shows that these activities and support are well matched to helping adolescents and young adults move into the socialized mind.
Or perhaps our hypothetical popcorn maker is further along in his development. Do the same demands—to lift your head beyond your role, to see yourself as part of a group collectively responsible for a whole operation—have a development-inducing value for someone further along in the developmental journey? We imagine you can answer this one for yourself by now. The same demand that can pull you more fully into the socialized mind (for one set of reasons) can also begin to pull you out of it (for a different set of reasons). To be asked to take your role as an object, to be more identified with the bigger system, to see how all the roles and relationships come under the governance of that bigger system—all this may draw you toward self-authoring.
Or consider Next Jump’s boot camp, where you work for a stretch in customer service. The goal is not only to get you closer to the heart of the business or to make sure you put in your dues or share the load. You need to take on what the company calls a “plus-1 project.” You need to look at an accepted process and not only fit yourself into it but also stand outside it, critique it, and come up with a proposed improvement. Can you see how this project could be a part of valuable curricula for people at different places in the developmental journey?
Bridgewater puts a premium on getting in sync. Can you see how the actual work of getting in sync, the risks of not being in sync, the complications of ensuring one even knows whether one is or isn’t in sync, will all differ at each of the stages in development?
Right about now you could be thinking something like this: “Now that you have me thinking about development and developmental differences, I see how so many features of a DDO seem well suited to support the developmental journey. But I haven’t thought in these terms before. Maybe if I just think about ordinary companies, or my own place of work, through the same developmental lens, I will find that these places are also filled with developmental provocations and invitations.”
That’s a good idea—and you should give it a try. We think it will help you see the differences between DDOs and ordinary organizations. Ordinary organizations do not continuously give you critical feedback; they do not constantly ask you to lift your head from your local neighborhood and take a bigger perspective; they do not devote time to teach you to beware of the mere appearance of being in sync when really you are not (and that’s why there is so much groupthink in ordinary organizations, as discussed at the start of this chapter).
Running through these glimpses into DDOs is a common thread that distinguishes them from ordinary organizations: DDOs continuously stir things up, troubling the waters; ordinary organizations continuously try to calm things down, instituting repeatable routines. Ordinary organizations don’t move you into a new role as soon as you’ve mastered the old one; instead, they commend you for having mastered it and call you reliable and dependable, appreciating the way you can be counted on now to keep performing the role indefinitely.
An ordinary organization may not even know it is doing it, but, at bottom, it is trying to minimize a certain kind of disturbance. It wants threats to certainty, predictability, routine, control, and connection to be as few as possible so that the work can get done without unnecessary emotional noise and distraction. A DDO, in contrast, strange though it may sound, values disturbances and is designed to preserve them at an optimal level—not overwhelmingly high, but never down to zero.
Does this mean a DDO is a sadistic home for lovers of emotional drama and alarm? After all, who in her right mind would purposely create such a setting, not to mention prefer it? The answer is that such a design is optimal for exactly one thing: developmental transformation. And it is favored by those who regard as precious the opportunity to learn and grow. Recall Nora Dashwood’s words: “It was the hardest thing I have ever done. And it has been the most meaningful growth and development I’ve ever experienced.”
A Scientific Approach
This chapter has introduced you to a science to help you understand what we mean by development when we talk about the deliberately developmental organization. We’ve tried to show you that—whether or not the DDO exemplars know it—they may be pursuing the first genuinely scientific approach to organizational design since Frederick Taylor a century ago.8
Taylor’s watchword was, of course, efficiency.9 Ours is development. Later in this book, we address directly how efficient development may be. For now, we point out that for all the effort in an ordinary organization to keep distracting alarm to a minimum, the single most important feature of ordinary organizational life, from the point of view of a DDO, is that, in the ordinary organization, everyone is doing a second job that no one is paying her for—looking good, staying safe, avoiding vulnerability. How efficient can that be?
Having spent this chapter bringing you into the adult developmental science underneath a DDO’s design, we turn next to an exploration of its visible features. What does a culture look like if it so values developing the capabilities of all its people that it seeks to fashion a space where everyone can bring their full, imperfect selves to work every day?
Chapter 2 footnote: This is a significantly revised version of material first appearing in Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2009).