Blogs

From various old interviews with AR founders, i learned that Robert Kegan stood beside Ken Wilbur in terms of being a philosophical and intellectual godfather to this movement. Cunov, McNaughten and Saltzman approximately comprised the initial nucleus of the Boulder Integral Center, around which flowered a large grassroots community of practitioners. All of which have refined, tested, and carried down the important body of work that is our relational practice.

I have recently come to realise that AR is not a body of knowledge, but more a body of practice (and here i use the term AR because it's the one they chose). Because the practice is essentially somatic in nature, not much was ever explained, or got written down. It is both carried out, and transmitted somatically. The modality was modelled from practitioner to practitioner.

This post is my token attempt to harvest the lessons given to us by Kegan. This inquiry will for numerous reasons be imperfect. It is necessarily a partial truth, and might even be just plain wrong in places. However it is what i got from reading An Everyone Culture, that Kegan coauthored by Lisa Lahey, and which was written near the end of his 40 year career. His was a life dedicated to thinking and teaching about how people grow and change.

Lets be clear, his writing is dense and employs long chapters of long sentences. Kegan and Wilbur were colleagues and seem to share a writing style in common with other notable organisational theorists of the time, such as Chris Argyris and Donald Schon.

Second, reading his work requires us to understand development through the filter of our current limited development. One of the premises of the book is seeing your own assumptions. So trying to read from within, or subject to, those assumptions tends to make the work feel murky and cryptic.

The book in a nutshell

My goal here is to save you the pain of reading it. So lets first try to summarise the books narrative and main ideas. Afterwards we can try to make sense of it.

1. Most organisations optimise for output and performance. Organisations have a responsibility to develop people, not just extract value from them. The primary mission (and outcome) should instead be adult development. This is a radical inversion, however his case is that success follows naturally from development. He calls these Deliberately Developmental Organisations (DDO).

2. People and organisations have an in-built resistance to change, or what he calls immunity to change. This is the system protecting itself, and takes the form of hidden assumptions and agendas.

3. Organisations waste a lot of energy where staff have to hide personal weaknesses and doubts, aka impression management, and also by the widespread, corrosive practice of talking about colleagues behind their backs.

4. Transparency accelerates growth. Open information flows aren't just about efficiency, they remove hiding places for road blocks.

5. Deliberately developmental practices must be visible, ongoing, regular and continuous. Not occasional retreats or coaching. It involves making our mistakes visible, using regular even blunt feedback. It is about normalizing, and not punishing being in over our heads. Personal vulnerability is a strength not a weakness.

6. Development requires community, not just individual self-reflection. You don't get there through private insight alone, others see and name your patterns in real time. It requires the troika of Edge which is the impetus to grow, Home which is the community of practice, and Groove which is the practice itself. Groups need to nurture this balance, and all three are required.

7. There is a slow step-wise journey from the state of being Socialised, to being Self-authoring, to being Self-transformational. This is a road less traveled.

Kegan holds a view that becoming self-transforming is harder than we might think, and fundamentally requires being immersed in environments which strongly encourage us to surface and revise our assumptions. To treat weaknesses as targets for change rather than things to hide. To embed feedback loops into daily life and work. It is precisely this kind of environment that raises the probability of developmental movement and shifts. Where being self-transforming is not a skill you apply but being able to make and organize meaning.

My comment on practice

One of the striking features in the book is a radical willingness to seek feedback, and where it's normal to give and receive hard feedback, for the express purpose of development. Where the organisation specifically resources the giving and receiving of such feedback.

The tension i am noticing here is, feedback does not always equal more growth. The three main companies he uses as case studies have each adopted fairly harrowing feedback processes. I badly want to balance this deliberate quest for developmental friction, with the nervous system's need for regulation as a precondition for learning. Perhaps that is where our more recent conceptions of best practice feedback serve to bridge this conceptual gap.

Here he comes out and says it plainly:

Many of the examples he offers, to my mind amount to throwing a bunch of harsh feedback at people, and the ones that survive go on to do just fine. Those who can not metabolise that environment leave or collapse. From the outside, it looks like a system that develops people, when perhaps what's happening instead is filtering for people who can already tolerate such rapid development. If that is the case then i see it as less a model of change, and instead another case of the hero worship, of the same caliber as what got us here.

In this respect, I am heartily tempted to place Kegan into a large class of theorists who are happy to tell us what being transformed looks like, but have less to say about what the journey involves. But that would be overly hasty, because development in his lens is clearly recursive. By practicing developmental practices, you get better at developing. Therefore his how, is, the just like ours, simply, practice.

Of course lately i have been trying to slow us down when we use the term practice. So that we can agree what we mean. In this regard Kegan is very clear what he means. Again, fortunately he is explicit and lucid on the matter. I will quote him at length because it's highly relevant.

Here Kegan is advancing a view that practice and work are the same thing. By incorporating such things as feedback, constantly questioning assumptions, and debriefing mistakes, routinely into the daily work rhythm, capacity gets exponentially built.

He did not reference his assertions in this particular book as much as i would have liked, and here that's a pity, because i dearly want to better understand the theory of practice. (To do that we will need to look to others, foremost among them Anders Erikson, which i will review shortly).

The first interesting thing that strikes me about this passage is how AR it sounds. I mean you don't hear this sort of language every day. You can actually smell the distinct Boulder school lineage in every sentence. Its almost eeery.

The other thing is that the passages make it crystal clear that practice is not separate preparatory practice, or practice before hand. I discuss these nuances here and here.

So this begs the important question of whether the 'work as practice' / 'practice as work' model is universally applicable or not. If, my previous theory about his practice of blunt feedback being that it filters for only those that can metabolise such things, then practice defined this way ought to work really well. It's practice deeply integrated in real life. It doesn't take time out of the work day to perform, it comes free of charge, because its incidental our existing life. In that sense it's both efficient and salient. In this sense it very much meets the terms of its own definition.

However there is one big caveat. What about all the rest of the people who are not yet developmentally ready for this crucible of trial by fire? Is development to be only for the somewhat already developed? Isn't that self-defeating? Doesn't this create or reinforce a two class system? The developmental haves and have nots?

This seems like a major blind-spot. Fortunately for the rest of us, its one that the founders of AR ultimately found a solution for. It's called relational practice.

Stray ideas

A quirk of Kegan's language (in common with Wilbur) is this idea of subject object, subject to object shift, making object of. This is jargon for instead of living from or through the machinery of my beliefs and impulses, starting to question the design of the machine itself. When we can hold our experience at arms length, we are making what was subject now object. To be clear, this is not saying we can be fully objective, just that we can better examine our own underlying premises that are very commonly unconscious in nature.

He also routinely uses words like expert, manager, and leader. (those people who are already more developed?) This left me with the impression that hierarchy is still very much a feature of his world. Given my dual class mental map of his model, this actually rather makes sense. Its coherent, even if not a whole solution.

Even though the book is ostensibly about systemic culture, it has to be said that Kegan still has one foot in the old guard. The emphasis on a class of more developed leadership reinforces a hierarchy that the rest of the book theoretically wants to transcend. This makes sense, given the era he was doing his research. More recently, organisational thinking tends to favour shared leadership, self-management, distributed governance, and peer-driven processes.

Quotable quotes

Here are some of the book's many gems:

- Know and work with your back hand, make sure others know too

- worry not about how good you are, but how fast you are learning

- problems are potential improvements screaming at you

- be assertive and open-minded at the same time

- treat all opinions as possibilities, and ask does it make sense, is it true

- teach people to fish rather than give them fish

- mental complexity is not about how much you know

- people waste time looking good, and they waste time making others look bad

- every practice rests on theory, even if we are unaware of it

- let the problem solve you rather than the other way around

- every day is an after-action review

- seek input about your growing edge

- Pain + Reflection = Progress

"The three DDOs we observed understand that growth can happen only through membership in workplace communities where people are deeply valued as individual human beings, constantly held accountable, and engaged in real and sustained dialogue. If people must be willing to be vulnerable in order to grow, they also need a community that will support them."

"Practices help externalise struggles that are interior. Practices connect the work of the business to working on ourselves. Practices move us from focusing on outcomes to the processes that generate outcomes. Language is a practice, and it creates new tools for a new paradigm Systemic stretch involves everyone, every day, across the organisation"

"You can't work on yourself and help others to do the same (edge) without the safety of a supportive community (home) and routines that name and normalise the work (groove)."

"You can't get out on your developmental edge until you've created practices that bring it into view. And you can't sustain these practices without first fostering a setting to support a new level of vulnerability. So, for us, the first moves in getting started always have to do with creating a home to support a new level of personal and collective learning."

"Every week for one hour, five people meet: two different pairs of talking partners, along with a more experienced colleague acting as a mentor and coach... Each recipient of coaching is expected eventually to coach four others; the students become the teachers."

"Holding on refers to the need for the setting to receive and welcome the person exactly as she now is, with no requirement, at the moment, that she be anything different from who she is... In letting go, sometimes the holding environment acknowledges the person's own emerging sense of the need to reconstitute himself and his relationship to the world, including the holding environment; at other times, the holding environment promotes that emerging sense."

"Create a culture in which it is OK to make mistakes, but unacceptable not to identify, analyze, and learn from them... there is only one kind of mistake that is not acceptable, and that is failing to acknowledge your mistakes."

"Is there a higher vantage point that you can take, sitting above your own in-the-moment, reactive, defensive self - looking down to see the "you" that is messing up repeatedly and predictably"

"You need an educative environment that draws you out of a self-construction oriented mainly to your own concrete needs and short-term ends "

"Each of us has the responsibility to struggle well, to work on breaking the earthy crust above so that our new green shoots can find the light of day"

"In essence, a DDO is working on ways to provide people the maximum exposure to those experiences likely to help them continue - when they are ready - the ongoing journey of adult development."

Paying homage

If you got a slight sense that the texture of those quotes is somehow vaguely familiar, you would not be alone.

So today i want to pay homage to Robert Kegan, as someone who could very well be the spiritual ancestor of our maxims, "lean into your edge" and "orient towards connection", "welcome everything, assume nothing", "posture and collapse", and "being confidently vulnerable".

I was not directly exposed to the graduates of the Integral Center, who were exposed to Decker and his friends. And while I did not know Decker, i do know that he was influenced by Robert Kegan. And now i feel like an important link in the chain has been slotted into its rightful place.

Thanks to all those people in this chain, we have a development practice for the rest of us. Relational Practice is a profoundly important and still evolving tool that is capable of making a real and achievable difference to the fabric of human culture.