INsight/ The Great Divide

Photo by Marvin Kuhn on Unsplash.

Manila, 1 August 2024 — The world is calling out for deliberately developmental organizations and leaders.

Story 

It happened over the past 100 years. And we are facing the consequences today as we struggle to address a growing number of global ‘wicked problems.’ Some prefer to call these global risks or crises, including on climate, conflict, cyber security, artificial intelligence, environmental pollution, and economic instability. 

Our world has become more and more connected, thanks to ever advancing technologies. The systems we have created are more sophisticated now than ever. Over the past century, their positive and negative impacts have grown to become global. Today, humanity can prosper in unprecedented ways and we can self-destruct. Both on a global scale. It seems that time to make the right choices is scarce.

In observing these problems and trends, philosophers and developmental psychologists have noted a great divide: that our advances in technology have outpaced our advances in human development. Everyone today, regardless of their education and morals, has access to powerful technologies that can wreak havoc on a large scale, with potentially catastrophic results. That is of great concern for all of us. It’s human development that needs a boost.

Challenge

What can we do to address this great divide? The first step would be to develop a better understanding of what is happening. While humanity’s technological advances will keep growing at an exponential rate, and are now further accelerated by generative AI, we want to see more effort invested in developing people and organizations to boost human development so that technology can be properly managed for good in society. There are examples.

Boosting human development is what Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, researchers of adult human development at Harvard University, have been advocating and experimenting with for decades. In recent years, they have pointed out the benefits of building Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs), and have described several instructive examples of DDOs in their 2016 book An Everyone Culture. 

In turn, that example has led Bretton Putter, CEO of CultureGene and a writer about the future of work, to observe that building DDOs will require Deliberately Developmental Leaders (DDLs). However, rather than proposing DDL as an additional style of leadership, Putter has pointed to the need for a new philosophy and approach to leadership, where leaders at all levels of the organization are deliberate about developing people all around them. That adds up to a powerful move for boosting human development. One that resonates with us. 

Question 

In our work to coach and grow more leaders in their workplaces, we are acutely aware of the global ‘wicked problems’ that our world is facing, and of the great divide between our rapid technological advances and the need for human development of people and leadership at all levels of organizations. We are committed to finding new ways to bridge the great divide that currently threatens humanity in our world. What about you?

To make progress, we are keen to help more leaders transition into what Professor Kegan has called the advanced adult development stages of the self-authoring mind and the self-transforming mind. These call on leaders to transition out of their socialized mind stage, where they are held back by a dependency on external validation and the expectations of others. As Kegan suggested, adult development offers valuable opportunities for leaders to learn and develop themselves and the organizations where they work.

Kegan also noted how transitioning into the next stages of adult development is a challenging process. It certainly takes a lot more effort and time than embracing the next technological advance of AI into our lives and work. Yet it can be done, when we are committed to transforming ourselves first. If you would like to take that challenge and invest in your human development and that of your organization, go ahead and set up a free strategy call so that we can discuss your next developmental steps as a leader.