David McCallum, S.J., Ed.D is a Jesuit priest and leadership educator. He serves as the founding Executive Director of the Program for Discerning Leadership, a special project of the General Curia of the Society of Jesus, Georgetown, and the Gregorian University. The Program provides leadership formation for senior Vatican officials and major superiors of religious orders in Rome, Italy, and internationally.
He is a facilitator for mission-driven, personal and organizational development programs, provides developmentally informed executive coaching, and delivers leadership development programs and spiritual retreats internationally. He co-founded the Contemplative Leaders in Action program (CLA), an initiative of the Office for Ignatian Spirituality (USA East Coast Province), as well as the Global Jesuit Case Series, the Mission Integration Institute at the University of San Diego, and the Ignatian Leadership Program for the Conference of European Provincials of the Society of Jesus.
Currently, Fr. McCallum lives in Rome and serves as a member of the Secretariat for the Synod of Bishops Commission on Methodology, supporting the Synodal process initiative by Pope Francis, and as adjunct faculty in the Institute for Anthropology, Interdisciplinary Studies of Human Dignity and Care (IADC) at the Pontifical Gregorian University.
A Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
More About Series Co-Host, Dr. Jonathan Reams
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
David McCallum, S.J., Ed.D is a Jesuit priest and leadership educator. He serves as the founding Executive Director of the Program for Discerning Leadership, a special project of the General Curia of the Society of Jesus, Georgetown, and the Gregorian University. The Program provides leadership formation for senior Vatican officials and major superiors of religious orders in Rome, Italy, and internationally.
He is a facilitator for mission-driven, personal and organizational development programs, provides developmentally informed executive coaching, and delivers leadership development programs and spiritual retreats internationally. He co-founded the Contemplative Leaders in Action program (CLA), an initiative of the Office for Ignatian Spirituality (USA East Coast Province), as well as the Global Jesuit Case Series, the Mission Integration Institute at the University of San Diego, and the Ignatian Leadership Program for the Conference of European Provincials of the Society of Jesus.
Currently, Fr. McCallum lives in Rome and serves as a member of the Secretariat for the Synod of Bishops Commission on Methodology, supporting the Synodal process initiative by Pope Francis, and as adjunct faculty in the Institute for Anthropology, Interdisciplinary Studies of Human Dignity and Care (IADC) at the Pontifical Gregorian University.
A Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
More About Series Co-Host, Dr. Jonathan Reams
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast; wherever you are in the world, thank you so much for checking in. Very, very much appreciated. Today. Jonathan and I are continuing with our conversations on the book that he has edited called maturing leadership. And our guest today is Dr. David McCallum, Society of Jesus. He is a Jesuit priest and leadership educator. He serves as the founding Executive Director of the Program for Discerning Leadership, a special project of the General Curia of the Society of Jesus, Georgetown, and the Gregorian University. The Program provides leadership formation for senior Vatican officials and major superiors of religious orders in Rome, Italy, as well as internationally. He serves as a facilitator for mission-driven, personal and organizational development programs, provides developmentally informed executive coaching, and delivers leadership development programs and spiritual retreats internationally. He co-founded the Contemplative Leaders in Action program (CLA), an initiative of the Office for Ignatian Spirituality (USA East Coast Province), as well as the Global Jesuit Case Series, the Mission Integration Institute at the University of San Diego, and the Ignatian Leadership Program for the Conference of European Provincials of the Society of Jesus. Currently, Fr. McCallum lives in Rome and serves as a member of the Secretariat for the Synod of Bishops Commission on Methodology, supporting the Synodal process initiative by Pope Francis, and as adjunct faculty in the Institute for Anthropology, Interdisciplinary Studies of Human Dignity and Care (IADC) at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Father, thank you so much for being with us today. We are so excited for this conversation. Jonathan, I know you are excited for this conversation. But what else the listeners need to know about you before we jump in, that's, that's a lot, you've been a busy person.
Fr. David McCallum 1:58
Boy, after an introduction like that, Scott, I feel like we all have to take a deep breath. I do. And I'm really grateful to be with you both and to be reunited with Jonathan, we've crossed paths many times over the years, and I'm so grateful for the work he did, editing this volume and bringing our work to a wider audience. And Scott, to you and your service, really, to people who are leadership development experts around the world for the content you're bringing. So it's a pleasure and a privilege to be with you. What to know...I'm a guy in Rome, trying to do my part to help support the church in really attending to a lot of the gaps in its leadership, and helping to nurture with the various skills and resources and lenses that we talked about in this program, a real shift of the way that we operate, and a shift in the direction of a more participatory approach to authority and to leadership and approach that really invites people to become more and more their own protagonists in serving this mission of the Catholic Church, but also the mission of the Catholic Church in the world to really reconcile, to promote social justice, to try to do some good. And that's with a lot of awareness, also of all the shadows that the church brings into its mission. So, so yeah, just trying to do my little part.
Scott Allen 3:28
I love it. I'm a guy in Rome. I think you're a little more than that.
Jonathan Reams 3:33
And I think we're going to come around to what you're doing now, towards the end of this conversation because I know from our interactions how much it's informed by this understanding of what does this kind of transformation demand of people individually. And how do you facilitate that kind of thing? So maybe to get us started? Could you just give us a very brief background and how you came to be interested in this kind of research topic? And what I will say for readers is the chapter is on the implications of developmental diversity for leadership education, and in particular, what caught my attention was understanding "fallback." So can you say a little bit about how did you get into all this?
Fr. David McCallum 4:25
Sure. Well, for me, the background is really this question that came up in my studies in the late 90s when I was in theology, and was first exposed to the work of Robert Kegan and Ron Heifetz. At the same time, when I was studying at Cambridge, and I could see the connections between the adaptive leadership approach that Heifetz had been innovating and the demands that this particular form of, leadership this way of conceptualizing the attitudes practices, the dispositions that leaders need to have toward complex and adaptive challenges. And that this imposes developmental demands on leaders. So as I was unpacking those connections, the people I was in touch with at the time, including Bob Kegan, said, "There's something here. And it's something that increasingly is catching people's attention. It's not been well developed." And the first opportunity I had to really study that more rigorously was doing my doctoral studies at Columbia. When I was thinking about a dissertation topic, my first interest was, okay, this question of the capacities and competencies, how do they match up? My first interest was looking at the work of Otto Scharmer. And the demands that the U Process imposes on people who are facilitating and participating in the U Process. That was not a really fruitful path at the time. And so this question came back to Alright, as leaders confront the VUCA conditions of our time - volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And they engage them in a way that in their workplaces, the responsibilities and roles, what are the distinct capacities that people bring in distinct stages of their development to meet those demands? What are the resources that they draw on from within themselves, right? The kind of attitudes and dispositions that help people to navigate the heat of the moment, or to move through conflict in a way that's constructive, or to disentangle symptoms and root causes? I mean, these are very demanding sorts of things. And then the question also of what happens when we react instead of showing up in a creative way when essentially we have an experience of a temporary regression. And when that shows up in the context of a meeting, or kind of interaction, which is interpersonal, or, you know, in the midst of some kind of a systemic change process, what do you do with that? So that was essentially the underlying context and questions that came to me as I started,
Jonathan Reams 7:18
I have noticed that lately, this question has been coming up. So you talk about capacities and competencies, and I think people conceptualize those in a way as if they're somewhat stable. And the notion of action logics, or stages of development, has, at least as I experienced coming into relationship with it is you initially think of these as almost ontological things that are kind of very stable. And yet we see in as you started alluding to, they're not always so stable. And I found the distinction between our meaning-making capacity maybe being stable, but our performance in context is variable. Oh, yes. Yeah. And I think this is where you're heading into. So what kind of context Did you find? Because you were able to do quite a rich study, combining a number of things. Can you tell us a little bit about how you were able to set that up and what you did for it?
Fr. David McCallum 8:21
Yeah, first, I would say that Susanne Cook-Greuter and Bob Kegan, and Bill Torbert, all had referenced the idea that these action logics or stages are a bit more fluid and fuzzy than they're mapped in the theory. But they didn't really have any kind of empirical data to talk about how this shows up in the context of people's performance. And my study was the first to, in a sense, capture that data and begin to explore and unpack it. And subsequently, a number of dissertations have followed up on my work. A recent book by Valerie Livesay, who I highly recommend for your program, is really beautiful, in a sense, expose on how this fallback dynamic occurs, what we can gain from it as we learn our way in our leadership, as we are all on that journey of trying to show up as our better selves. But the reality is our context and the conditions that we're situated are constantly squeezing our developmental capacity. We know that sometimes we show up in a setting, and nobody is willing to authorize us to do our work. And that kind of psychodynamic process of expectation and projection can really stifle our ability to really show up as our better selves. In another setting. We're highly authorized, and we're able to do things that almost feel miraculous to other settings. So the contexts and conditions in which we operate, how much we have protein, our system, we aren't too hungry, have had a decent night's sleep, all these things become factors. And even though we might exercise awareness, like Jonathan said about how we could show up, the fact is we don't on a consistent basis. We don't have complete control over that. And this temporary regression is what I call fallback. Now, how did we study that? Well, the setting I chose is that of an experiential learning conference sponsored by A.K. Rice in the United States. It's associated with the Tavistock Institute in London. This is a setting where people who want to understand the exercise of authority in a living lab can come together in a format of several days or a week and experience a kind of temporary organization. And that temporary organization imposes all those demands that we face in our very challenging workplaces and leadership roles today. The volatility, the uncertainty, the complexity, the ambiguity, the conflict, interpersonal, systemic, the challenge of trying to sort out ambiguous roles, and how to sort out differences. Diversity is often a factor in these conferences. And today, we know that navigating diversity in a way that's conscious, that's intentional, that's got a constructive result, right? That's not so easy. So that context provided really good, in a sense, artificial but real conditions in which to experience this.
Jonathan Reams 11:49
And you pointed out in your chapter that your interest was in diversity in relation to this, and specifically, what wasn't addressed was developmental diversity.
Fr. David McCallum 12:01
That's right. So the varying ways in which we bring ourselves to these challenging contexts based on our developmental capacity.
Scott Allen 12:10
Well, and I loved your phrasing a little bit ago that some of these VUCA contexts or just these varied contexts, it doesn't even necessarily it could just in my country, in my case, parenting, these different contexts, you know, impose developmental demands on leaders, and navigating some of these conversations or some of these situations. It's such an incredibly fun topic. And I love this exploration. And it would make perfect sense that fallback would occur. If we look across any other domain of learning, wouldn't that be? Wouldn't that be the case? Right?
Fr. David McCallum 12:48
Yeah. And you know, Scott, to your point, there's, there's the context, which imposes demands on us. And then there's the baggage that we bring along from the past. Yes. So many of us have had really great education experiences that help us to form assumptions about what will work or won't work in a given situation. And then a lot of us have had what I would call "Miss-educative" experiences, where we were traumatized by the way a certain situation or relationship unfolded. And those become, in a sense, trigger points for these regressive moments. And if we don't have a lot of self-awareness around them, if we haven't experienced enough healing and liberation from some of that experience in our earlier lives, a lot of it going back to our earliest childhood experiences. We're going to bring that into our current work life. There's work to do, inner and outer.
Jonathan Reams 13:45
One of the things that I talk about sometimes is, in doing leadership development, it's important to start with a bit of "cleaning up" so that we address these issues this baggage we bring with us before we try "growing up," because otherwise, we can add layers of complex justifications for poor stuff.
Fr. David McCallum 14:09
And it would be so nice, Jonathan, if it happened in that linear way, you know, that it's, it's basically this kind of like corkscrew spiral we're on. Right? We're always circling the very small and limited early grounds of our experience, but hopefully, from an increasing altitude with more perspective, and more ability to integrate what we're experiencing, sometimes we've got to go down the spiral. Sometimes we can go back up.
Scott Allen 14:36
One thing that I'm interested in is something I know about myself is that conflict can be challenging for me. My default, my natural way of being, is to avoid it like the plague, to do everything I can to stay out of situations where conflict will be present. So in many areas of my life, I mean, literally, I'm listening, Jonathan, to the Arbinger Institute's Leadership and Self-Deception. And I was driving to a client yesterday. And I have a situation where there's a little bit of conflict right now. And I started really examining my own behavior and what I needed to own in the conflict because it was very easy for me to externalize that and "other" the other individual, but it I had to look within, and in this area, I don't know, I think there's a lot of work for me to do. In other areas, might I be further advanced? So my question here is, are there areas of our lives topics, again, to your point, from some of that baggage, maybe, that we have from the past? Are there some areas where developmentally I might be, you know, fairly self-authored and a lot of my perspectives, but in other areas of my life, I might be really struggling? So does that come into this fallback as well?
It does, it does. You know, I think, Scott, your example about conflict is the one that I think most people would really land on and say, "you know, when it comes to dealing with authority, my experience of my parents has conditioned so much of the way that I think about authority in my current context." And if we didn't have really great experiences of the ways that our parents managed their own conflict, it's really tough to learn our way into a tolerance for the discomfort of the hard conversation. So back to your point, you know, there's a whole range; Wilber talks about them as "lines of development," where we can have a whole kind of mountain range right of peaks and valleys of perspective and altitude available to us with regard to our capacity for interpersonal relationships, the management of our psychosexual kind of urges and ways of relating our kinesthetic ability. You know, we're varied, dimensionally complex creatures. And so it's natural that we're going to have various levels of capacity and refined development in each of those various dimensions.
Jonathan Reams 17:24
I think that both of the things in response to Scott's comments in question and what you were saying just previously led me to be really curious about how did you try and empirically observe and unpack these phenomena in this Tavistock group experience?
Fr. David McCallum 17:45
Okay, without geeking out too much on
Scott Allen 17:47
You can eke out a little bit here. This is a "geek-safe" space, yes.
Fr. David McCallum 17:55
I really wanted to experiment with an integral methodology, where the study would be basically qualitative with some quantitative elements that quantitative elements are related to not just the use of the SOI (subject-Object Interview), and the methodology used to score it but also in the incidents that were captured and people's behaviors. And, and, and then, in their interviews, what I did was, I had 80 People in this conference, and I put out the invitation to all of them, hoping that I'd get a diverse cohort of about 20 participants who would volunteer, and I was blind to who the people were so that all the invitations were going out through a third party. And they were invited to participate in the qualitative and quantitative interview process. So I used Susanne Cook-Greuter's sentence completion tests based on the Washington University Lovins your scale. And in the process, I found that I had 18 developmentally diverse participants. They knew that I was going to be a participant observer in the context of the group relations conference held at the University of San Diego. And they knew that there was going to be a research team paying attention to the individual and systemic dynamics, basically taking notes, but again, not knowing who they were. Then after the experience at the conference, I discovered who my participants were. And they then went through a sort of series of interviews. To explore these incidents. We would call them critical incident interviews, where they could talk about moments where they showed up as their better self, you know, where they have their maximum capacity available to them, and other moments when they felt like they were in fallback. Some of them had the added benefit of these frameworks and lenses prior to their participation. Some did not. And I think that's an interesting thing to keep in mind. People who have access to these maps of adult development have an additional tool to take perspective on themselves. Those who don't navigate them as best they can. There are a couple of things that were so interesting here because I didn't go into this looking to see fallback as the phenomenon. My interest was, what are the supports that help people to show up as their better selves? And what are the internal scaffolds that people draw on? I call them to use a very fancy academic term, "endogenous adaptive resources." And that's the kind of ring to it, right?
Jonathan Reams 20:54
Great phrase - it rolls off the tongue.
Fr. David McCallum 21:00
Right? Listen to your better self, right? And I went in looking to understand those. But what I found was both the diversity of endogenous adaptive resources people have varied depending on their developmental capacity. And the fallback phenomenon was universal; everybody experienced fallback; what was really interesting was even the person who was scored as a late strategist, one of the later stages of adult development, experienced this fallback. But the way in which he actually caught it and then worked with it was so much quicker. And if you looked at the kind of comparison with folks at the earlier end of the development, people who were in the earlier to mid-conventional stages expert to achiever, some of them weren't even aware of the fallback. Some of them adopted coping strategies to just get through the experience of the weekend because it was so so hard. And the coping strategies did very little to help people's learning. Those who decided to lean into the experience of the fallback, acknowledge it, not get caught up in guilt or shame about showing up that way, but decided to step back and learn, got feedback from others and support, were able to, in a sense, use that that fallback in a very constructive way. And in many cases, the way that they led as a result of that fallback was more thoughtful and more considerate of their fellow participants. more effective if you want to use that word in trying to achieve their goals.
Scott Allen
Well, I'm gonna go back to Heifetz for a moment. And I never had this insight before. But I'd love to explore this with the two of you just for a little kind of side nook and cranny for a moment. Heifetz talks about the concept of getting on the balcony. I think maybe the Jesuits would call it a reflection, and action will depend on my developmental level; if I am an expert, that reflection is very different than if I am at a different stage. I don't want to say the quality, but the complexity of that reflection is very, very different. So how did the two of you think about that statement? Is it not a tangent we should have gone, or?
Jonathan Reams 23:36
I think it summarizes what David was saying. And my observation is that these models are trying to describe this phenomenon. Like you're talking about God that something happens that enables people to reflect on not only what happened out there but connected with what happened here. They're able to make a system out of that, see their own role in it more actively and explicitly, and differentiate those things. Because earlier, often, these phenomena are just a big fuzzy thing. You know you feel pain about something, you feel embarrassed about something, you notice somebody reacts in a way that you didn't anticipate, and it's very fuzzy. I think the process of being able to make better distinctions and better observations and connect them to your own processes is a lot of what these models are trying to describe. Does it sound right to you, David
Fr. David McCallum 24:43
I couldn't agree more. As Jesuits, we describe it as "contemplation" or reflection in action," as Scott was saying. And we recognize that this is really a developmental capacity. It's one thing to be able to stop and reflect after action, but to act exercise, what a lot of people today would call mindfulness is certainly something while we can practice it, it will have certain limits based on how much capacity for complexity and perspective taking we can we can have,
Scott Allen 25:15
Because my reflection might just be, well, "they're bad."
Fr. David McCallum 25:21
Very specific about the expert, for instance. So if I'm still having my identity and my sense of self-concept, largely authored from the outside in, I don't have a lot of access to this subjectivity; I can have an awareness of a variety of things. But I haven't developed the kind of understanding of my own agency and the different dimensions and aspects of that, in the same way that someone who has moved into the achiever or one of the later stages has.
Jonathan Reams 25:56
What I'd like to do is two things. One is to invite you to reflect a little bit about what does this tell you about how we use stage models? Because I'd alluded to earlier that my early encounters, you know, I picked up a kind of static model of the notion of stages. And what do you understand now from this experience of seeing that everybody falls back? And people use it differently? But how does it help us use stage models differently?
Fr. David McCallum 26:28
So one of the expressions that Susanne Cook-Greuter uses is, it's a kind of "center of gravity of meaning-making," when Loevinger and Suzanne developed this notion of ego development, a little bit distinct from the construct of the developmental theory of Keegan, it'll at least allows us to see that center of gravity has a lot of fluidity to it. And we can see that context matters. But also, the interstate of the person matters, where Bob Kegan would suggest that we retain a kind of awareness even in fallback. My data suggests that sometimes that that awareness can become very limited. I really recommend that, based on what I've learned, we see the fluidity of these stages more than we're trying to map them in terms of these demarcated boundaries of some kind of stage that we've moved into in a fixed way and can't be moved from it.
Jonathan Reams 27:30
yeah. I have the impression listen to that, that, you know, we all get brain fog at times. You know, and you alluded to this earlier, our performance can be dependent on do we have enough protein, did we get enough sleep, you know, what enables optimal performance and what disables it? But now, what I'm really curious about is how have you taken what you learned from all this and applied it to the current context that you were describing a little bit at the beginning; you're doing some really interesting work in Rome, working with the Vatican working with the whole Catholic Church in some ways, or at least a section that is going to have some leverage? How have you been applying this to what you're doing now?
Fr. David McCallum 28:12
We have a very robust formation program that we're we're bringing these folks into that includes personal development, interpersonal development, and organizational development for the senior church leaders who want to become more discerning and to come back to that language to exercise contemplation and action, not just individually, but also to cultivate this as part of the culture of decision making in organizations. And we're aiming toward the horizon that Pope Francis is really introducing to the church of moving from a very hierarchical bureaucratic approach to this, this church, this reality of the institution toward something which is much more also participatory and distributes leadership and authority broadly, recognizing that every baptized person has a role to play as a protagonist and the mission of the church. So we're doing things that my friend, Frederic Laloux, would call movement toward a teal kind of notion of church. Right? Very empowering and very inclusive. This is a paradigm shift for those who are really identified with and attached to this earlier way of approaching things. And the learning must be both informational and transformational.
Jonathan Reams 29:34
I can imagine, as you said earlier, that there's a lot of baggage people bring with them. There are centuries of inculturation into a model, a way of being, and a sense of identity that people build around that, and so how are you accounting for that in this type of transformational program?
Scott Allen 29:56
Did you just put out a memo and let people know?
Fr. David McCallum 30:01
If I could only count the ways the complexity of our membership is so great. We don't only have people coming from Rome; they come from all over the world; we're on our way to India to do this work in a culture, which is so many cultures, hundreds and hundreds of cultures all given the loose, sort of the name of Indian, or South Asian. And you've got colonialism and caste and all kinds of permutations of Christianity. So, for one thing, we try to approach things in this developmentally conscious way but also in an interculturally competent way; we see the scaffolds and supports necessary for both informative informational learning as well as transformational. We don't foreground adult development. But we do use, for instance, The Leadership Circle, which introduces this notion of actively creative and reactive ways of patterning our behaviors as leaders. This is a very helpful introduction to this notion of capacity and competence.
Jonathan Reams 31:14
I'm so glad to hear that I've been using the Leadership Circle since 2005. And use it in corporate programs in my university Master's course. So high impact
Scott Allen 31:26
Well, I just want listeners to kind of capture that we've heard the terms transformational and informational learning. And I think sometimes you may hear us talk about vertical or horizontal development, the vertical and the transformational. Sometimes those can be synonymous. And the horizontal and the informational can be synonymous. So, listeners, you may hear some of that different verbiage being used. But I believe it was Kegan who used "transformational" and "informational" and that's some of how he distinguished between what Torbert would call "vertical" and "horizontal," correct?
Fr. David McCallum 32:04
Yeah. And Kegan was working off of Jack Mezirow's work on transform learning, which is really important for us who do coaching and leadership development. Because transformative learning is, in a sense, the important baby steps that lead to stage change. And if you really are constantly inquiring and challenging the assumptions and the perspectives that you hold, or you're receiving those challenges and working with them, you're going to eventually have a kind of nudging of the space of your consciousness outward to include more perspectives, and so that you can accommodate this sometimes apparent contradictions that we experience, you can hold more paradox. Interestingly enough, we also use polarity management as a methodology within our curriculum. So we introduce people to this way of thinking in both/and dialectical terms, and this also becomes a very helpful touchstone for people to see, "oh, we're approaching things as problems that really are polarities to be managed," it puts us in a whole different stance in relation to those. And then, the conversation changes with our teams and with our organizations.
Jonathan Reams 33:18
It sounds like you're being able to incorporate many tools and processes. And as we start to kind of wind down to land the conversation. Can you also maybe just say, what is the scope of this? You know, how long do you have these people? How much intervention are you able to do? Because that's a lot that you're bringing into play for them.
Fr. David McCallum 33:40
Well, for one thing, we knew that we couldn't just approach this as a one-and-done, so each of the modules, personal development, interpersonal development, and organizational, take place over the span of about a year; we also build in a number of other supports. So people are partnered up with a learning partner that continues through the experience. We have peer coaching circles that help people to do this kind of collaborative inquiry about their leadership challenges by coming from diverse perspectives; they're all in leadership stretch assignments. And then, we asked them not only to do peer coaching one another but also to do collaborative inquiry, to work on teams, and to have these leadership stretch experiences. We also have an international accompaniment network of coaches who do executive coaching of spiritual directors who help support people in that inner work because there's no way that adult development is separate from the inner work of spiritual maturation, whatever your denomination, whatever your tradition, whatever your way of thinking about what's meaningful in life, these things have to come together.
Jonathan Reams 34:53
I just say that when people ask me about how did I get to where I was, I say, "it's all down to spiritual practice." That's the foundation of everything. All this developmental stuff is secondary.
Fr. David McCallum 35:06
You know, I think Kegan would agree, I think Torbert would agree, I mean, I think our friends in the developmental field have their own spiritual practices, some of our traditions have a great deal of DNA to support the potential future growth, like an acorn, you know, into the oak tree, some of our traditions may have a little bit less, at least in a very explicit way, Catholicism for all its foibles has a tremendous amount of resource to help support spiritual maturation, whether we take advantage of those things is another story. I think Buddhism, you know, has come onto the scene in the last 150 years in a way that is so oriented toward psychological intrapersonal growth; it has its limits when you get to the group in the organization. But I think we need to draw on these resources more freely, and also, with a certain respect, that you need to be willing to go deep, right in order to go far. And a superficial engagement with any of these traditions is not going to yield the kind of fruits that I think people are looking for. You know, if you're going to do a contemplative practice, really take it seriously; there's no way that a kind of occasional practice is going to yield this kind of benefit.
Scott Allen 36:27
So a couple of things come to mind for me. So, first of all, thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for the integration that you're doing from the academic space, taking these concepts, combining them working to make a difference in the world. I think that's just incredible. And Jonathan and I have engaged in a few conversations now, we're engaging in a whole host of other conversations, but many of them are with people who have the education and then they have the desire to act, the desire to implement the desire to put it into action, and experiment and explore and try and move the needle. And so thank you for that
Fr. David McCallum 37:08
It's a privilege. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for giving me a chance to talk about it.
Scott Allen 37:11
Yes, it's fascinating. And listeners, you have a link to the book in the show notes. So you can go explore that. And, of course, we have a number of other conversations coming up. So please tune into those because each of them is a fascinating exploration of this topic, and you're going to be amazed at the different avenues we can go down. Now to close out for today, you know, what have you been streaming? What have you been listening to? What have you been consuming? What's caught your attention recently that might interest listeners? Is there anything that comes to mind for you?
Fr. David McCallum 37:44
Sure. One thing I want to really recommend, and I think that Jonathan is aware of her work as well, is Valerie Livesay's work, extending this notion of fallback, and really exploring it in the lived circumstances of people's lives, and unpacking it with so much artfulness and clarity. She does that in her book, Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating Fallback in the Embrace of the Fullness of You. It's a long title, and it's maybe a little bit, in a sense, evocative, "what's the ghost light?" You know, it's the light that's left on the stage so that people doing stage crew between scenes can basically see just enough to make the scene shift. And how do we, in a sense, leave that ghost light on for ourselves? How do we see how in these different shifts between one state and the next one stage to the next? There's enough clarity to work with our fallback and grow from it. So I just really highly recommend Valerie's work. I would really recommend Bill Torbert's wonderful book Numbskull, where, you know, after a lifetime of reflection in action inquiry, Bill, who's a thought pioneer in this area, reflects on how messy this work of adult development is, and with his own self deprecating way, you know, informs us about that in his stories. Another I'd recommend is my dear friend and colleague Aliki Nicolaides' work on Generative Knowing; so if you think that transformative learning is an important way of thinking about adult learning and the power of perspective shifts, Aliki's book on generative knowing has just been published. And she's looking at how we really take stock of the day-to-day experiences we have. And in a sense, not just instrumentalized learning for effectiveness' sake, but how does it add to the story of who we are? How does it add up in some way to the story of who we're becoming? Her generative knowing is the beginning I think, of a whole new field of adult learning that will be very powerful for coaches and consultants to us who accompany people's learning. To give them a beautiful big space in which to work, instead of thinking simply about skills and capacities, but something that's much richer, something that's much more meaningful.
Scott Allen 40:16
That's wonderful.
Jonathan Reams 40:17
What you've just described touches me in a way that what I see is this second or third generation or wave of you talk about Bill and Bob Kegan and Suzanne and people like Karl Kuhnert, who've really been pioneers in integrating this field of adult development and something we call leadership. And now there's a group of people, yourself, the other authors in this book, Valerie, Aliki...
Scott Allen 40:47
Andrea Brownlow in Australia, her work.
Jonathan Reams 40:51
There's a ton. So I've been evaluating PhDs in the field and things like that, so you see, there's a growing wave where people are able to kind of combine and recombine and open up new niches, apply it in different contexts, and really take this whole field to a much more rich and robust level. And so I really want to thank you, David, for joining us today from Rome. Really glad that we could catch up and have this kind of conversation. And Scott, I just want to say thanks for the opportunity to join you in co-piloting through these conversations.
Scott Allen 41:29
So much fun, so much fun. Thanks to the two of you. Have a great day.
Fr. David McCallum 41:34
Bravi ragazzi!
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