Overview of Robert Keegan's Developmental Theory

Robert Keegan has been a pioneering developmental psychologist at Harvard since the 1970s, in the tradition of the likes of Jean Piaget. His major insight was to show how development went far beyond adolescence and into adulthood. His models lay out the major processes of development, from impulsive self-interest to socialized mind, self-authoring and self-transforming mind. So Bob, it's a real pleasure to speak with you. Same, David. For our audience, we've done a recent couple of films that were quite popular with Ken Wilber, introducing the concept of developmental theory. And your... You teach developmental theory at Harvard and are known as one of the most reputed figures in the field. Why is developmental theory important? In a way, developmental theory is just... Helping us to better understand our fullest possibilities. So, you know, a caterpillar is not meant to die as a caterpillar. destiny to grow wings and fly. Developmental theory is just part of a bigger mission to encourage the greater realization of human potential. Fewer and fewer of our brothers and sisters die as caterpillars and more of us become butterflies. Could you briefly outline your model and how it differs from other models? I mean people might be familiar with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs where at the bottom we have sustenance and at the top we have self-actualization. I guess that was the most sort of, that was probably the one that made developmental thinking popular in the 70s. And people might be familiar with Ken Wilber's model. model as well. What are the stages in your model? Does it map onto those at all? Well, maybe in different ways. My theory is often referred to as a constructive developmental theory, which means that it kind of brings together two very powerful ideas. The first is constructivism, the notion that reality doesn't just sort of happen up to us pre-formed. One of the things we do as human beings is give shape to raw. experience and make it into something meaningful for us. And that idea of constructivism runs through many, many different psychological and philosophical orientations. Then another very, very big idea is the notion of developmentalism. That is that living organisms and systems, including human beings, don't just grow in the sense of getting bigger and bigger. we evolve, become more complex. I mean, when a baby is born, when you were born, David, your head was a third the size of your body, just like every other infant. But as we grow, you know, I don't become, you know, six foot and have a two foot head, right? So there's a way in which we grow through stages that kind of form and reform. form. Now if you take the idea of constructivism, the notion that we're making meaning of things, and the notion of developmentalism and put them together, you begin to get this idea that the very way in which we construct reality itself transforms across different stages. So there are, in other words, different logics that gradually develop over time, if you will, or we call them psychologics, because we're talking about kind of the essence of psychology. and that growing in our meaning making or even in our wisdom is not about just knowing more and more through a given logic, but actually having the underlying logic itself become more and more complex in a way, to borrow a phrase from my friend Ken Wilber, that transcends but includes the prior logic. So... Ken, I think, is one of the great synthetic thinkers on the planet, and he brings together a whole lot of different wisdom traditions, and in Western academia it would be more lines of research. I think one of the most useful of his heuristics is that kind of four box model that kind of underlies the notion of taking a more integrated or holistic perspective on any phenomenon and those four boxes. which I'm sure many of those looking at this are familiar with, but just in case they're not, is just think about the difference between the individual level and the collective level, and then think about the difference between the interior and the exterior. gives you these four boxes. Now, if you zoom in on one of those quadrants, thinking about the interior development of the individual, that's the box in which I spent the first part of my professional life working largely as a theorist to better understand the gradual evolutions of interior individual development, standing initially on the shoulders of Jean-Pierre the Swiss psychologist who was the first to kind of elucidate stages of child development and in particular the ways that children organize the physical world and kind of their cognition. And my work has been to widen the aperture from cognition to the ways in which we organize. all the primary quadrants of personality, how we think, yes, but also how we feel, how we construct our social relations with others, and how we construct our interior relationships to parts of ourselves. And so my theory kind of opened the aperture beyond just cognition and then extended the study beyond. children and adolescents, which is kind of where Piaget ended, to sort of consider the question, you know, is there life after adolescence and can we actually continue to grow psychologically even when we've reached our... full height physically. I mean, literally when I started graduate school at Harvard in the 1970s, if you were a developmental psychologist, it meant you studied infants, children, or adolescents. End of story. Because that was the period, the first 20 years of life, let's say, when we believed psychological development actually occurred. We had yoked our notions of physical development to psychological development, and just as most of us reach our full physical stature, let's say in our 20s, early 20s, it was believed that that was kind of the end state for the development of the brain even. And brain scientists were very adamant. you know, what are we talking about, 40 years ago now maybe, that there were no further qualitative transformations in brain material after about the first 20 years of life. And our research and my colleagues and I basically never felt that seemed very sensible. I mean just by common sense you live among adults and you see that some people seem to be kind of making meaning and qualitative qualitative perceiving the world at a greater depth than others. And so we began to kind of explore all that. And today, you know, and I have many friends who are, you know, quote, hard scientists, neuroscientists, and, you know, today they have recanted that kind of constricted dogma. And I'll talk now about the phenomenal neuroplasticity of the brains, kind of one of the few instances in which the soft scientists, you know, psychologists were actually maybe a bit out ahead of the hard scientists. That's Norman Doidge, for example, the brain that changes itself and the idea of neuroplasticity. Yeah, yeah. Thinking fast, thinking slow, Kahneman. I mean, I think all of neuroscience has recanted the notion that, you know, the brain is basically done in terms of its development. I mean, even then, of course, people probably would grant this notion that some people seem to be wiser than others, but they... They attributed that largely to the fact that some people were getting more out of the same equipment than other people, and that experience, of course, matters. Some people are wiser not because they're actually making sense of the world with an upgraded system, but rather that they're just learning how to get more out of the same system. I think what we've come to show is the system. itself, which we have long understood. Those through qualitative transformations in childhood and adolescence has the potential to continue transforming on into our 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and beyond. Could you outline what the basic distinctions are in the model? I'm aware of some of the terms. You talk about the socialized mind and the self-authoring mind, for example. Could you outline what those are and what those mean? Sure. So I'll give you a... concrete example since these things are often like pictures worth a thousand words. I was talking with a social worker the other day who works with adolescents who have come out of the court system and who have committed crimes and so on. She was talking about a young man, maybe 16, 17 years old, who had a record of auto theft. She'd been working you know, with him. And she told me about a session she had with him where he came to her and said, you know, you'd be proud of me because I do still, I know I shouldn't, but I still do hang out with a number of rough friends who could easily get me in trouble. And, you know, just this weekend, I was hanging out with them and they wanted me to join them in stealing a car. And ordinarily, you know, I might've just gone along with that. And because of our work together, you know, I didn't. She's like, I'm really glad to hear about that, you know, so tell me a little bit more. He said, well, you know, they wanted me to steal this car. And I was going to, and I stopped, and I thought to myself, if I steal this car, there's a very good chance we're going to get caught. If I get caught, because I'm on probation, unlike these other friends, you know, they're going to get let off. I'm going to go back to jail. And she said that she said, well, you know, I'm moving. I'm really glad, Bernard, that you didn't steal the car. But I have to be honest and say that I wish the reason you'd chosen not to steal the car was not just... that if you did, you might go to jail, but because you gave some thought to kind of how that person would feel and the fact that it's his car, it's not your car, and he would naturally feel bad. And she said, he just looked right at me and he said... Yes, but I'm not there yet. And she sat back and she thought, you know, that was a beautiful answer, that he was being absolutely truthful, and that her hope for him was a little further ahead of kind of where he was. And, you know, she was kind of telling a story on herself, kind of saying how, you know, you can learn from your clients, even from your 16-year-old clients. Now, when he said, I'm not quite there yet, from a developmentalist point of view, I was like, okay, I'm not quite there yet. we would also feel like he was telling a very important truth. What he was saying was, just give me credit for the fact that I didn't steal the car. My underlying logic is still about what's kind of in my best interest. And the reason I didn't steal it was because I had at least enough foresight to consider that I could get caught and I could get sent to jail. That is itself a given stage of development. It is the stage that comes before the socialized mind. What she was hoping for was... a qualitatively different stage where people live not only to pursue their own interests and kind of look at others as sort of opportunities to get their own needs met or obstacles to getting their needs met, but where you actually begin to internalize something of the values and beliefs of others around you. It starts with your society as that might get conveyed through your immediate family. your faith community, others beyond it. And eventually, there's the possibility that I start relating to others, family members, friends, society, not just in terms of getting my own needs met, but where I actually become more a part of society because society has become more a part of me. I begin to internalize the values, beliefs, and expectations of important people around me. We call that the socialized mind because... you begin to develop the internal psychology that permits socialization, that permits you to become a member of a tribe, that permits you to become a part of a community of interest larger than one, larger than your own self-interest, where you will be able to actually subordinate some of your maybe short-term interests on behalf of enhancing the relationship. And when that stage evolves, typically in adolescence, It is a cause for relief and celebration on the part of parents and the community at large who live with this adolescent. It enables employers of fast food businesses who want to hire teenagers to feel they can hire a person who's begun to make that transition because they become trustworthy. You can kind of count on them. They may be able to keep their agreements, not just because they'll get into trouble if they don't. but because they want you to continue to trust them and to respect them and so on. And in very traditional societies, which for the most part don't exist anymore on our planet, where you could live your whole life within a relatively contained ecological niche, and where there was a single definition of how one should live, and what it means to be an elder, or what it means to be a man or a woman in this tribe. The socialized mind might have been completely adequate to the rest of one's life, but in a modern, increasingly post-modern world, where we have so many different definitions of how one should live and who one should be, where there are increasing demands from all quarters for us to resolve complex problems, Where there's not a single unified set of expectations for us to align ourselves with, the socialized mind becomes inadequate to the task. What does it take to not just accommodate yourself to what is expected and to be shaped by the environment, but to begin to create an internal authority? An internal compass, an internal way that becomes a filter through which you evaluate the many claims on your attention and on your values. Where you look at the expectations as they come in from your society, from your employer, from your intimate partner. And you say, you hopefully say, I respect that, that that's your expectation. But I... I also entitle myself to make a certain judgment as to whether I want to meet that expectation exactly like that. All of that, the ability to do those things, which is increasingly required almost of any of us now in this complex world in adulthood, requires a qualitatively different stage than the socialized mind, as valuable as that evolution was in adolescence. It requires the ability not just to be written upon, by your surround, by your culture, to be authored by your culture, but to sort of pick up that psychological pen yourself and to author your own identity, your own set of beliefs. And that authoring makes you then more of a personal authority. And that's why we call that the self-authoring stage. And that transformation... the gradual transformation from the socialized mind, where you are a good member of the tribe, so to speak, to the self-authoring mind, where you remain, obviously, a member of your community, but you're able to almost interrogate a bit its own rules and expectations, and maybe act on them. And that is your way, actually, through your own development. of enhancing the culture and the surround in which you live. Instead of just imbibing it and sort of taking it in, you now have the ability to step back a bit from these expectations and sort of make judgments about them. This is a tremendously empowering and inspiring move as you come into your own voice. But before you confidently move into the self-authoring stage, as with any transition, there is... Often a lot of terror and anticipated loss. And if I object to the existing social and interpersonal arrangements that I've long been kind of contracting to, what will be the results? Will you still love me? Will I be put out of my society? These are all the questions that come up at the beginning of this transition. Gradual transformation, which typically doesn't begin until the 20s and may not begin for someone until their 40s or may not ever occur for them, is the most dynamic and gradual transformation in adult development. The move from the socialized to the self-authoring mind. But, and I'll try to say this quickly because I know I'm going on for a long time, it's not the final stage of development to put together your own internal authority. There can come a time in your own evolution where you come to recognize that as powerful as your own inner compass enables you to be, that inevitably your system for making meaning with which you've become identified has limitations, has blindsides, leaves something out, privileges something and disadvantages something else. And as you come to see those limits, you have the potential now to again step away from something you have been completely embedded in. That is the gradual move of development, that you move from being subject to a way of making meaning. to be able to step back from it and turn that into object. So you can now look at it, be in some relationship to it, and you begin to construct a new subjectivity, one which, in the Wilburian phrase, transcends but includes the prior way of knowing. And that, in the present instance that we're discussing, this ability to actually step back. from your own inner system, begins a new voyage, a new transitional journey that can lead to a qualitatively more encompassing system, what we call the self-transforming mind. So instead of being just identified with the particular form you have created, you can now kind of see yourself as a self that creates forms, that can move from one form to another, that can hold you to a higher level of self-realization. multiple forms together. It enables you to not just be a faithful abider of the law and someone who stands within this impressive system of law that guarantees rights to given individuals, even if I don't know you and I'm not related to you by blood and so on, which is what the fourth order is able to do, starts constructing these institutions that are sort of outward reflections. reflections of the internal institution that you have constructed. But in this next transition, you can actually step back and say, it's great that we have this legal system, but just like my own internal system, that legal system is always imperfect. We might discover one day, oh my goodness, why don't we let women vote? And we kind of see that up until now, we've kind of excluded a certain group. Then we have the opportunity to act upon that system. and reconstruct it. So you have meta structures like within the US system, pardon the parochialism, we have like a Supreme Court, you know many democracies have that Supreme Court actually is an expression of the ability to say that it's important to sustain a system but it's also important to have a position to reflect on that system and see when it has limitations. So you actually have to reconstruct. construct those laws. Well, I'm just using that as almost an analogy on the political front, is what is happening psychologically, where you can still honor your form, but you have a certain humility that recognizes it has limitations. So those are the three qualitatively different stages of development in adulthood. The socialized mind, being a good member of the tribe, to the self-authoring mind, where you begin to construct some of the terms by which... you are going to be a member of a tribe or of a relationship. It's not like relationships are not important to you anymore, but instead of being utterly shaped by them, you begin to bring certain criteria to them about how you want your relationships to be, the self-authoring mind, and then the possibility of actually being able to interrogate now not just the expectations and rules of the society, but to interrogate your own internal system, which brings into being this. third qualitative way of knowing or filter on the world that we call the self-transforming mind. That's a quick summary of 30 years of research, David. And obviously Ken's model, for people who are familiar with it, takes these, it uses stages of development, but then applies them to society at large. That's right. Is your model useful for understanding the tensions in society at large? I think it's very useful for understanding tensions in society. at large but not necessarily in the way that Ken does it which Tends to say look there are probably evolutionary patterns of development that can be brought to the collective level. I'm not saying that isn't an interesting idea, but it is not the only way to think at the level of society and so on from... this kind of developmental perspective. I think you can make a claim that this gradual move from the socialized mind to the self-authoring mind, which is the biggest, I mean, numerically, the most populous kind of place in the transition, where we see people are at, that you can see that enacting itself at global levels as well. So, you know, we're living in an age where almost... in any direction you would look on the planet, where we see both at once the inspiring empowerment and liberation from the socialized mind, where various kinds of groups enable that transformation. That's kind of the happiest side of that big evolution, where you start feeling empowered and find... find your voice and kind of move more to the self-authoring side. As those trends become more and more influential across the world, they become also more and more threatening to people who are more firmly embedded in the socialized mind and who feel that your interrogation of our social arrangements are an ultimate threat to my identity, to my fundamentalism. And those threats essentially constitute a trigger. So the emancipatory aspects of a general support, a wider support worldwide for people's self-authorship will inevitably have a shadowy kind of backlash dimension to it where you don't just have that 16-year-old juvenile delinquent saying, I'm not. there yet. But you have a whole community of people who are triggered, who feel violated by your declaration that it would be okay for people of the same sex to form a union and be sexual partners, or that it would be okay to reinterpret the literal nature of my holy book to even claim, no, you are still... a Jew or you are still a participant of the Islamic faith, but you have a different construction of what that faith might be. So what you also have happening in the world is people saying in their own way, I'm not there yet. But instead of saying it in this way that that young man did, they may say, say it in a way that leads them to kill other people. They may feel like they have to strike out, even at the risk of blowing themselves up in terrorist activities, because they're essentially triggered. by the ultimate threats to their own way of making meaning, that these same emancipatory processes are enabling other people to come into a fuller realization of their voices. So that's just to show you a little bit the way you can take individual developmental theory and use it to speak to what's going on in the bigger world. And one of the things that I've found is that there's a lot of people who are One of the things that Ken said in the interview with us that he did was that because developmental theory implicitly involves hierarchies of cognition or hierarchies of development, there was a real move against it in the 1960s. I think what he said was the developmentalists circled the wagons at Harvard. He mentioned your name and a few other people. Is that true? Has that changed in any way? There's still a kind of taboo. boo around this idea of hierarchies? First I think that the trigger or the alert that goes up when anyone is faced with a hierarchy is something that ought to be respected. Because anytime somebody seems to be suggesting that something is better than something else, it's a smart question to say, on what basis are you making this claim? And underneath that question is probably a not totally unfounded suspicion that whoever's making that claim is going to benefit from the hierarchy they've created. That whoever's making that claim feels like they're somewhere near the top of that hierarchy. So you know I teach this stuff over and over again to students who may be coming to it for the first time and you ask you know is this is this kind of response you know diminishing? No, I mean it comes up every single time I'll teach this class. And it comes up because, you know, my students are often people who have moved to a place of a kind of greater respect for for difference and who have come maybe to recognize their own tendency towards judgmentalism and who are privileging their own kind of progressive or more liberal spirit that we shouldn't be saying that one thing is better than another. I very much enjoy welcoming in the forms of discomfort and provocation that a hierarchical system presents to people and I encourage them to ask themselves. you know, on what basis is this hierarchy constructed, and is it privileging and advantaging somebody like if it's constructed by a white guy from the Western world who's not poor, you know, is it basically advantaging that? But the best way that we get at this is by showing people that they hold a hierarchic theory themselves. The hierarchic theory doesn't come from me. It doesn't come from Ken, and it doesn't come from developmental theory. I can I can show people a piece of film of somebody talking and you begin to get a sense of how they're constructing the world. And I can ask them, you know, if this person were to undergo a transformative process, if they were to have a valuable therapy experience, or life itself were to be a great teacher for them, can you imagine some other way that they might construct experience that you would consider is not just a different way, but you would actually say you think that that way of constructing is actually more adequate, that it's not just a matter of how you think about it, it has a better grasp on reality, that it would make them a better parent in relationship to their child for them to have made that kind of move. I never get any resistance to that question. People can say, oh, well, yes, I think if she were less concerned with what other people thought about her all the time, she would actually be happier herself. She'd probably be a better mother as well. Right now she's being led around by her own daughter because she fears her daughter's disapproval. of her. She feels like if she doesn't answer certain questions she's being impermissibly secretive instead of being appropriately private and having a notion of boundaries and there's some things you just don't tell your kid. People become very very eloquent in expressing what they think would be a better way of handling the given dilemma that they can see in that piece of film. And after they've done that I tell them wow you're pretty judgmental people as it turns out. You think that this other way is not just different but actually better? "They say, yes, they think it's okay. Which one of us has a hierarchy? The reality is that no adult feels at all provoked by the notion that A ten-year-old who realizes they're never going to get older than their older brother, that they're not going to change gender, that when they move in one direction and someone else moves in the other direction, you know, the moon can't follow us both. These are all things that... four-year-olds believe. There's nobody who feels that the ten-year-old doesn't have a clear grasp of reality when they begin to distinguish between fantasy and reality as every child does between the ages of four. intent. People are completely at ease with hierarchic notions of how we construct reality when they're talking about children. But when you start introducing those same ideas into the realm of adulthood, it is understandably provocative. But it's important for people to see... And especially in academia? Why was there such a resistance against it in academia? I don't think it's in academia alone. I think it's in any community of reflection and all that. These are ideas and things that got started in academia, so they get most explored there, because where else do you have the privilege of actually putting these big ideas on a table and having people spend 12 weeks in a semester thinking about them? You know, if I were to go into, I spend a lot of my life outside of academia. I spend it in organizations that are trying to, you know, meet their goals. Whether they're businesses or governmental agencies or, you know, in the social sector or whatever. And they know that they can do better and they want help. And I could go in there and say, you know, part of the difficulties here are that, you know, basically, you know... What you really need are more and more self-authoring employees. That's really what you're asking for. People step up, exercise responsibility, not just be looking around all the time for someone to give them orders. What you really want is more self-authorship. And I could lay out these developmental theories and there would be the same forms of discomfort. Wait a minute, you're grading us now? I'm fine with the Myers-Briggs that somebody's an introvert, somebody's an extrovert. Nobody's saying the extrovert's better than the introvert. They're just saying their differences. I'm fine with that. You want to bring that kind of psychology into my organization? Fine. I'm fine with the Enneagram. I'm fine knowing this guy's more of a peacemaker. This person's more of a something else. Because no one's saying the peacemaker's any better than anybody else. But what you're saying is that actually it would be better to do this. Okay. So if I brought all that in explicitly into organizations as a way that I would begin to work in organizations, I would run into the same forms of discomfort. Because, you know, there's a lot of moral relativism that is strongly, you know, possessed by lots of people who basically are uncomfortable with the notion that some things are actually better than others. And in these sort of developmental communities, there's often this kind of tendency to it become a kind of development, developmental one-upmanship kind of thing. I'm more developed than you, or well, I'm more integral than you, or whatever. Yeah, exactly. How do we avoid that? I mean, it's tiring if you spend any time around it. Yeah, and that's the problem, people. What's happening is a given developmental position is sort of cannibalizing or taking over the developmental perspective. You know, if you're in this kind of like achievement-oriented thing, show me a ladder and I'm going to climb to the highest rung as quickly as I possibly can, then, you know, any kind of model, You know, it's quickly going to turn into a new commodity. Instead of, I want to be rich, I want to be famous, no, I want to be at a high stage of development. Okay, it's basically the same kind of thing. You know, I talk to, you know, Zen masters and Roshis and, you know, people who have spent their lives in, you know, monasteries. You know, and they run into the same thing. I get Westerners who, they want to be enlightened or even, you know. It becomes a new commodity. How fast will it take and how much will it cost? Or, okay, I don't even need to be enlightened. I just want to practice these wisdom traditions so that I have less stress and I'm a more effective executive. And they have to deal with the same thing. Like, you're turning what I'm offering you into a means to some other end, which actually does violence to, you know, what the whole framework is about. We started studying development because of the extraordinary joy and wonder of engaging the miracle of being alive and the difference between being a human being and the chair that you're sitting on is that you have the potential. Whether you want to call it you know the underlying spirit like Hegel did that the spirit is never at rest it's always working to give itself a new form. You have this spirit, you know, within you, and I do too, and collectively we do, that gives us the possibility, like the caterpillar and the butterfly, to actually transform. And the whole intention of developmental theory was not to create a new ladder that one wants to climb to the top of as quickly as they can, and turn development into as joyless a ride as... The ride of trying to acquire whoever has the most things wins. The whole idea was to actually consider the reality that we don't, all of us, come to experience the fullest possibility of being alive. If we're dying as caterpillars, there's a whole dimension of life experience that is possible for us. that we're not having the chance to realize. And that turns us then, I mean, to me, one of the greatest glories of my mission in life. One of my greatest satisfactions is to invite people who have leadership responsibilities and opportunities, whether within the small context of some team they lead with a few direct reports or the leaders of a hundred thousand person organization. for them to conceive that their opportunities as leaders includes the opportunity to help their people develop for their own benefit and for the benefit of the organization and to kind of convert leadership into a form of developmental facilitation. How can you make the water better for people to grow? That to me is kind of the highest use of developmental theory. Help me better understand you, where you are right now, but not assume that this is where you will always be. And for me to think about what are the moves I can make that could make an environment one that will make it more likely you have the opportunity. to realize your fullest destiny. That, to me, is very inspiring. When we start turning it into some kind of a grading system and putting people in boxes, we've turned it into something else. But this is one of the humilities. I'm in my 70s now. I've been doing this for a long, long time. And one of the things you realize is you put ideas out into the world. You do not have control. It's not like you can sue for the misuse of intellect. intellectual property. The reality is you don't have control over how that material will be used. You can't go around hoping it will never be used for ill. It is going to be. You just have to hope that it's much more often used for the inspiring purposes that you intended. You mentioned Jean Piaget at the beginning. He's become quite well known through Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson quotes him as a as a key influence on his thinking. What do you make of, have you been following the Jordan Peterson phenomenon? What do you make of... No, tell me, to teach me, what is the Jordan Peterson phenomenon? Well, one thing that he says in particular about Piaget was that Piaget's ultimate aim, he talked about, he looked at kind of how children develop and the development of morality among children, but his ultimate aim was about trying to tie together science and religion and find an explanation for an emergent understanding of morality. morality and tie together the worlds of science and religion. Do you resonate with that as an explanation for what Piaget was doing and how does that relate to your work? Well, first of all, it sounds like something interesting I should try to learn more about. And I'm not entirely sure that the most fruitful way of exploring this is just what Piaget's intentions were, but Piaget was a... A 12-year-old prodigy who, at the age of 12, published something in a scientific journal that had to do with his fascination with mollusks. the ways in which they evolved. He started getting letters from scholars who thought he was an adult who wanted to visit him because they were going to be in his village or something and he had to figure out ways to not meet with them so they wouldn't discover that he was 12 years old. I guarantee you at 12 years old Piaget had no notions about bringing science and religion together. The initial passion and curiosity was with the ways in which living organisms transformed. transform and it went from mollusks to children and basically spent a lot of time asking children about their conceptions of the physical world and coming to see that these enduring features around space, time, causality and objects in the world is not something that's just given. Recognizing the if-then relationship is something that takes six or seven years of living before you have a mental system that's complex enough. to be able to connect two points in time or space. That was the main work that Piaget did. Now it's true that in the latter part of his career he started looking not just at the way children constructed the physical world but the way in which they constructed the social world and he began a field which we now call moral development. I think the greatest contributor... To that particular field, and when it was much more grounded in philosophy and the relationship between philosophy and science, and the whole relationship between the is and the ought, which is a lively conversation in philosophy, was not Piaget. It was L'Oreal. Lawrence Kohlberg. Lawrence Kohlberg, American psychologist, who ultimately ended up at Harvard, is really, to my mind, the true father of bringing this particular paradigm to the study of psychology. of moral development and himself extending it beyond just the development of children into adolescents and adults. I would say that Jordan would be better off looking at Kohlberg's work than Piaget if he's interested in these efforts to bridge gaps between science and religion. And last question, and this is the kind of 64 million dollar question. We've talked about stages of development. We've talked about development per se. How do we develop? How do we move up these stages of development? If we could live infinitely, we would all develop. We would all develop in these directions because although we'd run into all kinds of experiences which were not supportive to our development, we would eventually run into the happy accident of the convergence of those features that are most conducive to development. And so essentially what education is about from a developmental perspective is, whether it's formal education or any kind of intention to educate, to train, to develop, whatever you want to call it, it's about essentially creating, bringing together as many of those conditions as you can for someone so that you create a very, very fertile space that wouldn't just spontaneously create itself. So what does that fertile space look like? look like. First of all, it's psychologically safe enough that I can withstand some of the discomforts that will inevitably be a part of an invitation to leave my comfort zone, leave my familiar way of making sense. So I need sufficient forms of support to kind of help me with what is actually going to be a very difficult thing, which is to ultimately consider that the problem I'm running into. is not about the world, it's about me. That some way I need to grow. I'm somehow running up against my own limitations. This is the extent to which learning, which is so widely and superficially celebrated in the world, is not fully enough honored for the true difficulty of its nature. A person who is willing to put themselves in a learning mode is someone who is willing to say something which Which is, to go back to your earlier question, kind of the fundament of the religious experience. Martin Luther, there's something limited about me as I now stand. I need something more. So learning is putting yourself in a position where you're acknowledging, at some level, I'm inadequate. I'm not fully done. And there can be something extraordinarily empowering, inspiring, uplifting about getting fuller, becoming more adequate. But initially... It has to do with acknowledging I'm not as enough as I want to be. That's a very difficult kind of thing and it requires a form of support. But the other dimension is what is it that curates these experiences that I need to learn, I need to grow. So you need forms of challenge. You need experiences that run you into the limitations of your current way of making sense. You need good problems you don't seek to solve too quickly because when you solve a problem quickly you're the same person coming out of it as you were going through it. going into it. You need problems that you can build a relationship to so that you are using these problems to solve you more than you trying to solve these problems. So you need good problems to grow on, the challenges that will provoke you, that will create the desires in you to actually become a bigger version of yourself. And you then need the support that enable you to withstand the discomfort of all of this. The part of you that wants to say, I'm going to just pull back and just kind of stay. back here in my comfort zone. Those are the fundamental kind of conditions. That's the $64 million question. The $128 million question is why are humans developing? Why are we doing this? And I want to just give you a quick glimpse of this here before we conclude. Because it's important for people to recognize that we are the only species on the planet living as long as we are beyond the years of fertility and reproduction. Most organisms finish their fundamental job of replacing themselves and then they perish. We're living a whole generation now beyond the years of fertility. And this is something which humans have only recently come to do. We are today living, you know, most people died through most of human history in their 30s and 40s. and 50s and today we're living a whole additional generation. And that provokes the question, why is this happening? And the glib answer is advances in medical science and reductions in poverty are helping us fight the things that tend to truncate our lives and so that's why we live longer. But that's a kind of a thin technical answer to a much bigger question, which is not what are the means by which it's happening, but why is it happening? And that's what we're looking in. In the Western world where we have all this valorizing of individual autonomy, if you feel satisfied by an answer that says this species-wide manifestation is just the consequence of a bunch of individual random choices, I'll leave you to that explanation. But I want to suggest a different one, which is when a whole species is collectively doing something, you should pay attention to it. And generally, why does any species do? anything collectively but then to survive, to succeed kind of evolutionarily, to maintain itself. And we are a species that is conscious of itself and we are living in a world which any person with their eyes open would have to say yes is a race to the top. There are all kinds of extraordinary expressions of human spirit and imagination and generosity but we are also living in a race to the bottom and there are all kinds of threats that are hanging over us that could you know wipe us out and we know from developmental theory that the higher state of development the self transforming mind this ability to actually stand back even you know from our own internal systems is a potential way of handling the most lethal features of being a human being, these sovereignties of mind and state. So what if the fundamental reason that we're developing and staying alive so much longer than we ever did before is to create more of that order of consciousness that will enable us to save ourselves? What if collectively we are... living longer in order to solve the biggest problem of our survival that we face today. Wonderful place to end. Robert, thank you. My pleasure, Dave.

So Bob, it's a real pleasure to speak with you. Same, David. For our audience, we've done a recent couple of films that were quite popular with Ken Wilber, introducing the concept of developmental theory.

And your... You teach developmental theory at Harvard and are known as one of the most reputed figures in the field. Why is developmental theory important? In a way, developmental theory is just...

Helping us to better understand our fullest possibilities. So, you know, a caterpillar is not meant to die as a caterpillar. destiny to grow wings and fly.

Developmental theory is just part of a bigger mission to encourage the greater realization of human potential. Fewer and fewer of our brothers and sisters die as caterpillars and more of us become butterflies. Could you briefly outline your model and how it differs from other models?

I mean people might be familiar with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs where at the bottom we have sustenance and at the top we have self-actualization. I guess that was the most sort of, that was probably the one that made developmental thinking popular in the 70s. And people might be familiar with Ken Wilber's model.

model as well. What are the stages in your model? Does it map onto those at all? Well, maybe in different ways.

My theory is often referred to as a constructive developmental theory, which means that it kind of brings together two very powerful ideas. The first is constructivism, the notion that reality doesn't just sort of happen up to us pre-formed. One of the things we do as human beings is give shape to raw.

experience and make it into something meaningful for us. And that idea of constructivism runs through many, many different psychological and philosophical orientations. Then another very, very big idea is the notion of developmentalism.

That is that living organisms and systems, including human beings, don't just grow in the sense of getting bigger and bigger. we evolve, become more complex. I mean, when a baby is born, when you were born, David, your head was a third the size of your body, just like every other infant. But as we grow, you know, I don't become, you know, six foot and have a two foot head, right? So there's a way in which we grow through stages that kind of form and reform.

form. Now if you take the idea of constructivism, the notion that we're making meaning of things, and the notion of developmentalism and put them together, you begin to get this idea that the very way in which we construct reality itself transforms across different stages. So there are, in other words, different logics that gradually develop over time, if you will, or we call them psychologics, because we're talking about kind of the essence of psychology. and that growing in our meaning making or even in our wisdom is not about just knowing more and more through a given logic, but actually having the underlying logic itself become more and more complex in a way, to borrow a phrase from my friend Ken Wilber, that transcends but includes the prior logic. So...

Ken, I think, is one of the great synthetic thinkers on the planet, and he brings together a whole lot of different wisdom traditions, and in Western academia it would be more lines of research. I think one of the most useful of his heuristics is that kind of four box model that kind of underlies the notion of taking a more integrated or holistic perspective on any phenomenon and those four boxes. which I'm sure many of those looking at this are familiar with, but just in case they're not, is just think about the difference between the individual level and the collective level, and then think about the difference between the interior and the exterior.

gives you these four boxes. Now, if you zoom in on one of those quadrants, thinking about the interior development of the individual, that's the box in which I spent the first part of my professional life working largely as a theorist to better understand the gradual evolutions of interior individual development, standing initially on the shoulders of Jean-Pierre the Swiss psychologist who was the first to kind of elucidate stages of child development and in particular the ways that children organize the physical world and kind of their cognition. And my work has been to widen the aperture from cognition to the ways in which we organize. all the primary quadrants of personality, how we think, yes, but also how we feel, how we construct our social relations with others, and how we construct our interior relationships to parts of ourselves.

And so my theory kind of opened the aperture beyond just cognition and then extended the study beyond. children and adolescents, which is kind of where Piaget ended, to sort of consider the question, you know, is there life after adolescence and can we actually continue to grow psychologically even when we've reached our... full height physically. I mean, literally when I started graduate school at Harvard in the 1970s, if you were a developmental psychologist, it meant you studied infants, children, or adolescents. End of story.

Because that was the period, the first 20 years of life, let's say, when we believed psychological development actually occurred. We had yoked our notions of physical development to psychological development, and just as most of us reach our full physical stature, let's say in our 20s, early 20s, it was believed that that was kind of the end state for the development of the brain even. And brain scientists were very adamant. you know, what are we talking about, 40 years ago now maybe, that there were no further qualitative transformations in brain material after about the first 20 years of life. And our research and my colleagues and I basically never felt that seemed very sensible.

I mean just by common sense you live among adults and you see that some people seem to be kind of making meaning and qualitative qualitative perceiving the world at a greater depth than others. And so we began to kind of explore all that. And today, you know, and I have many friends who are, you know, quote, hard scientists, neuroscientists, and, you know, today they have recanted that kind of constricted dogma. And I'll talk now about the phenomenal neuroplasticity of the brains, kind of one of the few instances in which the soft scientists, you know, psychologists were actually maybe a bit out ahead of the hard scientists. That's Norman Doidge, for example, the brain that changes itself and the idea of neuroplasticity.

Yeah, yeah. Thinking fast, thinking slow, Kahneman. I mean, I think all of neuroscience has recanted the notion that, you know, the brain is basically done in terms of its development. I mean, even then, of course, people probably would grant this notion that some people seem to be wiser than others, but they...

They attributed that largely to the fact that some people were getting more out of the same equipment than other people, and that experience, of course, matters. Some people are wiser not because they're actually making sense of the world with an upgraded system, but rather that they're just learning how to get more out of the same system. I think what we've come to show is the system. itself, which we have long understood.

Those through qualitative transformations in childhood and adolescence has the potential to continue transforming on into our 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and beyond. Could you outline what the basic distinctions are in the model? I'm aware of some of the terms. You talk about the socialized mind and the self-authoring mind, for example. Could you outline what those are and what those mean?

Sure. So I'll give you a... concrete example since these things are often like pictures worth a thousand words. I was talking with a social worker the other day who works with adolescents who have come out of the court system and who have committed crimes and so on. She was talking about a young man, maybe 16, 17 years old, who had a record of auto theft.

She'd been working you know, with him. And she told me about a session she had with him where he came to her and said, you know, you'd be proud of me because I do still, I know I shouldn't, but I still do hang out with a number of rough friends who could easily get me in trouble. And, you know, just this weekend, I was hanging out with them and they wanted me to join them in stealing a car. And ordinarily, you know, I might've just gone along with that. And because of our work together, you know, I didn't.

She's like, I'm really glad to hear about that, you know, so tell me a little bit more. He said, well, you know, they wanted me to steal this car. And I was going to, and I stopped, and I thought to myself, if I steal this car, there's a very good chance we're going to get caught.

If I get caught, because I'm on probation, unlike these other friends, you know, they're going to get let off. I'm going to go back to jail. And she said that she said, well, you know, I'm moving. I'm really glad, Bernard, that you didn't steal the car. But I have to be honest and say that I wish the reason you'd chosen not to steal the car was not just...

that if you did, you might go to jail, but because you gave some thought to kind of how that person would feel and the fact that it's his car, it's not your car, and he would naturally feel bad. And she said, he just looked right at me and he said... Yes, but I'm not there yet.

And she sat back and she thought, you know, that was a beautiful answer, that he was being absolutely truthful, and that her hope for him was a little further ahead of kind of where he was. And, you know, she was kind of telling a story on herself, kind of saying how, you know, you can learn from your clients, even from your 16-year-old clients. Now, when he said, I'm not quite there yet, from a developmentalist point of view, I was like, okay, I'm not quite there yet.

we would also feel like he was telling a very important truth. What he was saying was, just give me credit for the fact that I didn't steal the car. My underlying logic is still about what's kind of in my best interest.

And the reason I didn't steal it was because I had at least enough foresight to consider that I could get caught and I could get sent to jail. That is itself a given stage of development. It is the stage that comes before the socialized mind. What she was hoping for was...

a qualitatively different stage where people live not only to pursue their own interests and kind of look at others as sort of opportunities to get their own needs met or obstacles to getting their needs met, but where you actually begin to internalize something of the values and beliefs of others around you. It starts with your society as that might get conveyed through your immediate family. your faith community, others beyond it.

And eventually, there's the possibility that I start relating to others, family members, friends, society, not just in terms of getting my own needs met, but where I actually become more a part of society because society has become more a part of me. I begin to internalize the values, beliefs, and expectations of important people around me. We call that the socialized mind because... you begin to develop the internal psychology that permits socialization, that permits you to become a member of a tribe, that permits you to become a part of a community of interest larger than one, larger than your own self-interest, where you will be able to actually subordinate some of your maybe short-term interests on behalf of enhancing the relationship. And when that stage evolves, typically in adolescence, It is a cause for relief and celebration on the part of parents and the community at large who live with this adolescent.

It enables employers of fast food businesses who want to hire teenagers to feel they can hire a person who's begun to make that transition because they become trustworthy. You can kind of count on them. They may be able to keep their agreements, not just because they'll get into trouble if they don't.

but because they want you to continue to trust them and to respect them and so on. And in very traditional societies, which for the most part don't exist anymore on our planet, where you could live your whole life within a relatively contained ecological niche, and where there was a single definition of how one should live, and what it means to be an elder, or what it means to be a man or a woman in this tribe. The socialized mind might have been completely adequate to the rest of one's life, but in a modern, increasingly post-modern world, where we have so many different definitions of how one should live and who one should be, where there are increasing demands from all quarters for us to resolve complex problems, Where there's not a single unified set of expectations for us to align ourselves with, the socialized mind becomes inadequate to the task.

What does it take to not just accommodate yourself to what is expected and to be shaped by the environment, but to begin to create an internal authority? An internal compass, an internal way that becomes a filter through which you evaluate the many claims on your attention and on your values. Where you look at the expectations as they come in from your society, from your employer, from your intimate partner. And you say, you hopefully say, I respect that, that that's your expectation.

But I... I also entitle myself to make a certain judgment as to whether I want to meet that expectation exactly like that. All of that, the ability to do those things, which is increasingly required almost of any of us now in this complex world in adulthood, requires a qualitatively different stage than the socialized mind, as valuable as that evolution was in adolescence. It requires the ability not just to be written upon, by your surround, by your culture, to be authored by your culture, but to sort of pick up that psychological pen yourself and to author your own identity, your own set of beliefs. And that authoring makes you then more of a personal authority. And that's why we call that the self-authoring stage.

And that transformation... the gradual transformation from the socialized mind, where you are a good member of the tribe, so to speak, to the self-authoring mind, where you remain, obviously, a member of your community, but you're able to almost interrogate a bit its own rules and expectations, and maybe act on them. And that is your way, actually, through your own development.

of enhancing the culture and the surround in which you live. Instead of just imbibing it and sort of taking it in, you now have the ability to step back a bit from these expectations and sort of make judgments about them. This is a tremendously empowering and inspiring move as you come into your own voice.

But before you confidently move into the self-authoring stage, as with any transition, there is... Often a lot of terror and anticipated loss. And if I object to the existing social and interpersonal arrangements that I've long been kind of contracting to, what will be the results?

Will you still love me? Will I be put out of my society? These are all the questions that come up at the beginning of this transition.

Gradual transformation, which typically doesn't begin until the 20s and may not begin for someone until their 40s or may not ever occur for them, is the most dynamic and gradual transformation in adult development. The move from the socialized to the self-authoring mind. But, and I'll try to say this quickly because I know I'm going on for a long time, it's not the final stage of development to put together your own internal authority. There can come a time in your own evolution where you come to recognize that as powerful as your own inner compass enables you to be, that inevitably your system for making meaning with which you've become identified has limitations, has blindsides, leaves something out, privileges something and disadvantages something else. And as you come to see those limits, you have the potential now to again step away from something you have been completely embedded in.

That is the gradual move of development, that you move from being subject to a way of making meaning. to be able to step back from it and turn that into object. So you can now look at it, be in some relationship to it, and you begin to construct a new subjectivity, one which, in the Wilburian phrase, transcends but includes the prior way of knowing.

And that, in the present instance that we're discussing, this ability to actually step back. from your own inner system, begins a new voyage, a new transitional journey that can lead to a qualitatively more encompassing system, what we call the self-transforming mind. So instead of being just identified with the particular form you have created, you can now kind of see yourself as a self that creates forms, that can move from one form to another, that can hold you to a higher level of self-realization.

multiple forms together. It enables you to not just be a faithful abider of the law and someone who stands within this impressive system of law that guarantees rights to given individuals, even if I don't know you and I'm not related to you by blood and so on, which is what the fourth order is able to do, starts constructing these institutions that are sort of outward reflections. reflections of the internal institution that you have constructed. But in this next transition, you can actually step back and say, it's great that we have this legal system, but just like my own internal system, that legal system is always imperfect.

We might discover one day, oh my goodness, why don't we let women vote? And we kind of see that up until now, we've kind of excluded a certain group. Then we have the opportunity to act upon that system. and reconstruct it.

So you have meta structures like within the US system, pardon the parochialism, we have like a Supreme Court, you know many democracies have that Supreme Court actually is an expression of the ability to say that it's important to sustain a system but it's also important to have a position to reflect on that system and see when it has limitations. So you actually have to reconstruct. construct those laws. Well, I'm just using that as almost an analogy on the political front, is what is happening psychologically, where you can still honor your form, but you have a certain humility that recognizes it has limitations. So those are the three qualitatively different stages of development in adulthood.

The socialized mind, being a good member of the tribe, to the self-authoring mind, where you begin to construct some of the terms by which... you are going to be a member of a tribe or of a relationship. It's not like relationships are not important to you anymore, but instead of being utterly shaped by them, you begin to bring certain criteria to them about how you want your relationships to be, the self-authoring mind, and then the possibility of actually being able to interrogate now not just the expectations and rules of the society, but to interrogate your own internal system, which brings into being this.

third qualitative way of knowing or filter on the world that we call the self-transforming mind. That's a quick summary of 30 years of research, David. And obviously Ken's model, for people who are familiar with it, takes these, it uses stages of development, but then applies them to society at large. That's right.

Is your model useful for understanding the tensions in society at large? I think it's very useful for understanding tensions in society. at large but not necessarily in the way that Ken does it which Tends to say look there are probably evolutionary patterns of development that can be brought to the collective level.

I'm not saying that isn't an interesting idea, but it is not the only way to think at the level of society and so on from... this kind of developmental perspective. I think you can make a claim that this gradual move from the socialized mind to the self-authoring mind, which is the biggest, I mean, numerically, the most populous kind of place in the transition, where we see people are at, that you can see that enacting itself at global levels as well. So, you know, we're living in an age where almost...

in any direction you would look on the planet, where we see both at once the inspiring empowerment and liberation from the socialized mind, where various kinds of groups enable that transformation. That's kind of the happiest side of that big evolution, where you start feeling empowered and find... find your voice and kind of move more to the self-authoring side. As those trends become more and more influential across the world, they become also more and more threatening to people who are more firmly embedded in the socialized mind and who feel that your interrogation of our social arrangements are an ultimate threat to my identity, to my fundamentalism. And those threats essentially constitute a trigger.

So the emancipatory aspects of a general support, a wider support worldwide for people's self-authorship will inevitably have a shadowy kind of backlash dimension to it where you don't just have that 16-year-old juvenile delinquent saying, I'm not. there yet. But you have a whole community of people who are triggered, who feel violated by your declaration that it would be okay for people of the same sex to form a union and be sexual partners, or that it would be okay to reinterpret the literal nature of my holy book to even claim, no, you are still...

a Jew or you are still a participant of the Islamic faith, but you have a different construction of what that faith might be. So what you also have happening in the world is people saying in their own way, I'm not there yet. But instead of saying it in this way that that young man did, they may say, say it in a way that leads them to kill other people. They may feel like they have to strike out, even at the risk of blowing themselves up in terrorist activities, because they're essentially triggered. by the ultimate threats to their own way of making meaning, that these same emancipatory processes are enabling other people to come into a fuller realization of their voices.

So that's just to show you a little bit the way you can take individual developmental theory and use it to speak to what's going on in the bigger world. And one of the things that I've found is that there's a lot of people who are One of the things that Ken said in the interview with us that he did was that because developmental theory implicitly involves hierarchies of cognition or hierarchies of development, there was a real move against it in the 1960s. I think what he said was the developmentalists circled the wagons at Harvard. He mentioned your name and a few other people. Is that true?

Has that changed in any way? There's still a kind of taboo. boo around this idea of hierarchies?

First I think that the trigger or the alert that goes up when anyone is faced with a hierarchy is something that ought to be respected. Because anytime somebody seems to be suggesting that something is better than something else, it's a smart question to say, on what basis are you making this claim? And underneath that question is probably a not totally unfounded suspicion that whoever's making that claim is going to benefit from the hierarchy they've created. That whoever's making that claim feels like they're somewhere near the top of that hierarchy.

So you know I teach this stuff over and over again to students who may be coming to it for the first time and you ask you know is this is this kind of response you know diminishing? No, I mean it comes up every single time I'll teach this class. And it comes up because, you know, my students are often people who have moved to a place of a kind of greater respect for for difference and who have come maybe to recognize their own tendency towards judgmentalism and who are privileging their own kind of progressive or more liberal spirit that we shouldn't be saying that one thing is better than another. I very much enjoy welcoming in the forms of discomfort and provocation that a hierarchical system presents to people and I encourage them to ask themselves.

you know, on what basis is this hierarchy constructed, and is it privileging and advantaging somebody like if it's constructed by a white guy from the Western world who's not poor, you know, is it basically advantaging that? But the best way that we get at this is by showing people that they hold a hierarchic theory themselves. The hierarchic theory doesn't come from me.

It doesn't come from Ken, and it doesn't come from developmental theory. I can I can show people a piece of film of somebody talking and you begin to get a sense of how they're constructing the world. And I can ask them, you know, if this person were to undergo a transformative process, if they were to have a valuable therapy experience, or life itself were to be a great teacher for them, can you imagine some other way that they might construct experience that you would consider is not just a different way, but you would actually say you think that that way of constructing is actually more adequate, that it's not just a matter of how you think about it, it has a better grasp on reality, that it would make them a better parent in relationship to their child for them to have made that kind of move. I never get any resistance to that question.

People can say, oh, well, yes, I think if she were less concerned with what other people thought about her all the time, she would actually be happier herself. She'd probably be a better mother as well. Right now she's being led around by her own daughter because she fears her daughter's disapproval. of her.

She feels like if she doesn't answer certain questions she's being impermissibly secretive instead of being appropriately private and having a notion of boundaries and there's some things you just don't tell your kid. People become very very eloquent in expressing what they think would be a better way of handling the given dilemma that they can see in that piece of film. And after they've done that I tell them wow you're pretty judgmental people as it turns out. You think that this other way is not just different but actually better? "They say, yes, they think it's okay. Which one of us has a hierarchy? The reality is that no adult feels at all provoked by the notion that A ten-year-old who realizes they're never going to get older than their older brother, that they're not going to change gender, that when they move in one direction and someone else moves in the other direction, you know, the moon can't follow us both. These are all things that... four-year-olds believe. There's nobody who feels that the ten-year-old doesn't have a clear grasp of reality when they begin to distinguish between fantasy and reality as every child does between the ages of four. intent. People are completely at ease with hierarchic notions of how we construct reality when they're talking about children. But when you start introducing those same ideas into the realm of adulthood, it is understandably provocative. But it's important for people to see... And especially in academia? Why was there such a resistance against it in academia? I don't think it's in academia alone. I think it's in any community of reflection and all that. These are ideas and things that got started in academia, so they get most explored there, because where else do you have the privilege of actually putting these big ideas on a table and having people spend 12 weeks in a semester thinking about them? You know, if I were to go into, I spend a lot of my life outside of academia. I spend it in organizations that are trying to, you know, meet their goals. Whether they're businesses or governmental agencies or, you know, in the social sector or whatever. And they know that they can do better and they want help. And I could go in there and say, you know, part of the difficulties here are that, you know, basically, you know... What you really need are more and more self-authoring employees. That's really what you're asking for. People step up, exercise responsibility, not just be looking around all the time for someone to give them orders. What you really want is more self-authorship. And I could lay out these developmental theories and there would be the same forms of discomfort. Wait a minute, you're grading us now? I'm fine with the Myers-Briggs that somebody's an introvert, somebody's an extrovert. Nobody's saying the extrovert's better than the introvert. They're just saying their differences. I'm fine with that. You want to bring that kind of psychology into my organization? Fine. I'm fine with the Enneagram. I'm fine knowing this guy's more of a peacemaker. This person's more of a something else. Because no one's saying the peacemaker's any better than anybody else. But what you're saying is that actually it would be better to do this. Okay. So if I brought all that in explicitly into organizations as a way that I would begin to work in organizations, I would run into the same forms of discomfort. Because, you know, there's a lot of moral relativism that is strongly, you know, possessed by lots of people who basically are uncomfortable with the notion that some things are actually better than others. And in these sort of developmental communities, there's often this kind of tendency to it become a kind of development, developmental one-upmanship kind of thing. I'm more developed than you, or well, I'm more integral than you, or whatever. Yeah, exactly. How do we avoid that? I mean, it's tiring if you spend any time around it. Yeah, and that's the problem, people. What's happening is a given developmental position is sort of cannibalizing or taking over the developmental perspective. You know, if you're in this kind of like achievement-oriented thing, show me a ladder and I'm going to climb to the highest rung as quickly as I possibly can, then, you know, any kind of model, You know, it's quickly going to turn into a new commodity. Instead of, I want to be rich, I want to be famous, no, I want to be at a high stage of development. Okay, it's basically the same kind of thing. You know, I talk to, you know, Zen masters and Roshis and, you know, people who have spent their lives in, you know, monasteries. You know, and they run into the same thing. I get Westerners who, they want to be enlightened or even, you know. It becomes a new commodity. How fast will it take and how much will it cost? Or, okay, I don't even need to be enlightened. I just want to practice these wisdom traditions so that I have less stress and I'm a more effective executive. And they have to deal with the same thing. Like, you're turning what I'm offering you into a means to some other end, which actually does violence to, you know, what the whole framework is about. We started studying development because of the extraordinary joy and wonder of engaging the miracle of being alive and the difference between being a human being and the chair that you're sitting on is that you have the potential. Whether you want to call it you know the underlying spirit like Hegel did that the spirit is never at rest it's always working to give itself a new form. You have this spirit, you know, within you, and I do too, and collectively we do, that gives us the possibility, like the caterpillar and the butterfly, to actually transform. And the whole intention of developmental theory was not to create a new ladder that one wants to climb to the top of as quickly as they can, and turn development into as joyless a ride as... The ride of trying to acquire whoever has the most things wins. The whole idea was to actually consider the reality that we don't, all of us, come to experience the fullest possibility of being alive. If we're dying as caterpillars, there's a whole dimension of life experience that is possible for us. that we're not having the chance to realize. And that turns us then, I mean, to me, one of the greatest glories of my mission in life. One of my greatest satisfactions is to invite people who have leadership responsibilities and opportunities, whether within the small context of some team they lead with a few direct reports or the leaders of a hundred thousand person organization. for them to conceive that their opportunities as leaders includes the opportunity to help their people develop for their own benefit and for the benefit of the organization and to kind of convert leadership into a form of developmental facilitation. How can you make the water better for people to grow? That to me is kind of the highest use of developmental theory. Help me better understand you, where you are right now, but not assume that this is where you will always be. And for me to think about what are the moves I can make that could make an environment one that will make it more likely you have the opportunity. to realize your fullest destiny. That, to me, is very inspiring. When we start turning it into some kind of a grading system and putting people in boxes, we've turned it into something else. But this is one of the humilities. I'm in my 70s now. I've been doing this for a long, long time. And one of the things you realize is you put ideas out into the world. You do not have control. It's not like you can sue for the misuse of intellect. intellectual property. The reality is you don't have control over how that material will be used. You can't go around hoping it will never be used for ill. It is going to be. You just have to hope that it's much more often used for the inspiring purposes that you intended. You mentioned Jean Piaget at the beginning. He's become quite well known through Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson quotes him as a as a key influence on his thinking. What do you make of, have you been following the Jordan Peterson phenomenon? What do you make of... No, tell me, to teach me, what is the Jordan Peterson phenomenon? Well, one thing that he says in particular about Piaget was that Piaget's ultimate aim, he talked about, he looked at kind of how children develop and the development of morality among children, but his ultimate aim was about trying to tie together science and religion and find an explanation for an emergent understanding of morality. morality and tie together the worlds of science and religion. Do you resonate with that as an explanation for what Piaget was doing and how does that relate to your work? Well, first of all, it sounds like something interesting I should try to learn more about. And I'm not entirely sure that the most fruitful way of exploring this is just what Piaget's intentions were, but Piaget was a... A 12-year-old prodigy who, at the age of 12, published something in a scientific journal that had to do with his fascination with mollusks. the ways in which they evolved. He started getting letters from scholars who thought he was an adult who wanted to visit him because they were going to be in his village or something and he had to figure out ways to not meet with them so they wouldn't discover that he was 12 years old. I guarantee you at 12 years old Piaget had no notions about bringing science and religion together. The initial passion and curiosity was with the ways in which living organisms transformed. transform and it went from mollusks to children and basically spent a lot of time asking children about their conceptions of the physical world and coming to see that these enduring features around space, time, causality and objects in the world is not something that's just given. Recognizing the if-then relationship is something that takes six or seven years of living before you have a mental system that's complex enough. to be able to connect two points in time or space. That was the main work that Piaget did. Now it's true that in the latter part of his career he started looking not just at the way children constructed the physical world but the way in which they constructed the social world and he began a field which we now call moral development. I think the greatest contributor... To that particular field, and when it was much more grounded in philosophy and the relationship between philosophy and science, and the whole relationship between the is and the ought, which is a lively conversation in philosophy, was not Piaget. It was L'Oreal. Lawrence Kohlberg. Lawrence Kohlberg, American psychologist, who ultimately ended up at Harvard, is really, to my mind, the true father of bringing this particular paradigm to the study of psychology. of moral development and himself extending it beyond just the development of children into adolescents and adults. I would say that Jordan would be better off looking at Kohlberg's work than Piaget if he's interested in these efforts to bridge gaps between science and religion. And last question, and this is the kind of 64 million dollar question. We've talked about stages of development. We've talked about development per se. How do we develop? How do we move up these stages of development? If we could live infinitely, we would all develop. We would all develop in these directions because although we'd run into all kinds of experiences which were not supportive to our development, we would eventually run into the happy accident of the convergence of those features that are most conducive to development. And so essentially what education is about from a developmental perspective is, whether it's formal education or any kind of intention to educate, to train, to develop, whatever you want to call it, it's about essentially creating, bringing together as many of those conditions as you can for someone so that you create a very, very fertile space that wouldn't just spontaneously create itself. So what does that fertile space look like? look like. First of all, it's psychologically safe enough that I can withstand some of the discomforts that will inevitably be a part of an invitation to leave my comfort zone, leave my familiar way of making sense. So I need sufficient forms of support to kind of help me with what is actually going to be a very difficult thing, which is to ultimately consider that the problem I'm running into. is not about the world, it's about me. That some way I need to grow. I'm somehow running up against my own limitations. This is the extent to which learning, which is so widely and superficially celebrated in the world, is not fully enough honored for the true difficulty of its nature. A person who is willing to put themselves in a learning mode is someone who is willing to say something which Which is, to go back to your earlier question, kind of the fundament of the religious experience. Martin Luther, there's something limited about me as I now stand. I need something more. So learning is putting yourself in a position where you're acknowledging, at some level, I'm inadequate. I'm not fully done. And there can be something extraordinarily empowering, inspiring, uplifting about getting fuller, becoming more adequate. But initially... It has to do with acknowledging I'm not as enough as I want to be. That's a very difficult kind of thing and it requires a form of support. But the other dimension is what is it that curates these experiences that I need to learn, I need to grow. So you need forms of challenge. You need experiences that run you into the limitations of your current way of making sense. You need good problems you don't seek to solve too quickly because when you solve a problem quickly you're the same person coming out of it as you were going through it. going into it. You need problems that you can build a relationship to so that you are using these problems to solve you more than you trying to solve these problems. So you need good problems to grow on, the challenges that will provoke you, that will create the desires in you to actually become a bigger version of yourself. And you then need the support that enable you to withstand the discomfort of all of this. The part of you that wants to say, I'm going to just pull back and just kind of stay. back here in my comfort zone. Those are the fundamental kind of conditions. That's the $64 million question. The $128 million question is why are humans developing? Why are we doing this? And I want to just give you a quick glimpse of this here before we conclude. Because it's important for people to recognize that we are the only species on the planet living as long as we are beyond the years of fertility and reproduction. Most organisms finish their fundamental job of replacing themselves and then they perish. We're living a whole generation now beyond the years of fertility. And this is something which humans have only recently come to do. We are today living, you know, most people died through most of human history in their 30s and 40s. and 50s and today we're living a whole additional generation. And that provokes the question, why is this happening? And the glib answer is advances in medical science and reductions in poverty are helping us fight the things that tend to truncate our lives and so that's why we live longer. But that's a kind of a thin technical answer to a much bigger question, which is not what are the means by which it's happening, but why is it happening? And that's what we're looking in. In the Western world where we have all this valorizing of individual autonomy, if you feel satisfied by an answer that says this species-wide manifestation is just the consequence of a bunch of individual random choices, I'll leave you to that explanation. But I want to suggest a different one, which is when a whole species is collectively doing something, you should pay attention to it. And generally, why does any species do? anything collectively but then to survive, to succeed kind of evolutionarily, to maintain itself. And we are a species that is conscious of itself and we are living in a world which any person with their eyes open would have to say yes is a race to the top. There are all kinds of extraordinary expressions of human spirit and imagination and generosity but we are also living in a race to the bottom and there are all kinds of threats that are hanging over us that could you know wipe us out and we know from developmental theory that the higher state of development the self transforming mind this ability to actually stand back even you know from our own internal systems is a potential way of handling the most lethal features of being a human being, these sovereignties of mind and state. So what if the fundamental reason that we're developing and staying alive so much longer than we ever did before is to create more of that order of consciousness that will enable us to save ourselves? What if collectively we are... living longer in order to solve the biggest problem of our survival that we face today. Wonderful place to end. Robert, thank you. My pleasure, Dave.

Transcript for:Overview of Robert Keegan's Developmental Theory

Transcript for:
Overview of Robert Keegan's Developmental Theory