Intentional Society: Examining the developmental stages
Note: No IS activities this week. Our next intro call will be April 10th.
Two weeks ago we introduced Adult Development to ourselves as a model, and this last week we took a more detailed walk through the stages of ego development as charted by Kegan, Torbert, and Cook-Greuter. As you can see here, they align and rhyme conceptually, though they name the clusters a little differently:
A bit hidden underneath these surface names are a pattern of developmental shifts between individualistic and communal frames, and ever-expanding scopes of the objects and systems that one models in their head. The things that we don't model, that are outside of our awareness, are the things we "are subject to." When we bring a new construct into our heads, we "make object" of it inside our widened perspective of sense-making.
After encountering this progression of "vertical" development, we took a few minutes to look at the trap of attaching a "better" label to "higher" stages. Fit to different contexts and capabilities - sure. But I don't think there's any direct tie here to the intrinsic worth or value of a human being. Research finds little-to-no correlation between development and happiness, either. Finally, viewing these stages as a ladder to climb to the top of is itself a stage and not the highest (or most capacious or most developed) one.
Whoever is stabilized in a developmental frame that fits their context and meets their needs probably has a good thing going, and I wouldn't try to shove any of this in their face. But for many of us... we see possibilities and challenges that are pulling us to grow up up up - we are pulled to grow and expand to meet the complex demands of our own lives, goals, and more, all the way out to the future of humanity.
It's that kind of journey that these maps are useful for - and that's the kind of people that Intentional Society is attracting. We feel called to meet the needs that pull at our awareness - questing, seeking, wandering towards the undiscovered country that lays ahead of us, individually and collectively.
We're taking this week off, in recognition of Easter Sunday and as a breather after one quarter of Intentional Society meetups. We'll begin Q2 with some structural design, hopefully finding some new experiments worth pursuing.
Cheers,
James