Acknowledgments

We happily acknowledge our appreciation—but more than this, our admiration and affection—for the many members of three extraordinary organizations (Bridgewater, Decurion, and Next Jump), who have been, and continue to be, wholehearted learning partners over several years. True to their own principles of transparency, these companies declared nothing off-limits and made every aspect of their operations available to us. We are inspired by their members’ countless gestures of thoughtfulness, generosity, and courage in letting us see them in the midst of the intimate work of individual and collective learning.

We especially want to thank Ray Dalio, Greg Jensen, Bob Prince, Zack Wieder, and John Woody at Bridgewater; Nora Dashwood, Christopher Forman, Jeff Koblentz, Bob Lochhead, and Bryan Ungard at Decurion; and Jackie Edwards, Charlie Kim, Greg Kunkel, Meghan Messenger, and Elise Pierpont at Next Jump.

We want to acknowledge the valuable work and good company of Inna Markus Leiter and Claire Lee, who are also members of our DDO research team. Special thanks to Inna, who took the lead in helping our research team to be itself a kind of DDO.

We thank the many colleagues who read and commented on various drafts of our manuscript, while, of course, absolving them of all responsibility for its shortcomings: Dianne Argyris, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Niko Canner, Lorraine Heilbrunn, Bill Hodgetts, Neil Janin, Michael Jung, Bill Lahey, Fred Laloux, Eric Rait, Laura Rogers, Thee Smith, Harry Spence, and Bill Torbert. A special thanks to Jennifer Garvey Berger for generously sharing a rich example of her work with an emerging DDO. Mandanna Farhoodi Moberger prepared the manuscript with care and ingenuity. We continue to appreciate the wisdom and patience of Jeff Kehoe, our long-suffering, never-complaining editor at Harvard Business Publishing.

We remember and celebrate the inspiration of our friend, Jim Fowler who dreamed of “communities of developmental expectation.”

Finally, we want to acknowledge each other, and the experience of genuinely cocreating this book. Five collaborating authors could be a recipe for unproductive stress and strain. We like to think the reason it was not has something to do with our learning, at least a little, the lessons of our own book.

—Robert Kegan
Lisa Lahey
Matthew L. Miller
Andy Fleming
Deborah Helsing