LeadWise Academy Week #3 Reflections: Autonomy and Deliberate Development
The theme for the third week of LeadWise Academy: Practical Self-Management Intensive was Autonomy and Deliberate Development.
I found the concepts and practices shared deeply profound, and took significantly longer to review and process. Below is my synthesis and what I’m taking away from it, which is really just scratching the surface.
Context
You’ve probably heard this ad nauseum- we live in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
In such a world, the challenges we face are increasingly adaptive- they are complex and the solution is almost always unclear at the onset. Unlike technical challenges, we can no longer rely on authority or experts to solve such challenges. In fact, we often are overwhelmed in our struggle to make sense of it all. How then might we solve adaptive challenges?
Vertical (Human) Development
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein
As Einstein points out, the only way to solve our current i.e., VUCA challenges is to elevate our level of thinking. We cannot solve them with the same level of thinking we used when we ‘created’ them. What does this mean?
The Center for Creative Leadership defines elevating how one thinks as “Vertical Development”:
Horizontal Development refers to the adding of more knowledge, skills, and competencies. It is about what you know.
Vertical Development refers to advancement in a person’s thinking capability. The outcome of vertical stage development is the ability to think in more complex, systemic, strategic, and interdependent ways. It is about how you think.
Source: Center for Creative Leadership, Vertical Leadership Development Part 1
By analogy, imagine if our minds are the cup to the left. Horizontal development, or gaining technical skills, would entail pouring water i.e., new content (tools, skills, competencies) into our cups. More often than not however, our cups are full- we are bombarded daily by new data, information, and knowledge; we already know it.
The limiting factor is no longer the content (our knowledge); it is our cup- our minds. The development we need in a VUCA world is the cup on the right- the expansion and development of our minds (mental models, identity) i.e., vertical development. This however begs the question- where are developing from, and to?
Based on Kegan’s Adult Levels of Development, there are 3 generalised levels of vertical development:
1. Socialised mind: At this level we are shaped by the expectations of those around us. What we think and say is strongly influenced by what we think we others want to hear
2. Self-authoring mind: We have developed our own ideology or internal compass to guide us. Our sense of self is aligned with our own belief system, personal code, and values. We can take stands, set limits on behalf of our own internal “voice”
3. Self-transforming mind: We have our own ideology, but can now step back from that ideology and see it as limited or partial. We can hold contradiction and oppositeness in our thinking and no longer feel the need to gravitate toward polarised thinking.
Source: Center for Creative Leadership, Vertical Leadership Development Part 2
The journey of vertical development to me is really a journey of discovering one’s own agency (independence), and then being in empowered relationship with the world (interdependence). Everything else flows from that.
If this is indeed the way forward, why aren’t we seeing a significantly more people and leaders operating at higher levels of thinking and consciousness?
The Deliberately Developmental Organisation (DDO)
While we can spend a significant amount of time outside of work (as I do) to develop how we think, the reality is often that we spend >~50% of our waking hours at work.
In most large organisations, each person has professional development goals and can sign up for a portfolio of learning opportunities, most of which are often competency focused i.e., horizontal development. Even if there were indeed opportunities for vertical development, these are often short, 0.5–5 day programmes which takes one out of one’s work context. What happens once one returns from such a programme?
1. Lack of connectivity: When a person returns to the “real” world and is overwhelmed by work tasks, it becomes too hard to convert what was learned in a programme into actions that address real problems.
2. Person in isolation: Most professional development programmes don’t engage a person’s key stakeholders back at work in the change process. As a result, most people fail to receive support back at work, but in fact are likely to experience resistance from stakeholders who are surprised and disrupted by the changes made to that person’s behaviour.
Source: Adapted from Center of Creative Leadership, Vertical Leadership Development Part 1, by Moses Mohan
While episodic development can help, they often fall short of translating into sustained transformation as they are not embedded into “real world” context.
As articulated in this brilliant article on The Dawn of System Leadership:
“Practice, practice, practice: all learning is doing, but the doing needed is inherently developmental”
So the solution lies in embedding vertical development into the doing. One however might say that an organisation exists to perpetuate its own development i.e., stay profitable, and diverting organisational resources for the sake of people development comes at the cost of PNL. What if that didn’t have to be the case? The question then becomes:
“How might we ‘do work’ in a way that enables organisations and their people to be partners in each other’s development?
Enter Deliberately Development Organisations (DDOs), organisations where organisational performance is not a separate priority from people development; where organisational growth and human growth are seen to enable each other. In fact, the big bet in a DDO is that organisations can be the ideal context for people’s growth and flourishing- and that such personal development is the secret weapon for organisational success. Hence, DDOs integrate the pursuit of business growth and human development as if they were a single goal. What does look like?
Based on the research of Kegan and Lahey in “An Everyone Culture” which highlights 3 DDOs: Bridgewater, Decurion, Next Jump, there are 3 key dimensions:
- Home: Communities that provide an empowered, safe, and trustworthy space for people to be vulnerable and develop.
- Groove: A set of practices that embed ongoing development into organisational life.
- Edge: A developmental aspiration for personal growth.
Each dimension cannot exist in isolation, and collectively reinforce each other. In many ways, Susan Basterfield has co-designed the LeadWise Academy experience to be a mini, ‘pop-up’ DDO. We start every week by setting our personal intention (Edge), step into weekly practices based on the week’s theme (Groove), and are part of a virtual community that provides a safe space for growth (Home)
Immunity to Change
In a DDO, each person starts by identifying a meaningful personal growth goal (Edge). There are many ways to do this, but one of the most effective, research-backed ways is the “Immunity to Change” (ITC) map. The basic premise of ITC is that desire and motivation isn’t enough to change the status quo, and there are often internally consistent, strongly-held beliefs that fight sustained change.
We had a chance to experience this in the LeadWise Academy, and here’s mine:
The ITC map is essentially self-coaching- here are the key steps:
- You identify a meaningful improvement goal
- You identify behaviours that work against your goal, including what you are doing and what you do not doing
- You identify your fears and worries (Worry box) if you do the opposite of the behaviours you’ve listed out that work against your goal
- You identify the hidden commitments that give rise to your fears and worries
- You identify the underlying big assumptions that drive your behaviours and hold your immune system that prevent you from actualising change (hence the name Immunity to Change)
- You identify actions to test your big assumptions and/or identify actions to achieve your goal
Coaching to me is fundamentally about facilitating self-awareness in service of growth. The ITC just that, and beautifully and effectively helps to raise self-awareness in service of realised change.
Personal Takeaways
- Personal growth and development is not just in the receiving, but in the letting go. If our ‘cups’ are full, any further development will not be absorbed and overflow.
- The people needed to address the challenges of our times are people who are consciously and continuously on a journey of vertical development. This is a journey of discovering one own’s unique agency (Who is my Self?) and then finding how might one become a perfect instrument in advancing what matters (What is my Work?)
- The promise of self-managed / deliberately developmental / teal organisations is to be vehicles that enable people to fully realise their highest human potential. If this promise is fully realised, the unleashing of creative human potential will in turn translate to a thriving organisation
