Leadership that does the right thing – in a connected world

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What does it mean ’to do the right thing’ in a complex and unpredictable world, marked by major existential crises and shifts?

In our leadership we face an ethical demand. We hold not only the lives of those we relate to in our hands – but potentially also those of our grandchildren, of humanity, and of thousands of species. In this final part of the blog series, I describe how vertical development lifts the ethical perspective, not just up to the balcony or into the helicopter. We need to go all the way out to where the small blue planet floats in the darkness.

Each stage of development in Robert Kegan’s developmental model can be said to have its own relationship with ethics – and its own ethical logic. Broadly speaking, vertical development leads towards an ethics that is more nuanced and more inclusive.

Externally governed ethics

The ethical map of the socialised mind, and its sense of what is right and wrong, is given by loyalty to prevailing societal conventions, or to the norms that apply within the group or subculture one belongs to. It may also be anchored in specific external authorities such as sacred texts, a political ideology, or leading figures. The fact that the majority of the adult population has developed a socialised stage is absolutely crucial to our ability to appeal to a sense of ’civic duty’ – for example in the fight against Corona. The limitation of the socialised mind is that it is characterised by a relatively categorical opposition between right and wrong. It tends towards a ’them’ and ’us’ outlook – in which, if our ethics are the right ones, then theirs must be wrong.

Internally formulated ethics

With the ’self-authoring’ mind we gain a certain distance from the ethical values and convictions we acquired while growing up. The self-authoring mind is able to relate critically and reflectively to the ethical norms it grew up with, and to redefine and reinterpret them for itself. This creates an inner system of values, and one’s own internally coherent ethical thinking and ideological system. Typically it has room for more nuance, and greater acceptance and understanding that others may choose to subscribe to different values and ethical outlooks. It is better able to navigate multicultural contexts, and to find its way between ethical demands that at first glance appear contradictory.

How, for instance, does one handle a situation where there are simultaneous considerations of ‘ethnicity and equality’, ‘professional competence’, ‘community/history’ and ‘economy’, all pulling in different directions – and where different stakeholders bring different wishes and demands? It is difficult to navigate – but almost impossible unless the leader has the inner standpoint, and the capacity to weigh different considerations and draw boundaries within a larger perspective, that the self-authoring mind provides.

With the development of the self-authoring mind, the capacity to hold and accept differences in norms, values and outlooks on life expands. It comes from a sense of having one’s own coherent ideology and ethics to rest in – you can therefore hold a view that differs from mine without my feeling that my own is challenged or threatened. I can be curious about yours, and find it exotic and interesting. The limitation of the self-authoring mind is the need to hold on to its own version, and to maintain that the other’s is ‘foreign’. Ultimately there is no guarantee that a self-authoring mind will not develop an ethics that excludes particular ethnic or social groups as ’inhuman’, thereby losing the sense of connection, and considering itself fully entitled to dominate or exterminate them.

Transformative ethics

With development into the rarer ’self-transforming’ mind, differences and contradictions are no longer primarily located externally; they are also recognised within one’s own inner complexity. The man comes into contact with his inner woman, the Israeli comes into contact with his inner Palestinian, and the powerful leader is in contact with his own powerlessness and dependency. From that experience it becomes harder to maintain a sense of ‘natural reasonableness’ and ’non-complicity’ in the local and global social polarisation and inequality that is also part of the challenges of our time.

The climate consequences of the Western lifestyle, one’s own complicity in the climate crisis, and the accompanying inner urge to put things right, also become harder for the self-transforming mind to rationalise away. It creates considerable cognitive dissonance to maintain separations between work, business, ethics, politics and person, because the systemic connections are far more apparent. This gives rise to a leadership that seeks to a greater degree to create coherence – also between micro ’here and now’ situations, mezzo-level business challenges, and the macro societal challenges of social polarisation, economic inequality, climate crisis and so on that we collectively face.

There is still limited empirical research examining and documenting how the self-transforming mind navigates these ethical questions – but inspiration can be found, among other places, in Joiner and Josephs’ book ’Leadership Agility’. Based on studies of leaders with different meaning-making structures, the authors conclude that more self-transforming leaders have a greater capacity both to be creative and co-creative in here-and-now social interactions, and at the same time to keep their gaze lifted towards the role that they, and the company, can play in a positive industrial and societal development.

Bob’s Big Idea

Robert Kegan himself also addresses the question of the connection between vertical development and the way we relate ethically, in an RSA lecture from 2013 available on Youtube. There he tells, among other things, an interesting anecdote about some researchers who set out to investigate whether the Danes’ willingness to help Jews across to Sweden during the Second World War was an expression of a high level of vertical development. The conclusion was that, on the contrary, this was an ethics based on the strong loyalty of a ’socialised’ mind towards the fact that these were Danish Jews and therefore ’our own’, for whom great loyalty and willingness to sacrifice were shown. Against this, one can readily see that some of the Nazi regime’s key leaders operated with a more advanced ’self-authoring’ structure in their systematic and rational approach to solving the ’Jewish problem’. On a more uplifting note, however, Kegan says that he has yet to find an empirical example of a ’self-transforming’ structure being used for ’evil purposes’.

In the same lecture Kegan offers his own more ’historical’ and ’broad-spectrum’ reading of the thesis that the development of ’the self-transforming’ mind is part of the solution to the challenges of our time – what he calls ’Bob’s Big Idea’:

”If you step far enough back and look at us as a species, you have to conclude that something strange has begun to happen over the last 100 years: 1) we have dramatically expanded the number of us; 2) we live much longer – a whole generation longer than we did 100 years ago; 3) two thirds of all the people who have ever lived past the age of 60 are alive today. Why is this happening? Technological progress answers how it happens. Here is Bob’s Big Idea as to why it happens: as a species we are collectively ’figuring something out’. We are a species in imminent danger, and we know it.… We are the only species that has produced the means to mutually annihilate one another. Perhaps it is no coincidence that we are the only species that lives for many years after we can no longer reproduce. The self-transforming mind does not develop before what we today call ’midlife’ (but where until recently we ended our lives). What if we now live longer so that we can develop more of the advanced ’meaning-making structure’ that can save us from the self-inflicted danger we live in? What if we live longer in order to improve the chances that our endangered species can find non-murderous, non-catastrophic, non-annihilating ways of handling these dangers, of handling the ’socialised’ tribal passions, and of handling the ’self-authoring’ proud sovereignties of thought and state? What if we live longer in order, in Gandhi’s words, to find ’a way out of hell’?”

Robert Kegan, RSA lecture 2013 (own translation and editing)

As Kegan emphasises here, it takes many years for an individual to develop the more advanced meaning-making structures. Since I must accept that I am myself in the second half of life, I naturally welcome a cultural shift away from modern society’s hero-worship of youth towards a renewed appreciation of the potential wisdom of old age. At the same time it is clear that even though there will be more of us growing older, and even though this also contributes to a larger share of the population with a self-transforming mind, most of us will continue to make meaning through one of the earlier structures – and the solution to the problems of our time will not simply come from putting a group of people with self-transforming minds to work on sorting them out for us.

The potential lies instead, as far as I can see, in the fact that with a critically increased share of ’self-transforming’ minds, we gain stronger conditions and capacity for leadership to be taken in the development of organisations, network communities and societies that are able to create contexts and cultures which stimulate and invite everyone, regardless of meaning-making structure, to take part in co-creating the solutions we need. These cultures and communities of practice must be designed precisely so that, in Kegan’s words above, they ”handle the ’socialised’ tribal passions, and handle the ’self-authoring’ proud sovereignties of thought and state”, in a way that becomes conducive to, rather than destructive of, our shared human and societal wellbeing and development, as well as our planet’s ecosystems on which we depend.

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