The Olympics offered us a glimpse of the integral wisdom of ‘Clumsy’ leadership - but how can we turn it from a 1% rarity into a commonplace inspiration?

The organising of the successful London Olympics didn’t rely on only a single ‘elegant’ approach, but instead offered us an inspiring and vivid example of a multi-faceted, or ‘clumsy’, approach – so argued RSA Chief Executive Matthew Taylor in his annual lecture on 12th September (and accompanying article in RSA Journal).

This ‘clumsy’ approach successfully integrated the solidarity of national pride, the hierarchical leadership of the organising committee and the amazing efforts of individual sportspeople.

A key point Matthew Taylor makes - drawing on a model called ‘Cultural Theory’ - is that the solutions which offer exactly this kind of integration of the competing rationalities - egalitarianism, individualism and hierarchy - are particularly necessary when dealing with the ‘Wicked’ problems of our age.

For Cultural Theory, any successful solution to pressing social ills must ‘consist of creative and flexible combinations of these different ways of organising, perceiving and justifying social relations’, these multiple rationalities.

Currently ‘we’re not developing the kind of solutions that mobilise these [three] forms of social power’, Matthew Taylor told a packed Great Room at the Royal Society of Arts.

‘Organisations don’t mobilise those three sources of power’ - ‘we come up with feeble solutions to big problems’, he said.

Cultural Theory tells us that ‘A clumsy solution... is not a compromise; still less a consensus. Rather it emerges from a messy, noisy argumentative process; a constructive engagement between the three 'active' ways of organising: hierarchy, individualism and egalitarianism'.

For Matthew Taylor, the Olympics therefore offers us just ‘a glimpse of the alignment of forces that could enable significant progress in tackling “Wicked” issues’ - which might include climate change, our ageing population, social injustice and international drug trafficking.

This Cultural Theory approach - propounded by Matthew Taylor - certainly feels intuitively right to me: ‘all the “voices” heard, and responded to by the others’.

And this ‘clumsy’ thinking should impact government policy too: ‘It is therefore important that all the ways of life be taken some sort of account in the policy process’, says Cultural Theory.

This is all well and good - but is there any likelihood that we will move from today’s failing ‘elegant’ policies – and ‘elegant’ leadership - to the ‘clumsy’ leadership, that offers us the hope of something new and more encompassing (and Cultural Theorists argue has already proved its worth in relation to many social issues)?

That what I will start to investigate in this blog post....

How much ‘Clumsy’ leadership is there currently in society?

Whilst Cultural Theory offers an appealing theoretical lens on leadership, I’ve not yet seen it delve into the empirical question of how much of this ‘Clumsy’ leadership actually exists out in the real world - in organisations, in political parties, in NGOs etc.

But I think there might be a way round that impasse. (Let me know if I’m wrong!).

There are types of leadership - described in other theoretical traditions - which seem to me close to indistinguishable from this ‘Clumsy’ leadership. If we pick a model of leadership that does include a credible leadership assessment tool, that has been doing empirical research for many decades, then we might be able to determine the current prevalence of ‘Clumsy’ leaders.

There are various statements of Cultural Theory’s credo that seem particularly clear about what ‘Clumsy’ leadership looks like.

For example:

• 'One cannot be guided by one ideology only, or a single set of normative concerns'
• ‘The leader's  role with a wicked problem... is to ask the right questions, rather than provide the right answers’.
• Leadership which is ‘about questions not answers’, ‘about reflection not reaction’ and ‘about relationships not structures’.
• ‘We are going to have to find some way of not rejecting uncomfortable knowledge’.
• ‘Imagine the wider benefits of a world where seeking to strengthen the confidence and clarity of an adversary’s case was conventionally seen as good practice’ (this final one comes from Matthew Taylor himself, rather than directly from Cultural Theory)

The form of the self - the form of leadership - that statements like these seem so closely aligned with is the ‘Self-transforming mind’ (or ‘Postmodern mind’) found in Harvard Professor Robert Kegan’s model of adult psychological growth. (NB After numerous studies tracking many individuals, the impression developmental psychologist Jean Piaget left us – of significant psychological growth ending around the age of 18 - has been proven to be very wide of the mark.)

In Kegan’s research, the characteristics he found of the Self-transforming/Postmodern mind were that it asks one to win some distance from one’s own internal authority/inner compass or ideology, to be no longer captive of them, so becoming less invested in one’s own point of view. Instead, it examines issues from multiple points of view and sees where seemingly opposite perspectives overlap, becoming friendlier towards contradiction and incompleteness – and even able to embrace contradictory systems simultaneously. It’s also strategic - and can understand and manage tremendous amounts of complexity. Its decisions are based on the common good for organisations and society.

I’m going to begin by mentioning two things that rather give the game away about how common this ‘Self-transforming’ mind will turn out to be.

Firstly, Matthew Taylor - in his 2010 annual lecture (and accompanying pamphlet Twenty-first Century Enlightenment wrote that “In a 2002 overview of survey evidence for the OECD, Kegan concluded than only one in five people across the world have achieved the competencies necessary for what he termed a ‘modernist’ or self-authoring order of consciousness.”

So, less than 20% have reached Kegan’s Self-authoring (Modernist) mind, which is the major milestone in development before the Self-transforming/Postmodernist mind becomes possible. (This Self-authoring mind itself is hugely important in its own right, and the RSA report I co-authored with two RSA colleagues earlier this year - Beyond the Big Society - Psychological Foundations of Active Citizenship - uncovered how Self-authorship is a vital foundation required for enduring ‘active citizenship’. See my blog post about the report ‘How to understand the psychology of active citizenship’ - which includes a description of Robert Kegan’s stages of adult psychological maturation).

The self-transforming mind is also - and this is the second point - the final stage that Kegan’s interview-based assessment process has yet been able to uncover in people’s psychological development.

You should by now have spotted what I’ve spotted, the Self-transforming mind - which is just another name for the ‘Clumsy’ mind, and the foundation for Clumsy leadership - is not going to turn out to be very common at all.

A quick poke around Prof Kegan’s research shows that less than 1% of people have a fully Self-transforming mind. Better news is that 6 or 7% of people are in the half-way stage between Self-authoring and Self-transforming. (I’m taking these figures from Kegan’s book ‘Immunity to Change’ - which includes a helpful condensed overview of his adult development research and its close relationship to leadership).

So, the key question becomes: how can we increase this 1% of ‘Clumsy’ leaders?

Does varying psychological capacity put a cap on the spread of the ‘Clumsy’ leadership that we would like to see?

Yep, I suspect that will be the case.

Take a quick look at what happened with the similarly innovative ‘systems thinking’ approach to creating successful government policy.

When Jake Chapman FRSA wrote his influential booklet – ‘Systems Failure – Why Governments Must Learn to Think Differently’ – he was invited to give numerous presentations across Whitehall and beyond.

“The result was universally the same: real interest in the ideas and their potential, and no willingness to adopt or try any of the ideas or tools in practice,” he says.

We can have a pretty good stab at the hidden reasons why Jake’s transformational systems thinking didn’t take off – despite the seeming wide interest.

Jake’s work supporting the development of High Potential Development group (top civil servants) found that the delivery-focused ‘Achiever’ action logic was prevalent amongst them, in other words Prof. Kegan’s Self-authoring/Modernist mind. There was a strong opinion that imaginative ‘big thinking’ was not a priority.

Yet the only people who went on to actually use any of the innovative systems-focused approaches were those few civil servants who were strongly motivated by later - ie post-conventional - ways of knowing (including the ‘Self-transforming mind).

I suspect that Cultural Theory-based approaches might well hit that same brick wall. (Unless they get a fair bit wiser to understanding the varying capacity of leaders for ‘clumsy’ thinking, and how to boost it).

Another example of an approach to organisational development that might well require this - fairly rare - ‘Self-transforming’ mind is Chris Argyris’ Action Science (which aims for a shift from command-and-control and defensive thinking in organisations to a mutual learning approach). Though Argyris himself appears non-plussed by such arguments, the leading practitioners of his approach seem to admit that Kegan’s Self-transforming mind is the psychological capacity that is required (see ‘Robert Kegan’s Developmental Perspective’).

Our situation is not hopeless: the capacity for ‘clumsy’ leadership can be successfully increased (but will it take the 16 years it took Jonathan Haidt?)

I’m under no - well, few - illusions about how difficult it is to change a person’s rationality, their ‘way of knowing’.

It’s illuminating and fascinating to see the turning-points that led Jonathan Haidt – author of The Righteous Mind - Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Re... - into a new worldview that fully embraced plural rationalities.

“My own intellectual life narrative has had two turning points”, Jonathan shares with us - calling them “a kind of awakening”.

The first was in 1993, when it fully came home to him that there are multiple - equally valid - moral foundations (ie same core insight as Cultural Theory/Matthew Taylor, even if his way of labelling it is different).

“Our minds contain a toolbox of psychological systems, including the six moral foundations”, says Haidt.

“I began to see that many moral matrices coexist within each nation,” he tells us.

Yet a merely theoretical acceptance of multiplicity, of plural rationalities, as a concept seems to come long before Haidt’s day-to-day behaviours, experiences and motivations change. These aren’t transformed until a second turning point - in 2009 - when he evolves from a fairly standard liberal, Obama-fan, view to a truly post-partisan outlook.

“I had escaped from my prior partisan mind-set (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later)”, Haidt realised - “I was no longer on the defensive”.

“It felt good to be released from partisan anger”, he adds.

He found that he could begin to “think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society”.

It appears, from Haidt’s experience, that we might all be able to espouse things theoretically, long before we really live them experientially - a gap of around 16 years in his case.

At the outset of the article based on his annual lecture, Matthew Taylor writes: ‘Most of us would like to live in a more caring, social just, economically dynamic and environmentally responsible country’.

Does this have a ‘clumsy’ appeal to all the plural rationalities?

Research into UK public attitudes by the Values Modes research organisation Cultural Dynamics has found that - except for ‘economically dynamic’ - the topics in this statement are all very appealing to the ‘Inner-directed Pioneer’ segment of the population (closest to Cultural Theory’s Egalitarianism) - but far less so to the two other major segments of the UK population: ‘Sustenance-driven Settlers’ and ‘Outer-directed Prospectors’ (which correspond pretty closely to Cultural Theory’s Hierarchical and Individualist rationalities).

How to increase the capacity for Clumsy leadership?
The RSA report Beyond the Big Society - Psychological Foundations of Active Citizenship mentions a few rather different examples of interventions that helped people’s ways of knowing to change and grow. It highlights a transformational interdisciplinary curriculum (on earth sustainability) at one US college that successfully fostered psychological growth in students – compared to a control group on a traditional curriculum.

Only those students on the transformational curriculum reached the stage of ‘independent knowing’, with other students remaining at developmentally prior levels as ‘absolutist’ or ‘relativist’ knowers, to use the terms developed by William Perry, a pioneer in student development research. (This finding is particularly relevant to the Big Society because those students who progressed developmentally were twice as likely to take on extracurricular ‘service’ projects, and three times as likely to take on leadership positions in community service organisations – as a control group.)

Prof Jake Chapman FRSA has found similarly positive empirical outcomes emerging in his work training public sector leaders at the National School of Government. And a 2004 Australian study found significant change in participants’ developmental stages after a 10-week transformational course, compared to a control group.

Moreover, in the Caribbean nation of Curacao, the largest island in the Netherlands Antilles, a major developmental levels intervention - with the support of business and political parties - was organised after the country’s capital was hit by rioting due to industrial conflict. Research – including 5,000 developmental diversity assessments – concluded that 'it is indeed possible to restart and even accelerate the maturation process in individuals, organisations and societies'. The project’s chief organiser – Harvard’s Dr Harry Lasker – also found that screening to gauge developmental diversity 'was an effective way to tailor training content to individual characteristics'.

These are the tip of iceberg - there has been decades of work in areas like developmental curricula, along with such initiatives as Lawrence Kohlberg’s ‘Just Communities’ to support moral development in prisons and schools.

If we help leaders to change - will they then just leave our organisations...?

Adult developmental researchers, coaches, and others have discerned an all-too-common pattern of individuals (leaders) who are on the way to a Self-transforming form of mind finding organisations ‘the wrong context for their work lives’.

‘Even if we support people to grow, they leave organisations before the organisation can get the full benefit of the self-transforming [clumsy!] mind’, writes Jennifer Garvey Berger in her 2012 book ‘Changing on the Job - Developing Leaders for a Complex World’: ‘they find organisations too constraining - and they leave’.

Jennifer adds: ‘It is my strong opinion, though, that as organisations become more powerful and more global, and as threats to our planet become too large for any group or organisation to manage, we will require people with self-transforming minds to be in leadership positions. Such leaders can look beyond their own reputations and their own needs - even their own need to see their vision realised - and hold on to a more connected, global sense of the world’.

In the Curaçao example mentioned above, the training helped many people to move from a mentality focused around hierarchy and fate to one based around achievement and self-authoring one’s own destiny. But once those people went back to their jobs, many of them quit: ‘The organsiation’s top management had requested achievement-motivated workers, but when it got them, the existing organisational structure would not allow achievement-motivated behaviour’, writes Victor Pinedo in Tsunami - Building Organisations Capable of Prospering in Tidal Waves (2004).

It’s often a similar story when residents are asked to engage with their local authority in transforming services - the local bureaucracies aren’t really set up to work with creative and engaged citizens.  

(NB I suppose I ought to mention somewhere in this complicated explanation I’m giving that the emerging, latest stages in adult development are characterised by the ability to abstain from automatically trying to explain everything. Now back to my all-encompassing explanation...).

Next steps? Some potential roles for Matthew Taylor’s RSA

If we imagine for a moment that I’m right in the argument I’m making that a kind of integrative ‘Clumsy’ leadership is necessary to deal with ‘Wicked’ issues, and that it is founded on the rare ‘Self-transforming’ stage of adult maturation - then here are some initial ideas for next steps:

• Launch a research project to uncover how commonplace the Self-transforming/Clumsy mind actually is

Eg across the UK, in organisations, in different professions, in Government depts, in No. 10 Downing Street, in the RSA...

• Undertake a literature review/metanalysis of all interventions which have fostered positive adult growth (towards 'Clumsiness')
  

How many have successfully fostered development to the Socialised (traditional) stage, how many to the Self-authoring (modern) stage, how many to the Self-transforming - Clumsy - stage? Which ones appear valid and replicable? Could we help any to become widespread?

• Produce a template to help active citizens create ‘Clumsy’ solutions

A toolkit to help active citizens to uncover how each of the three Cultural Theory rationalities would view any issue, followed by guidance on how to mesh them together to build a powerful and sustainable ‘Clumsy’ solution. (NB Cultural Theory sometimes adds in Fatalism and the Hermit as additional rationalities).

• Start testing out the collaborative/organisational approaches - such as ‘Future Search’ - that Cultural Theory has assessed as being most ‘Clumsy’

An excellent - though, of course, challengeable - Cultural Theory paper by Steven Ney and Marco Verweij is titled Messy Institutions for Wicked Problems: How to Generate Clumsy Solu.... It looks at a number of approaches to collaboration, strategising and decision-making in organisations to see which ones are most ‘Clumsy’/’Messy’(ie does it honour the 4 or 5 Cultural Theory lenses?).

Candidate approaches researched include Open Space, Soft Systems Methodology, Citizen’s Juries, Bohm Dialogues, Future Search, Wisdom Circles and the Learning Organisation. (It assesses 19 in all).

The most Clumsy/Messy - and potentially Self-transforming - is Future Search, with others like Design Thinking and 21st Century Town Meetings coming close too. Bohm Dialogue, Learning Organisation and Open Space are some of the approaches that only honour one of the rationalities, and so are far from integrative and ‘Clumsy’. (I’m not the only one who might quibble with some of this - but it’s a great step forward to scan the current tools being used in organisations, from NGOs to corporations, and to analyse which are most integrative/Clumsy).

• Begin to assess government policy proposals to see whether they are integrative and ‘clumsy’, or not.

Use Ney and Verweij’s assessment approach - above - but apply it to proposed Government policies.

Another angle on this might be to undertake a before and after adult developmental stage assessment, to see if policies are fostering the growth of ‘Self-authoring’ minds (as the OECD said was so important in the 21st century - see Beyond the Big Society) or Self-transforming minds.

• A booklet featuring the key proponents of the different models of plural rationalities outlining how their approach has successfully dealt with - or could deal with - a particular ‘wicked’ issue.
  An edited collection of short articles could showcase approaches such as:

 - Cultural Theory’s plural rationalities
 - Jonathan Haidt’s moral matrices
- Prof Robert Kegan’s ways of knowing
- Prof Clare Graves/Spiral Dynamics’ ‘Value memes’
- Mark Williams’ ‘10 Lenses’ (actually there are really 11, as he has a clumsy/integrative one too).

- Pat Dade’s 12 ‘Values Modes’ (with its three Maslowian top-level categories of ‘Sustenance Driven’, ‘Outer Directed’ and ‘Inner Directed’)

- Torbert/Loevinger/Cook-Greuter ‘Action Logics’/Ego stages

- Lawrence Kohlberg’s moral stages

- Ken Wilber’s integral approach (though this is an integration, rather than a single model)

(And potentially many others too: Michael Commons, William Perry, Belenky et al, Hall-Tonna, Richard Barrett, King and Kitchener, Marcia Baxter Magolda etc).

I don’t think any publication like this has been attempted before - and it could be very helpful indeed to policy-makers - offering some really fresh thinking on ‘Wicked’ issues.

I suspect that none of these models of plural rationalities will reach a tipping point on their own - but brought together, anything could happen. And bringing the models more closely into some kind of conversation might encourage their own growth into the Self-transforming space.

I even had a first stab at a name for such a publication: ‘Difference is beautiful – crafting policies as if plural rationalities mattered’. Sounds a bi like some kind of unpretty postmodern heap though...

A - the? - leading proponent of Cultural Theory, Michael Thompson FRSA, is broadly supportive of the the RSA putting together a publication like this, suggesting the rather neat title ‘Are You a Clumsy Fellow?’ for it.

• Support ‘Clumsy’ leaders, help them to stay - and grow - inside their organisations

    A new ‘Clumsy’ leaders network might help, and I’m sure Jennifer Garvey Berger isn’t the only person who’s thought about how to support Self-transforming/clumsy individuals so that they don’t leave their organisations - where their input could be unique and valuable. (This might make a good topic for a research project). The idea that organisational culture often acts as a sorting mechanism to drive away the very people who might be able to succeed with ‘Wicked’ issues is pretty troubling.

Another place to look for ways to turn organisations into supportive and deliberately transformational institutions might be in the work on schools by Eleanor Drago-Severson. Her wonderful 2009 book Leading Adult Learning: Supporting Adult Development in Our Schools is a pioneering look at how school leaders can foster the adult development of their staff by understanding developmental diversity, in order that their schools be the most effective for their students.
Ellie describes 4 practices that schools - and any other organisation - can use to support adult transformation and growth:
                    - Teaming
                    - Providing Leadership Roles
                    - Collegial inquiry
                    - Mentoring

Of course, it may even turn out that the late Elliot Jaques was right all along with his rather prescriptive and hierarchical vision of a ‘Requisite Organisation’ that is designed to reflect, engage and support the different stages of cognitive complexity of staff. (Part of the problem might be that Jaquesians have never properly reworked his model for the world of knowledge-based work?)

• From Alpha Course… to Genesis Course - spreading transformation across the UK and beyond

The RSA’s Beyond the Big Society report called for ‘transformational learning hubs which run training exercises for community leaders’.
One way I envisage to do this would be to create a secularised, transformational equivalent of the Alpha Course, complete with shared meals - and an active citizenship focus.

The Alpha Course has proven hugely popular with its 'opportunity to explore the meaning of life': it has attracted 3 million participants in the UK, and 15 million worldwide. I think some don’t - initially - even fully realise its Christian basis. It now runs in churches, homes, workplaces, prisons, universities and elsewhere.

Could there be a way fuse citizens’ skills, self-development, effectiveness and community engagement (and ‘Social Brain’ reflexivity) into a deliberately transformational 10-week course, that could spread across the 100 countries that have RSA Fellows?

We could call it… the ‘Genesis Course’!

• Develop, recruit and support post-conventional leaders
  The report Flying High - a new look at local government leadership, transforma... (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers) offers advice on taking local authorities in the direction of Self-transforming/Clumsy leadership.
  Here are some snippets:
  - ‘The evidence suggests that attempting significant cultural change without some postconventional leadership capacity at senior levels may lead to failure.’
  - ‘An important step for chief executives is to be aware of their own leadership "maturity", especially if they want to transform their organisation and work through many of the dilemmas of the Transition Zone within which there are periods of intense uncertainty and risk taking.’
  - ‘It is not always necessary for the chief executive to be post-conventional but it is important that they develop or recruit this capacity or give more time and space for those who demonstrate post-conventional behaviour. This is sometimes difficult, as quite often postconventional individuals, by their very nature, will be challenging, disturbing of the status quo and more likely to be seen as “mavericks”.’
  I’ve recently been hearing intriguing things about significant positive changes - at Swindon Council - that resulted from the deliberate recruitment of a ‘Self-Transforming’ Chief Executive, and other post-conventional senior leaders. I heard that there was a very positive and progressive impact on some services, but I’d like to see some more detail.

The thorny issues of hierarchy, directionality et al.
I’m not that keen to write about these issues (as an open discussion of them seems rare), but felt that I should. But I’ve now - conveniently - run out of time to do so in this long post . Maybe another time...

Parallels between Spiral Dynamics and Cultural Theory? - A quick linguistic experiment

Spiral Dynamics is one of the many models of plural rationality - with perhaps a 50 year history of applications, including involvement in ending Apartheid in South Africa (as described in The Crucible - Forging South Africa's Future).

I was wondering what would happen if I removed each Spiral Dynamics label for one of the rationalities and replaced it with the equivalent Cultural Theory label.

Will the quotes then easily pass for Cultural Theory insights? Let me know what you think.

(Basically I've swapped out the label 'Blue' value meme and replaced it with 'Hierarchy'; Green with 'Egalitarian'; Orange with 'Individualist'; Purple/Red with 'Fatalist'; and 'Clumsy' for Yellow/integral).

Here are the quotes:
"Building everything from the bottom up is just as bad as top-down. It its egalitarian, power to the people enthusiasm, the Egalitarian/Solidaristic rationality sometimes puts too much of its energy into the lower echelons. Everybody gets a say, whether competent or not. Nobody’s opinion carries more weight than anyone else’s. When misapplied, this noble philosophy only leads to a pooling of ignorance and wasted time. The one or two people with real experise are shouted down by know-nothings getting their share of the consensus. The individualist rationality which plays the game of entrepreneur so well is driven away to less Egalitarian/Solidaristic pastures or starts a business on the side. The Hierarchical rationality blows its whistle and calls for an investigation by a higher authority. The Clumsy mind loses patience an simply disappears.” (Spiral Dynamics, pg 151).

“As the Clumsy awareness peaks, scales drop from our eyes enabling us to see for the first time the legitimacy of all the plural rationalities that have been awakened to date” (pg 277).


Clumsy awareness generates a FlexFlow perspective. This view honours differences between the plural rationalities and facilitates the movement of people up and down the human spiral. This produces a sense of stratification, a recognition of the layered dynamics of human systems operation within people and societies. If the Fatalism rationality is sick, it must be made well. If the Fatalism rationality is running amok, the raw energy must be channeled. If the Hierarchical rationality turns sour and becomes punitive, it must be reformed. Since many of our social ‘messes’ are caused by the interaction of people with different rationalities, such ‘messes’ can only be sorted out through the ‘Clumsy’ complex of intelligences and resources”. (p. 277)

[NB I repeated Fatalism, as Spiral Dynamics includes around twice as many rationalities as Cultural Theory does, so the same Cultural Theory label gets used for rather different thinking systems]

“With Clumsy awareness active one avoids falling into the sink holes in any of the plural rationalities, from Individualism’s unbridled ambition to Egalitarianism’s naive altruism”. (Pg 278)

“Clumsy thinking people are able to fix problems while others fret, manipulate, query higher authority, form study groups, or play theory games”. (Page 277).

And here are a couple of additional extracts - this time from Ken Wilber's book Boomeritis, which is also based on the Spiral Dynamics model of plural rationalities:

"When Egalitarianism dissolves Hierarchy it makes it impossible for Fatalism to develop further, because there is no Hierarchical base to accep the development" (Boomeritis, pg. 380).

"On sturdy Hierarchy and Individualism, Egalitarian ideals can grow" (pg 382).

"When Egalitarianism champions every 'multicultural' movement, it acts to encourage other rationalities not to grow into Egalitarianism. Thus, the more Egalitarianism succeeds, the more it destroys itself.(pg 382).

Spiral Dynamics has interesting findings about which rationalities are most rejecting of particular other rationalities. For instance the peak Orange/Individualist particularly rejects Green/Egalitarian

Co-developer of Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck, warns of 'Mirror Management' and the 'Car Wash Mentality', which can only see a single rationality, and seek to impose 'elegant' solutions: "If what you are about to say or do looks and sounds good to you, don't do it! (Unless, of course, the listeners or readers have the same value systems as you,' he advises in The Crucible.

Do please comment below – I’d love to hear your feedback. Please put me right if I’m going wrong ;-)

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Books/reports/blogs

– Transforming Behaviour Change – Beyond Nudge and Neuromania, by Jonathan Rowson (free RSA report).
– Leading Adult Learning: Supporting Adult Development in Our Schools, by Eleanor Drago-Severson.

-  ‘Changing on the Job - Developing Leaders for a Complex World by Jennifer Garvey Berger
– Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.
(Contains a great chapter at the beginning which describes the importance of the adult development dimension to organisational change; the rest is about their easy-to-use, yet revealing, ‘Immunity to Change’ tool. Have you used it?).

- Beyond The Righteous Mind: helping Jonathan Haidt understand his ow..., by Matthew Mezey (a previous post in this group)

- How to understand the psychology of active citizenship, blog post by Matthew Kalman Mezey

- The Postconventional Personality - Assessing, Researching, and Theo..., by Angela Pfaffenberger, Paul Marko and Allan Combs

- Robert Kegan’s Developmental Perspective (webpage) (ie how the Self-Transforming/Level 5 mind is needed for Argris-inspired organisation development)
– Development and Assessment of Self-authorship: Exploring the Concept Across Cultures, by Marcia B. Baxter Magolda, Elizabeth Creamer and Peggy Meszaros (Eds.).

- Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Ini..., Joiner and Josephs.

- Action Inquiry - The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership, by Bill Torbert and associates.

- Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change, by Don Beck and Chris Cowan

- What Makes People Tick: The Three Hidden Worlds of Settlers, Prospe..., by Chris Rose.

Flying High - a new look at local government leadership, transforma... (free PDF), (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers)

Messy Institutions for Wicked Problems: How to Generate Clumsy Solu... (free PDF), by Steven Ney and Marco Verweij.

A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, ..., by Ken Wilber.

- The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative ..., by Roger Martin
– Learning Partnerships: Theory and Models of Practice to Educate for Self-authorship, by Marcia Baxter Magolda and Patricia King.
– Developing Adult Learners: Strategies for Teachers and Trainers, by Kathleen Taylor, Catherine Marienau and Morris Fiddler.
Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: the Role of Leadership (free PDF), by Keith Grint.
– Student Development in College: Theory, Research, and Practice, by Nancy Evans, Deanna Forney, Florence Guido, Lori Patton and Kristen Renn.
– Transforming Your Leadership Culture, by John McGuire and Gary Rhodes (Center for Creative Leadership)

- An Integrative Approach to Leader Development: Connecting Adult Dev..., David Day et al.
– Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Pr..., by Jack Mezirow and Associates (including Robert Kegan)

- Victor Pinedo in Tsunami - Building Organisations Capable of Prospering in Tidal Waves

- Organization Design, Levels of Work and Human Capability: Executive..., by Ken Shepard et al. (NB Recent bestseller The Leadership Pipeline applies a Jaquesian approach, though without crediting the original source of this approach).

- Executive Coaching: Practices & Perspectives, Berger and Fitzgerald.