development

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Bill Torbert’s Action-Logics

05 Feb 10 in Torbert's Action Logics | Add your comment

Bill Torbert says this about human development:

Self-transformation toward fully and regularly enacting the values of integrity, mutuality and sustainability is a long, lifetime path that most of us follow as we grow toward adulthood, but that very few continue traveling intentionally once we become adults. Each major step along this path can be described as developing a new action-logic: an overall strategy that so thoroughly informs our experience that we cannot see it.

Our action-logic, then, is like the filter through which we view everything, but which we cannot see. Like water is to the fish, perhaps?

Torbert defines 7 main action-logics (there are some others, but so rare as to be hardly ever seen in the healthy adult  population):

  • Opportunist
  • Diplomat
  • Expert
  • Achiever
  • Individualist
  • Strategist
  • Alchemist

In a good-sized sample of well-educated working adults in the USA, he found the following distribution:

Opportunist: 3%

Diplomat, Expert or Achiever: 90%

Individualist, Strategist or Alchemist: 7%

So most of the adults you encounter in your working environment are Diplomat, Expert or Achiever. We’ll explore each of these in more detail in other posts.

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Ken Wilber’s Fulcrums

04 Feb 10 in Uncategorized, Wilber's Stages | 2 comments

The developmental model of Ken Wilber uses the concept of fulcrums. A fulcrum is basically “a fork in the road of human development”, where we leave the old way of seeing the world behind. He identifies nine main Fulcrums or milestones. We’ll cover them all in other posts. But first, here’s a short introduction.

Development isn’t rigidly linear, but a process of embedding a worldview, integrating it with what we’ve developed so far, and then transcending the old ways of meaning making for something new that includes all the old but adds a new capacity. There are times when we see things in old ways, and there are tantalizing glimpses of a deeper and broader view that may seem fleeting. But as we grow, the next level becomes more reliably present for us, until the next level is our ground of being; it becomes embedded, and that’s largely the way we see the world now.

One analogy is learning to run. First we walk, wobbly and without confidence. We fall down often, remain back at the ’sitting and crawling’ stage until we are moved to try to walk again. Eventually we walk competently. Then we try running, and persist until we can do that well. We can still walk (and we can still sit and still crawl), but now we can also run: we have transcended walking, but walking is included for the rest of our lives.

Here are Wilber’s 9 Fulcrums:

F1 – physical self. Usually up to about 5-9 months.

F2 – emotional self. Usually up to about 15-24 months.

F3 – self concept. Usually up to about age 7.

F4 – role self. Usually up to about age 11-14.

F5 – formal-reflexive or mature ego. Most people develop at least to this stage, but some don’t. Most people who develop to this level remain here for the rest of their lives. But some people develop further.

F6 – centaur or vision logic, integrative

F7 – psychic

F8 – subtle

F9 – causal

I’ll cover all of these fulcrums in other posts. We’ll spend more time on F4-F6, because these are the levels we are likely to encounter in the people we work with every day.

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Developmental Stages

07 Jan 10 in Stages | Add your comment

The idea that people continue to develop throughout their adult lives is the leading edge of psychology today.You might hear it called ‘developmental psychology’ or ‘integral psychology’ or ‘ego development theory’ .

The notion of ‘development’ is that people can gain broader and deeper perspectives as they mature. This is different from gaining new skills such as learning a better way to communicate, or how to manage your anger constructively. It has to do with changing the underlying structure that you use to make meaning of your world — your values and beliefs. For example, we see how teenagers or young adults are driven by their need to belong to their group, to identify with the group norms and blend in. But at a certain point, the young person realises that they want to be recognised for their unique qualities, or would  like to be known for their particular expertise. Blending in is no longer the most important thing; now they want to be differentiated. This transition from Diplomat to Expert is a major developmental step. The values and beliefs that fuel our meaning-making have changed.

As opposed to models of Types, where you are considered pretty much born with a certain tendency, trait or preference, the developmental models consider the human journey to be a progression through known stages, in a fixed order (i.e., you don’t skip a stage).

There are things you can do that will help or retard your development. Stressors can cause regression to an earlier stage. Occasional ‘peak experiences’ can give a temporary glimpse of a later stage. But you have a ground of being in your life, a general way of making sense of your experiences and understanding your world. Your development pace is rather slow; you can be years in a particular stage of development.

Some of the thought leaders in this developmental world are Ken Wilber, Robert Kegan, Bill Torbert and Don Beck. All of these will be explored in more detail in other postings.

The important thing to understand is this: there are several ways to look at and to understand individual differences. Type afficionados find sufficiency in explaining these differences by some sort of Typing scheme, such as Myers Briggs Type, Enneagram number, Belben Role, etc. The Stage modelers see people as fundamentally changing throughout their lives. I think each view has merit. I believe that exploring individual differences in terms of Type can open our eyes to accepting that other people are different from us, and that the differences don’t mean others are better than or worse than us. But I also believe that if we consider only Type, our perspective is limited. Developmental models hold out more hope: what we may find limiting today can (and will be) outgrown as we develop to the next stage of our lives.

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