Perspectives

Adult development describes how we can mentally grow through life, how our thinking-patterns and the ways in which we understand the world and people around us may shift.

These steps are discrete. They are not a gradual accretion of knowledge but rather more like steps. The shifts are characterized by concentrically-larger circles of identity, care and responsibility.

As we grow through such thinking-patterns our abilities to get different perspectives and see connections, catalyze synergies, lifts. We are more likely, for example, to empathetically understand different value systems and the cares inherent in them. With that comes a widening responsibility.

For example:

“Early in life it is I, me and mine. And then it is a we. But it is a particular we—it is my community and everyone else might be considered an other” says Abigail Lynam (see intro video>).

In these stages there is a progression. A less complex stage may be characterized by:

Viewing alternatives as black and white—there is one right way of seeing. This can be useful when we are receptive to subtle thoughts and feelings. It can be a stage of complexity that sees us, and where we see ourselves, as problem solvers.

That shifts when we include more. Say we are confronted weighing costs and motivation. We buy something based on multiple factors including emotions, brand and quality as well as price.  A more complex stage-understanding may:

Coordinate such differential concepts.  We may directly link the cause and effects so that “increased brand love = increased sales and higher profits”.

What we may not see, within such a linear cause and effect system, are longer-term systemic issues. Those could include climate change, local and global values, exploitation and more.

Many of these issues are the meta-crises of today. Climate emergency, radical inequality, systemic racism, biodiversity calamities, and others, are highly complex. Adult development helps us understand how we are shifting to meet these challenges. The map it provides can assist our own development as well as communicating with others for action.

Watch Abigail Lynam introduce these concepts in the video below>.

Step change

We make sense of the world around us in discreetly different ways. This is easy to see in children—the example below is from Jennifer Garvey Berger’s book Changing on the Job.

When a three-year-old in the bath tub sees the water go down the drain, she makes a fairly straightforward connection between the water that disappears and her body and toys that seem an imminent danger. A kind grown-up who tries to sooth her by explaining that water and people are different will likely have no luck. At this stage in her life, the child does not have the capacity to see the difference between the water that disappears and the toys that are too large to wash away; crying, she begs to be removed from the tub and she struggles to save all her precious things as she escapes. Several months later, the same child—with something of a different mind now—calmly and playfully watches the last bit of water disappear, poking it with the toys as it goes. The water has not changed at all, but her ability to make fine distinctions has grown more complex; she now has a different form of understanding of the world, a greater level of what I call “self-complexity.”

This greater level of self-complexity is a step change. It is a new and distinctly different way in which the child is understanding herself and the world around her. She now sees that she is separate from the water and not at risk of following down the drain.

It is not just children. Adults can continue to develop through similar, later step-change stages.

We see this when people talk about sustainability. The following two examples are from senior managers at leading multinational companies—companies generally regarded at the forward edge of action on climate change, environmental and social responsibility.

The first is Victor talking about how his company approaches sustainability and getting multiple individuals (contractors and those working for the company) to engage with this over a large scale development:

We pushed the boundaries but within reason and we always aim to keep raising the bar, so to speak. So we have got some of the [energy efficiency] requirements, and all that sort of stuff, which we think is really important but it’s also about having the public transport here, having the facilities here, so people don’t have to get in their car and drive to the other side of town to do their shopping or, to go to school or, work or whatever. And, bike paths and all of those sorts of things to create a healthy environment.

The second is Leanne addressing how her company is aiming to shift multiple individuals working in different business areas:

One of the things that we are driving quite strongly from the group in all of the businesses is a consistent way to measure intangibles … to be an employer of choice or … have the right people doing the right things in the right way … it’s actually about the strategic discussion that you are having around what you are doing rather than, ‘yeah I got to tick on that box’. We are seeing shifts. What are the initiatives that we are embedding, what are the things that we are not doing that we actually could be doing? So… the richness is in the discussion not in the measurement.

There is a distinct shift from a rules based physical approach (Victor’s statement on action requirements) to enabling and skilling individuals creating and/or driving initiatives (Leanne’s statement). A check list of actions may not create effective or innovative action. Leanne’s company found it had to empower individual business areas to create changes. What was directly relevant to one area may not be the highest leverage for another.

Why and how

Understanding adult development helps us to create beneficial step changes.  The changes are significant shifts and help describe how we experience ourselves, others and the world around us.

As we shift there is an increasing level of autonomy, freedom, perspective-taking capacity, self and other awareness, inclusivity and flexibility to interact with others.

The stages are outlined below and illustrated with an individual’s actual quote (a person working in a  significant leadership role in a major multinational) plus a video for each common stage, each of which has particular gifts and blind spots. Hold them compassionately. The ways of understanding the world around us are worthy of respect.

Following the stage descriptions, the resources section contains links to background articles and great books that can help in a variety of situations—your own, in organizations and globally.

Opportunist

Opportunistic people are primarily focused on behaviors that create personal advantages. They are likely to put their own self-interest ahead of any competing priorities.

The focus on personal gain can be narrow, a specific task-orientation such as accruing a type of property, more toys and/or deference from others.

Opportunists tend to regard their bad behavior as legitimate in the cut and thrust of an eye-for-an-eye world. They reject feedback, externalize blame, and retaliate harshly. One can see this action logic in the early work of Larry Ellison (now CEO of Oracle). Ellison describes his managerial style at the start of his career as “management by ridicule.” “You’ve got to be good at intellectual intimidation and rhetorical bullying,
David Rooke and William R. Torbert, Seven Transformations of Leadership in Harvard Business Review

Conformist

A conformist is committed to routines. She observes protocols and aims to avoid inner and outer conflicts. In this way of making sense of sustainability she is seeking, when possible, to conform and work to the group around her standards. She wishes to be a member of the team, have status within her group and often speaks about sustainability in favorite phrases or clichés. Primary loyalty is to her immediate group, hurting others is a ‘sin’ and positive ethics are to be ‘nice and cooperative’.

Lee, in the example below, is talking about sustainability and climate change (at the time she did not believe in human-driven climate change). However, confronted by an alternative perspective she relates to the individuals. She resonants with their views:

I went to Canada two years ago and I saw the glaciers and things and they are all melting and the Canadians are very excited because it means they get more fresh water and the temperatures are bit warmer for them. So the people up there in Canada are really embracing the climate change, if there is climate change.

Expert

Our expert makes a substantial step. This is the first human development stage for abstract thinking, relating physical concepts to theories and subtle ideas. For example, he’s interested in problem-solving such as the economics of production and looking for causes like material costs.

He can be critical of others based on his—expert sustainability correlated—logic. It’s not just the cost of a material that creates a successful product—aesthetics, brand, comfort and much more are important but different ‘expert’ thinking individuals may value only one or two of those aspects.

He’s choosing efficiency over effectiveness—seeking to stand out with technical knowledge, be unique, a perfectionist, valuing decisions based on technical merit. Sometimes this becomes dogmatic. While he is seeing contingencies and exceptions this usually details with a specific silo but not categorizing across competing and different systems.

An example is Rod’s statement which focuses in on a particular technical solution—reusing water—without considering here more subtle or other constraints (such as our emotional aversion to drinking recycled sewerage):

Sometimes I think you just have to bite the bullet and you just have to take the simple approach. But, I don’t think our bureaucracy is just capable of doing that. The mind boggles—all this recycled water we put out in the ocean, it could be harvested, cleansed, go through a wetland. Yeah, it might be wetlands, it might be some other filter, I don’t know, but you could get it. It’s just water—you have bodies that aren’t used in water—if you take out the impurities it’s fine!

Achiever

Achiever is a classic modern-day success story. This is what it looks like when you coordinate several different expert perspectives—business success. A person typically thinks about longer-term goals. For her the future is vivid and she feels like initiator looking for generalizable action opportunities and the reasons that make the most sense. She’s seeking mutuality, despite often being in a position of responsibility, in her business relationships and appreciating the complexity—perhaps seeing opportunity in marketing, for example, from offsetting emissions and working with her company suppliers on cooperative sustainability outcomes.

That to say she works with systems but often feels guilty if she does not meet her own standards. However, she’s somewhat blind to her own shadow—similar to how modern-day industry missed its global impacts from power production and coal. That is there’s a subjectivity behind objectivity—it’s not just about identifying an opportunity, putting in place a plan and getting the measurable result.

Carrie talks about the need to recognize and work with multiple, bottom-line-like, silos:

I like to think of sustainability in a holistic sense—in that it is sort of trying to find that balance of environmental, social, governance and economic outcomes—but to me it’s breaking it down into simple terms. It’s about being smarter about what we do and how we live and how we build, how we design. It’s about being smarter…more sensible about how we use our resources. It’s being smarter with the end outcome in terms of it not using as much or producing as many harmful impacts on the environment.  But, yeah it really is about improving outcomes for the environment in which we live today, so that it’s still there, still healthy, happy tomorrow and thereafter.

Pluralist

Our modern-day world brought us great success, wonderful improvements in health and sanitation, comforts and mechanical power. Pluralists—sustainability perspectives correlated with redefining—take a relativistic perspective on such changes seeing the more global, subtler problems that arise as a result of this success. Our pluralist view focuses on both present and historical contexts, he’s seeing change over a much longer time period such as global epochs and the longer-term implications of climate change.

He’s often more aware of his conflicting emotions and likely to seek independent, creative work. He’s attracted by difference and change more than by similarity and stability but can deconstruct the modern-day world’s problems in specific silos. If his view is “right” it’s hard to reconcile that with a differently siloed, different pluralist’s view. We can get organizational decision paralysis—everyone is right but he’s just waiting for those others to change their minds and see that he is right…

Dean outlines the difficulties with just seeking modern-day ‘success’:

I mean…investment banking. I mean they deserve everything they got in their house. Because they are—I call them the forces of darkness, right. They are amoral! I would say they will do whatever they need to get the deal. The investment banks do whatever you need to do to get the next deal and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good. It doesn’t matter whether it is ethical. It doesn’t matter anything. You just do anything get the deal, right.

Strategist

Strategists start coordinating subjective, subtle and tangible technical perspectives. It’s similar to the modern-day achiever success story (coordinating different views) but now encompassing not just the technical but emotional, global and relatively remote experiences too.

That’s to say our transformer—sustainability perspectives correlated with this level of self-complexity—recognizes the importance of principles, theories and differing judgments. She is seeing that it’s not just the rules, social customs and exceptions to those norms that are important for making and maintaining good decisions. There is some nuanced relativity, an understanding of complexity and growth hierarchies that helps to make principled choices.

She will act on approximation, categorizing across diverse fields of complexity, and such action is beyond win-lose options to net “positive-sum” gains—many win, co-creating mutually beneficial solutions. She places a high value on mutuality and autonomy and is interweaves short-term goal-orientedness with longer-term developmental process-orientedness. For example, her organization is delivering on bottom lines across profit, purpose and for the planet, while enabling many people to individually style and innovate—managing for overall beneficial outcomes (individually and small to giant groups).

Arena frames action on sustainability, recognizing multiple important factors, in a strategist-like manner:

So I think the challenge is realizing obviously that our audience is varied and broad. Our stakeholders are varied and broad… [We need to] recognize that if we are talking to a particular group of employers or stakeholders that are very focused on the environment… [we’re] also gently trying to get them to broaden their perspective.

For example, Earth Hour. We have committed to Earth Hour this year again. There was one division in particular that… are so focussed on their under-performance right now. They are in quite a dire situation that they basically said, we are not doing anything but turning around the bottom line. We don’t want any noise about anything else, you’re distracting our people. We said look, we don’t mean to do that, we realise that’s your priority, but this is an important initiative from the group perspective. Here’s why it’s important for our employees, for our customers. But, there is also business case. Let us tell you that. If you turn off this many branches [power/lights]… it’s not a huge amount but we translated it into the numbers and said you will save X-thousand dollars. Why would you say no? There’s no downside.

Posts and links

For a great read on self-complexity and its business importance see Jennifer Garvey Berger, Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World here>.

For the research background on sustainability stages see Simon Divecha & Barrett Brown’s Integral Sustainability: Correlating Action Logics with Sustainability here>.

To analyze how people make sense of sustainability, with respect to adult development stages, see chapter 4 of a Climate for Change here>.

Karen O’Brien’s quote is from Do values subjectively define the limits to climate change adaptation? here>