Week #3 LeadWise Academy Assignment

To my delight, Week #3 started with a focus on Deliberately Developmental Organizations. Kegan’s book has been a significant influence on me, and my thinking in my role at Actionable.co. It’s been a major source of inspiration for how we think about individual development for ourselves as team members, for the way that learning and development can be integrated with the work that we are doing and will need to do as a scaling start-up, and the desire to make development goals increasing visible and transparent within the team. It’s a journey we’re just starting, but given that, as an organization, we are focused on changing the way that professional learning is carried out in organizations, it’s critical that we challenge ourselves to walk the talk.

The project this week was a bit of a surprise…we were to complete an Immunity to Change map, and share it with a partner. *Gulp*

I will say first that this kind of introspective work is not the sort that I naturally gravitate to. Perhaps that in itself is a valuable observation that merits further reflection, but since we’re moving quickly, I’ll have to park it for now, and focus on the experience and process of the map itself. It seemed a simple enough exercise:

• Define a development goal (something you want to get better at) that is a little scary/challenging
• Describe the behaviours that would allow you to reach this goal
• Inventory the ways that you currently act that prevent or undermine your reaching this goal
• Document the feelings that arise when you imagine *not* acting in the ways you have listed (which undermine your goal)
• List the ‘competing commitments’ (perhaps unconscious) that you are pursuing with these counter-productive behaviours
• Extrapolate the ‘big assumptions’ that these commitments and behaviours are indicative of

A packed schedule this week meant that I dove in and completed the map rapidly, in a coffee shop, before I ran to another meeting. In retrospect, this time pressure was helpful to prevent avoidance of what could have been an uncomfortable exercise. It made me detach a bit. As I quickly scanned my big assumptions before sending my map to Simone in Slack, I was surprised and a bit horrified about where I’d arrived.

Note: I’m not going to share my whole map. It feels too fresh for me, and I need more time to reflect and process what it means. But I will share a few of my assumptions:

-Competent people know what to do at all times

-I have to constantly prove my competency and value

-I need to protect myself and others from making mistakes

These sound like a master chef’s recipe for anxiety….

It also connects to the broader tension that I’m thinking about in my professional life at this time (Control vs Chaos: more here), and is perhaps a big reason that I’m here (as part of LeadWise Academy) — simply put, the assumptions surfaced by this exercise are not compatible with the vision of a Deliberately Developmental Organization that I hold in such high regard…

So, to sum up: lots to think about! Which means I must carve out some time to think about it, of course.

Lastly, I enjoyed the group discussion we had on Friday a great deal, in which the words ‘serendipity’ and ‘coincidence’ featured. In a meeting later in the day with a couple of my colleagues (about our upcoming content related to learning cultures and change) I asked them if they had heard of Immunity to Change. Surprised, they told me that the keynote speaker at our partner summit in June has, just this week, shared that this will be the focus of his presentation (spooky)…