Leaders who seek to win the “war for talent” by viewing capabilities as fixed resources that may be “out there” put themselves and their organizations at a serious disadvantage.
On the contrary, those who ask themselves “what can I do to make my environment the most fertile field in the world for talent to grow ?, are in the best position to be successful.
Be sure to read part 1 of this series:Manage your managerial talent or raise your level of consciousness?
The challenge of change and improvement is often confused with improving, “tackling” or “tackling” the greatest complexity in the world. Tackling and coping involve adding new skills or expanding our repertoire of responses. We simply add new resources but they are insufficient.
In reality, the experience of complexity is not just a story of the world. It is also a story about people, about how the demands of the world fit with those of the person or the organization. When we experience the world as "too complex," we are actually experiencing a mismatch between the complexity of the world and our own right now.
Mental development in adulthood
Let's look at the trajectory of mental development in adulthood:
Mental complexity and its evolution is not about how intelligent one can be, it has nothing to do with IQ.
The reader will see that the line thickness changes for each plateau; With this decrease we want to represent that the number of people decreases as one ascends from one plateau to another.
The socialized mind
Having a socialized mind decisively influences both the sending and receiving of the flow of information. If this is the level of complexity with which we look at the world, what we intend to send will be greatly influenced by what others want to hear. We are familiar with the group-think concept, which explains that team members retain crucial information in decision-making processes because "although we knew that what the leader proposed was unlikely to be successful, the leader wanted our support."
The socialized mind also has a decisive influence on how information is received and attended to. Maintaining alignment with other important and valuable people in our environment is crucial for the coherence of our own well-being; the socialized mind is highly sensitive and highly influenced by what it grasps; and what he captures often goes beyond the explicit message. It may well include the results of very dedicated attention to imagined sub-texts that may have more impact on the recipient than the message itself. Often this surprises and discourages leaders who cannot understand how subordinates can give that meaning to their communication; and the explanation is that the receiver's noise signal detector may be very distorted,and the actual information that comes to you has little to do with the intention of the sender.
The self-directed mind
When we view the world from this level of mental complexity what we "send out" is likely to be a function of what we believe others need to hear to improve the agenda or mission we have designed. Consciously or unconsciously, we have a direction, an agenda, a position, a strategy, an analysis of what is needed, a prior context from which our communication arises. Our plan or direction may be excellent, or it may be riddled with blind spots. Mental complexity decisively influences whether the information we send is aimed at taking the wheel and driving (self-directed mind), or being included in the car in a way that others drive (socialized mentality).
It is easy to see how this could describe an admirable ability to focus, to distinguish the important from the urgent, to optimize the use of our time, and to have the means to limit everything that demands our attention, more and more and more. with more intensity. But this same description can also be the recipe for disaster if our plan or position has some weakness, if it does not allow some crucial element of the equation to pass through the filter, or if the world changes in such a way that a frame of reference becomes outdated. which was helpful previously.
The self-transforming mind
It also has a filter but we are not "fused" or "confused" by it. The self-transforming mind is able to step back to see its own filter which is not the same as seeing through it. Because the self-transforming mind values but also suspects a single position, analysis or agenda: because it knows that, whatever the approach or design, there is always something to be included, it always has to leave room to change the agenda or analyzes.
In the same way, the way this mind receives information includes the advantages of the self-directed filter without being a prisoner of it. People with this level of mental complexity, when they feel they have a good map, can focus their attention, select and push; But information that can warn them about the limits of their current designs or thoughts takes higher priority. They are able to separate the wheat from the chaff but can identify the "golden chaff", the anomaly, the seemingly inconsistent, to turn their designs around.
It is more likely that this information, which we could call “disruptive” reaches those who have this level of complexity because not only do they attend to the information that reaches their threshold through, say, normal channels, but they are also aware that their behavior influences and they always have their door open to those who decide to knock on it; They are in charge of transmitting that they will always receive with interest and pleasure what they want to communicate to them.
In the talk "The New Reaches of Adult Development: Reflections on the Self-Transforming Mind", Professor Kegan wonders whether it is really possible to grow beyond the psychological independence of the "self-transforming mind" seen as the zenith of adult development.
Technical problems and adaptive problems
Ronald Heifetz distinguishes between two types of challenges or problems, the "technical" and the "adaptive." The former are not necessarily easy, nor are their results not very relevant. However, adds the author, many, if not all, of the challenges we face today and those that we will have tomorrow need more than just adding more technical skills to our mindset. These are the adaptive challenges that can only be addressed by transforming our mindset, moving towards a more sophisticated stage of mental development.
Others call it horizontal development strengthening or expanding the skills we already have instead of the more necessary one that is vertical, the one that takes us to the next plateau.
The root of any way of knowing (what philosophers call epistemology) is something that may seem abstract and that we call "the subject-object relationship." Any way of knowing can be described with respect to what you can look at (object) versus looking through the filter or lens that we are attached to. For example, our mental models operate when we look through them without being aware of it.
A way of knowing is more complex when it is able to look at what was previously only able to look through. In other words, our way of knowing becomes more complex when we create a larger system that incorporates and expands our previous system. If we want to increase our mental complexity we have to move aspects of our forms of search for meaning from subject to object, alter our mentality in such a way that a way of knowing or finding meaning becomes a type of "tool" that we have (and we can control and use) rather than something that has us (and therefore controls and uses us). In simpler words, what we master or control; and what dominates or controls us.
But, how is it facilitated or helped us to go from subject to object ?; What promotes the development of mental complexity?
We have to clarify that the increase in mental complexity is not only a cognitive matter. It is a complicated job that requires the head and the heart, the thought and the feeling. In short, what is it that generates an increase in complexity? Kegan's answer is the optimal conflict:
- The persistent experience of some kind of frustration, dilemma, vital puzzle, dilemma, or personal problem that is… Perfectly designed to cause in us the feeling of having come to feel the limits of our current way of knowing, of knowing… In some sphere of our life that we care about, with… Sufficient support so that we are not overwhelmed by conflict or able to escape from it or blur it.
Immunity to change
All over the world, organizations spend billions of euros and spend huge amounts of time on evaluation processes to develop their personal best and greatest capabilities. They listen with courage to the feedback they receive about why they need to change. Often, and in all sincerity, they commit to change; they even start out, putting a lot of energy into the effort. A year later they haven't made much progress and are back where they were.
Too often these heartfelt statements of change turn into something akin to New Year's resolutions. Most of them are sincere and precisely the low percentage of those who achieve something is perplexing. In these annual resolutions, we try to eliminate behaviors that have a negative connotation and increase those that have a positive one. But until we understand that the attitudes behind obstructive behaviors are very effective, we will not have formulated the problem correctly. Many of us have immunity to change as a way to protect ourselves from achieving the goal in order to save our lives.
Kegan summarizes in three premises what we have learned to overcome immunity to change:
- Overcoming immunity does not require the removal of all anxiety management systems. We will always need some. It is not the change that makes us anxious; it is the feeling that we are defenseless in the presence of what we see as dangerous that produces anxiety. Overcoming an immunity to change always presents us with the specter of exposing ourselves to those dangers. We build immune systems to save our lives. We can overcome our immune systems. An anxiety management system can be replaced by a more expansive one (in due course we will discover the limits of the latter) and the expectation of overcoming it will arise again.
The radiography method
Kegan wonders what it would mean to adaptively approach an adaptive challenge instead of doing it from technique; in other words: how could we intentionally support the development of mental complexity?
First, the formulation of the problem needs to be adaptive, that is, to understand exactly how the problem leads us to the current limits of our mental complexity; and secondly, to seek an adaptive solution, that is to say that, in some way, we verify that it is we ourselves who need to adapt.
Let's see, step by step, how to create that optimal conflict through an X-ray of the person (it can also be done in a group). It is about putting the person before his X-ray giving him the necessary support; this approach is a powerful tool to support the development of mental complexity that facilitates tackling adaptive challenges.
Creating an image of our immunity to change brings out that optimal conflict.
Let's look at the following table regarding who Kegan calls Peter:
Peter is a CEO, co-founder of a great company. He is contagiously stimulating, energetic, and a very funny guy whose curious mind, interest in people and love of work have been powerful levers of his Company's success.
Although with many virtues, Peter, like all of us, has his limitations that are increasingly perceived, and he is the first to recognize this, because he has decided to greatly boost the growth of the Company by acquiring two important competitors. Of course, it also means taking on the organizational challenges of mixing different cultures, working with new senior players who also need to take on new roles, and, to some extent, redefining the way they operate. Above all, evolve towards a more distributed leadership model, reduce its direct intervention in everything that happens in the company, know how to delegate better, and allow the executive region of the Company's brain to use other thoughts in addition to its own.
Using his own self-knowledge but also taking seriously the feedback received from those who work close to him, Peter identifies a set of personal change goals that he is seriously committed to achieving. In his own words he wants:
- Be more receptive to new ideas Be more flexible in your responses, especially those related to new definitions of roles and responsibilities Be more open to delegating and supporting new lines of authority To develop the X-ray in relation to these aspirations, Peter needs to create a honest and candid list of things you do (or don't do) that are on the opposite side of the change goals you need. Here's his initial list: I often give brusque responses when new ideas are presented to me in a tone that means “let's not talk about this any more”; or “we're done.” Too often I don't ask open-ended questions or really seek the opinions of others. Too often I convey the message to others that it is I who has the last word.Too quickly I give my opinions even when they may not be asking for them.
The figure below shows the first two features of the radiograph.
It is perfectly understandable, and the most frequent alternative, to try to solve our problems by technical procedures. If the objectives in column 1 represent an adaptive challenge for him, trying to solve them by technical procedures will not provide us with any solution.
Peter's pop-up X-ray
As we develop our radiography further, we take a counterintuitive and respectful position regarding column 2 behaviors that obstruct desired compromises. Instead of considering them as things that must disappear, we take them as valuable information that can be analyzed to develop a more satisfactory picture of what may be happening. That is, what appears in column 2 are nothing but the symptoms of something other than the thing itself.
Kegan recalls that psychologist William Perry argues that the two most important things we need to know with respect to the people we are trying to help is "What do they really want?" (Column 1); and "what are they doing that is preventing them from achieving it?" (Column 2).
The advantage of Kegan's X-ray is that it adds a third column (later also a fourth) that consists of making visible the hidden commitments that "have Peter" (remember that the ideal is that Peter is the one who "has them", that he dominates them from a higher level of consciousness), that they hold him captive, that they enslave him (although Peter is not totally or partially aware of it). We present them in the third column.
In order not to extend this long article any further, we must work with column 3 and even one more, 4, which would collect the "mental models" that dominate Peter, probably unconsciously.
This radiograph is also very useful when working with equipment.
If any reader is interested, I can send you more information about this powerful methodology.
