Blog series: Vertical development – part 3. Many mature and successful leaders are surprised when they discover that an as yet unrealised stage of personal development lies waiting for them. A personal development that appears to give them a significantly better chance of succeeding in transforming their companies and organisations.
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Many mature and successful leaders are surprised when they discover that there is still an unrealised stage of personal development waiting for them. A personal development that appears to give them a significantly better chance of succeeding in transforming their businesses and organisations.
This is about the development from the ‘self-authoring’ mind to the ‘self-transforming’ mind. Two concepts that describe stages 4 and 5 respectively in Robert Kegan's model of personal development. I have described the development towards the ‘self-authoring mind’ in an earlier blog. And I have described how it can feel magical when leaders take a developmental leap onwards towards the ‘self-transforming’ stage.
But what lies behind the magic? How does the self-transforming mind develop and function? And how can it be that it appears to be so much better at creating change and transformation in people and organisations? Those are the questions I begin to explore in this blog.
”I am limited, and locked in by my own fixed perception of myself and my sense of having my act together.” This is how people who are in the transition phase towards the self-transforming mind may begin to think. A turning point in personal development occurs when they ‘give up’ on the ambition of developing themselves and their own perspective to perfection. They begin to find meaning and peace in the fact that they will always be incomplete and partial in their perspective and meaning-making. At this point they begin to let go of an inner ‘control’ and stability in the experience of themselves. They give up the need to have a ‘consistent’ identity with fixed value positions. Instead, they begin to experience themselves and the world as something that is in constant motion and enormously complex. They deliberately seek to challenge their own fixed viewpoints and opinions. They discover that the feeling they previously had of sitting in the driver's seat and being in control of themselves fades away. Instead, they are now witness to an inner psychology, with a myriad of sub-personalities with shifting and differing, often hidden, agendas.
It can be difficult to form a picture of what this abstract description actually involves. Not least because only a few per cent of adults have developed fully or partly into this stage. Let me therefore describe a very concrete little example that can illustrate the difference between how a self-authoring and a self-transforming mind function.
Example:
Martin has made an agreement with his colleague, Peter, about a task that he himself depends on being completed. Peter misses the agreed deadline, which has consequences for Martin. It is not the first time this has happened.
Martin's reaction - version A
With a self-authoring mind, Martin might think along these lines: ”What a fool Peter is. But when I think about it, I am probably an even bigger fool. Because Peter has done it before, and now I have put myself in a situation where I have once again become dependent on him – knowing full well that I can't count on him. I really have to learn from that and make sure that I don't end up in this situation one more time.”
Martin's reaction - version B
If Martin has instead developed a self-transforming mind, he might think the following: ”What a fool Peter is! But I am an even bigger fool, because I have put myself in a situation where I have made myself dependent on him. That isn't like me. I wonder how that came about? Hmm... When I really sense into it, I discover that somewhere inside me I have actually been angry with him for a while. But other parts of me haven't quite been willing to allow it. Imagine, I have been so angry that a part of me has been willing to undermine myself in order to create a situation where I have a really good reason to properly tell him off. Oh, how cunningly my subconscious operates.”
This small example illustrates how the self-transforming mind has given up the notion of being a consistent personality that is in control of itself. The experience is instead one of being an open, impressionable psychological system of sub-personalities and agendas that often interact beyond the radar of consciousness. This is, incidentally, in line with some of the most recent research on how human psychology works.
The example also illustrates how each stage in Robert Kegan's developmental model integrates and builds on the preceding perspectives. But just as when you zoom out with a camera, the new stage widens the frame so that even more of reality can be seen. When, as we grow up, we develop the ‘socialised’ mind (Kegan's 3rd stage), we become able to see ourselves from the outside. We become very aware of what others think of us, and of how we take part in relationships and communities. We absorb the external norms for authority and responsibility, and take them for granted. It can feel as if we are dependent on our surroundings, our relationships and other people's leadership, just as they happen to be. If, in our little illustrative example, we imagine a version in which Martin has a socialised mind: he would probably still start out thinking that Peter was a fool. But instead of immediately afterwards seeking to restore his own sense of responsibility and control, a socialised Martin would be more preoccupied with his continued dependence on Peter: how should he interpret Peter's behaviour? Does Peter perhaps not respect him? Has he himself done something that makes Peter act in this way?
The self-authoring mind (Kegan's 4th stage) retains the ability to see itself through the eyes of others, and can still decode and follow the prevailing norms for responsibility and authority. But it adds an ‘inner voice’ that focuses on defining and taking responsibility for oneself. It maintains a sense of one's own independence and capacity to be the architect of one's own fortune. Once the self-authoring mind has emerged, it often assumes that the interplay with others is, or ought to be, an interplay characterised by agreements between independent, self-responsible (self-authoring) individuals. In our illustrative example, this gives rise to questions in the self-authoring version of Martin, such as: how can I navigate in future so that I don't make myself dependent on others I can't trust? Or how can I make sure in future that Peter keeps the agreements I have to make with him – for instance by ensuring that they are also in his interest?
With the emergence of the self-transforming meaning structure (Kegan's 5th stage), the inner self-authoring perspective from the 4th stage and the outer socialised perspective from the 3rd stage are both preserved. But now an additional perspective is added, concerning how the inner and the outer are constantly interacting and co-creating each other. Responsibility and authority are now experienced neither as something given primarily by external norms, nor as something that can primarily be defined and re-defined personally with the inner voice. A new way of seeing emerges: how these phenomena are also relational and contextual: they are not stable entities that can be located in individuals. They arise in a dynamic interplay between oneself, others, events and circumstances - cultural currents, for example.
In our little example, with the self-transforming Martin, we see how even the inner train of thought is marked by an attentiveness to relationships - both inner and outer. The self-transforming version of Martin will presumably use the experience as an occasion to have a talk with Peter. Here he will be interested in understanding what lies behind Peter's behaviour, and in jointly gaining a better understanding of the dynamic they are creating together. The self-transforming Martin will perhaps also be careful not to reduce the experience to being only about him and Peter. He will also have an eye for whether the episode reflects a larger cultural or systemic phenomenon in the company or in society, in which they are both embedded.
Perhaps it is not least this ability to see issues from many different perspectives at the same time, and to spot connections and possibilities where others see contradictions, that seems magical. Most of us can also, from the earlier stages of development (that is, with a socialised or self-authoring mind), grasp that all these perspectives exist. We may even be able to analyse them and offer our take on them. But most of us have to make an effort, and perhaps use checklists and stakeholder analysis models. It becomes a deliberate analytical exercise. By contrast, it seems that this capacity to see many perspectives, and to see them simultaneously, is built into the self-transforming meaning structure.
In a conversation with Jennifer Garvey Berger, who is one of the world's leading experts in vertical development, she told me the following about one of her clients, whose transition from the self-authoring to the self-transforming mind she has followed:
”I have been with him from his first glimpse of the ‘self-transforming’ world, and now he feels that he really has two feet planted there. His sense is that the things he tried to do as a ‘self-authoring’ leader are now instead something he simply is. He can see, for example, that he tried to be less ego-centred, made an effort to be less certain, tried to listen better and strained to look across multiple perspectives. And he was also somewhat exhausted by all that effort (and, incidentally, also quite sure that his efforts were successful). Now he looks back at that version of himself and tells me: ’Wow. First of all, that was a huge amount of work I put into it. Secondly, I think it was really mostly about me after all. I think I did it in order to be a leader-hero. I had an image of this leader-hero who precisely tries not to be a leader-hero, which I then tried to live up to anyway. I don't feel that way any more. I don't try to see the team dynamics in my leadership group - those dynamics simply leap out at me. I don't attempt to step in and see my board chair's perspective – that perspective simply arises as available to me. So all these things that I previously needed space and reflection for, and perhaps a talk about with you, Jennifer - all of that now simply arises as immediately at-hand for me.”
Jennifer Garvey Berger
The additional capacity to see patterns, and to understand the complexity of human interaction, is part of what gives the self-authoring mind the possibility of creating magical breakthroughs and achieving greater success in the task of transforming leadership in teams and in whole organisations.
In the continuation of this blog series I will go on to describe how the self-transforming mind strengthens the capacity to connect people and opposites, and embraces a larger ethics and meaning. These may be important keys to helping us solve the challenges of our time.
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