Values and Developmental Models

Speaker A I'm not a developmental stage expert, and that'll be obvious when I start. But I've gotten some very useful material out of looking at stage theories. I did my dissertation on transform leadership. And the question was, or the assertion was, in order to make transformational change, major change in the way that we go about doing our business, fundamentally changing the underpinnings of how we do our business requires either that the leader be one stratum higher than the role that is normally required to operate it in that situation or that the developmental stage of the leader needed to be one level higher? So that was what I was looking at, and that's what drove me into the developmental work. At one point, I kept studying and values kept coming up. And I finally got to the place where I said, gee, values have got to be a key issue, and I don't know anything about values. So I had a client at that time that we were just beginning to get introduced to, jax, my client had gone out to see him. I had made some telephone calls to him and was beginning to get to know him. This is 1991, I guess it was. So I went to that client and I said, hey, could you fund me for a month or so so I could study values? Which he asserted to he had a reason that was connected. And we did a project on searching what was available on values. And in the process of doing that, I stumbled on a guy named Brian Hall and a work called Value Shift. Now, hall has familiarity with Brian and with his work, but what I felt was this man was way ahead of everybody else that I had found in this idea of developmental stage. So I got hold of him, had some conversations, began to study in that area, and over the years have kept track of it and kept falling back on interest in values. And during that period, I came up with a number of things that I felt were important. And, you know, if you present them in front of Warren, we'll see how they stand up. Okay? But these are some of the things that I've learned that I feel are useful things. First of all, developmental models, they are everywhere, every society, every religion. You just find out that you start looking up developmental models and they're throughout society. And when you go to start comparing them, boy, they overlay really well. They really overlay. Well. Now, sometimes there are stages missing. Sometimes there are extra stages and all that. But in Hall's work, he had 65 models that he looked at. Before I got into this at all, I had looked at eight or eight models or so. And you look at him and say, gee, Maslow fits over here, and here's another one, and here's another one. So the issue about are we talking about a real human phenomena. I mean, to me it's an absolute settled situation. You can't get away from it. So it's like the periodic table. It's there whether you believe it or not. All right. Now, the thing that I got as I was going in the values direction knew a little bit about developmental stage. And I downloaded a demonstration instrument from Values Technology which was Hall's company. And I took the instrument and then I started to back engineer the instrument. I was curious about what they did and about halfway through back engineering the instrument on leadership it was a measure of leadership. I said, oh, my gosh, this is a developmental stage model. So he had an instrument which was basically testing your stage in your belief on leadership. Now, as I walk down his work what I trying to accomplish and means values those things that we hold important on going to get them. And that also is pretty reflected in the literature. So what came out of that is if you consider stage or the term like worldview or how I interpret and make meaning out of the world it can be translated into values and into a preference for values. So that was one of the lessons that came out of it. The second thing that came out of it is that development over time can also be represented as a progression of values. So a lot of what Warren just showed us had that kind of sound. I'm interested in this thing in doing work and then I get more interested in this next kind of thing in doing work. I don't forget about the first one, but I add the second one and that's where spiral comes in.

Speaker B Methods, progression of values.

Speaker A Now, next point. Now, we did these independently but he highlighted the same kind of thing characteristic of developmental stages. To me, there's a pendulum swing. And that pendulum swing can be well, let me say internal to external. The first time that you hear about Jax's work usually you go kind of tilt. You know, it runs different and you work that inside for a period of time and then you begin to get convinced that there's some action that you should take and then you begin to work it outside in the organization. So there's a swing, internal, external, there's the same swing. Don Beck talked about values and you've got the self oriented, you've got the group oriented. So once again, one of the characteristics of these things called stage theories is a back and forth swing. And that's the duality that we're talking about and the two axes. Now, this, I think, for me was one of the most profound things that I got out of out of the work with hall. They're all out of sequence anyway. You may value something, but it requires skills to work out those values. In other words, you cannot progress a new stage of development without at the same time developing skills that lets you execute those behaviors. And I think that from the change standpoint, this is critically important because if we're saying we're going to bring about a change, we need to recognize that there is an integral skill development piece. So, for example, if I go from a child in the family to where I'm going to go out on my own, what do I have to be able to do to go out on my own? I have to get employment. I have to keep employment. I have to generate income. So there are a series of things that are required. Now, one of the things that hall said, and let's see if we have this next what hall asserted. Now, when I put this together last night, I'm pulling this together out of memory. So there's a couple things I'm not exactly sure are worded here. You may know what they are, but he basically asserted that there were three domains of knowledge that were necessary to move ahead developmentally. One of those domains were okay. And those domains shifted as you move to higher stages of development. So if you're talking about early stages of development where you're beginning to get independence and self sufficiency and those kind of stages, there were instrumental skills, basic skills. How do I work a checkbook? How do I drive things like that. Calling those kind of acting out skills. There's imaging or the ability to begin to picture things in your mind and work with things in your mind. And then there's human relations skills. Just how do I relate with human people? As you move higher into development, the human relations skills, pretty well developed at that time, begin to shift to systems thinking skills. What's your ability to deal with looking at systems and taking care of systems? This is one of the things that somewhat explains why, where do most OD consultants come from? They come from HR, so they come from developing skill areas. Here they have the intellectual capacity to get into systems thinking and they begin to shift into dealing with the whole organization. So it's kind of a natural progression. I skipped one. Hang on just a minute. I feel like I missed one here. That's important to us. Just a minute, okay? When I was doing the studying on development, I automatically felt, or was my opinion that higher stages of development are good, better than lower stages of development. One way I think of it this way, we know that as your CIP capability increases, your capability to be bigger, to have more influence, to be more influential, to solve bigger problems, to work that occurs. I was of the opinion, as your developmental stage went higher, setting aside CIP, and I'll say more about that, but as your developmental stage went higher, you also got to be a bigger person. Bigger in the sense that you could reframe situations in a way that someone that didn't have that stage of development could not reframe in the same way. I think a good example of this is President Clinton. One of the things that he did on a routine basis was to take the opposition's position and turn it around and reframe it in a way that was advantageous to him. And when we looked at developmental state or we looked at CIP measurements, it wasn't that he was that far ahead of other people at that time. It was that he had a different way of looking at the world and he could work those things. Now, Paul's assertion was that a lack of balanced skill development creates a problem. For example, Michelle told me that if a child skips crawling, they have trouble with depth perception later in their life. So what hall was saying on these developmental processes, if we don't progress in all three of the domains that I was talking about, we end up twisted in our behavior. So we can end up with a highly developed person, highly developed worldview that has dysfunctional behavior. For example, if you don't develop in the human relations skills and you have high capacity, it's highly likely you're going to move into Manipulative leadership because you have the intellectual ability to be able to understand those things and act on them. Now, I have just some observations, or I'll call them opinions. These are my opinions from working with this. Developmental models tend to build into the higher stage. Okay, I want to do this one slowly because this is maybe a little bit divergent. Developmental models tend to build into the higher stage definitions. So, in other words, I'm talking about how I define what a high stage is, high cognitive capacity. In other words, if it requires systems thinking, I'm already projecting stratum four CIP capability at a minimum. Now, implying the implication of that is that higher stage development is not available to those with lower CIP. Okay? I don't believe that. And the realm is for me, it comes out of the spiritual realm because I'll define one of the stage stages that takes place is when you begin to discover you have an inner voice and you have inner guidance. That goes with, I think, the fourth stage. But in that ballpark. All right? I know people who do not have high CIP who mirror value systems that are very much at a higher stage value system. So my personal experience says I have trouble with this. And the thing that the next piece of that is I think it needs to be tested. And the only way that it can be tested okay, the only way that it can be tested is if we can get at CIP independent of values. Now, that gets a little bit tricky.

Speaker B This could only apply potentially if it is true to a person, not an organization.

Speaker A That's correct. I'm thinking about a person limiting yourself.

Speaker B To a person, not an organization or an academic discipline or a society.

Speaker A That's right. But it would be interesting to if we knew more about that, we might be able to say more about what you're commenting on. Okay. What I found is we use a personality instrument that was developed by a person that did a lot of hiring. And what he discovered is that each instrument was around some question, and he ended up using a series of instruments because each one answered a different question about the individual. After a number of years, he developed his own instrument, which was about eight different models and a number of individual things that he felt were important built into the instrument. And what he attempted to do was to measure about 68 or 69 things. Okay, myers Briggs was in there, discs was in there, erickson was in there. And his test was, could he create an instrument that would give you the same sequence of measures as that test? Not necessarily a duplicate of that test, but if Myers Briggs said you were an INFJ, then his instrument ought to say you were an INFJ. Now, we had an opportunity to do 230 points where we were in an organization that we did talent gearing. So that meant we had position of role, we had current potential of individual. So we had two or three data points that dealt with vertical positioning within the organization. And then we had 69 data points that had to do with personality. Now, the reason the personality work was they had a management training course, and this was their third iteration of a new one. And it bombed on a beta test, and they were using a leadership model. And I said, okay, I know a guy that can take a leadership model and within a couple of days can create an instrument which is pretty reliable, that will mirror what that model is. So anyway, we did that. What we found the correlation between the vertical positioning and the personality data was what? Conical correlation, which is this vector against this vector was zero point 65. Now, that says that the common variation to the two things is about 30%. So it's saying that we're measuring what we call personality. And I'm saying 30% of the data that we're measuring is really dealing with vertical, something to do with vertical capability. And to me, it says that most of the psychological things that we do are confounded with this thing called CIP and nondifferentiable from it. So it's kind of a fertile place for observation. Okay, you our.