Dr. Jonathan Reams - Adult Development and Leadership: A Primer

Dr. Jonathan Reams is driven by an insatiable curiosity about the essence of human nature and how to cultivate this essence in the service of leadership.

He uses various outlets to achieve this. He currently has a position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he teaches and does research on leadership development, coaching, and counseling. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Integral Review, A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal for New Thought, Praxis and Research. He is also a co-founder of the Center for Transformative Leadership and the European Center for Leadership Practice. Jonathan’s Ph.D. is in Leadership Studies from Gonzaga University.

Jonathan practices the cultivation of leadership through consulting and leadership development program design and delivery. He brings awareness-based technology to this work, focusing on how the inner workings of human nature can develop leadership capacities for today’s complex challenges. 

Quotes From This Episode

• "It is the air that we breathe, the water that we swim in it; it’s all around us. It is the essence of our experience. And because of that, it’s often invisible to us. It’s taken as given. It’s just the way we see the world, and that’s how it is. And (Robert) Kegan tries to lift this up and make it visible for us."
• "Self-awareness is a key foundation for good leadership. Because if you’re not aware of your own shadows, your own tendencies, you will act them out in unconscious ways and project them onto others and create unintended consequences."
  
  

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Book: Noise by Daniel Kahneman
• Book: Talent Code by Dan Coyle

More About Guest and Series Co-Host, Jonathan Reams

• Jonathan's Website
• Book: Maturing Leadership: How Adult Development Impacts Leadership
• Article: A Brief Overview of Developmental Theory

About  Scott J. Allen

• Website

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are important views to be aware of. Nothing can replace your own research and exploration.

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in the study, practice, and teaching of leadership. 

Transcript

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. Thank you for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today I have a very special guest and you're gonna get to know this gentleman pretty well over the coming. Actually, it's probably going to be a couple months, we have this really cool series that we are going to be introducing in the Phronesis podcast. But I need to introduce you to this person real quick. You've met him before, if you're a longtime listener, it's Dr. Jonathan Reams. He has an insatiable curiosity about the essence of human nature, and how to cultivate this essence in the service of leadership. He's a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he teaches and researches leadership development, coaching, and counseling. He serves as the editor-in-chief of the integral review, a transdisciplinary and transcultural journal for New Thought practices and research. He is also a co-founder of the European Center for Leadership practice, and the Center for Transformative Leadership. Jonathan's Ph.D. is in Leadership Studies from Gonzaga University. Jonathan practices the cultivation of leadership through consulting and leadership development, program design, and delivery. He brings awareness-based technology to this work, focusing on how the inner workings of human nature can develop leadership capacities for today's complex challenges. There's plenty of those, Jonathan; we need you. Welcome, sir. I saw you a couple of months ago and Washington DC, at the International Leadership Association Conference. How have you been, Sir?

Jonathan Reams  1:34  

I've been great. Scott, I thought was a real blast getting to hang out in person, and really deepen the kind of tentacles of connection. 

Scott Allen  1:45  

Yes, I like that it sounds a little spooky, but kind of cool. The tentacles of connection, we had never met in person. And all of a sudden, I'm walking down the hallway to my room. And I see this three-dimensional figure that I'd only known in two dimensions.

Jonathan Reams  1:59  

That's right. And it was very spooky too because I thought I just had come out of my room. And okay, I'm gonna go look for Scott, and you came around the corner?

Scott Allen  2:10  

Well, I am so excited to frame up and help listeners understand what we are up to, you know, you have edited this volume called Maturing Leadership. And for listeners, really, the next eight episodes are going to be with authors from this volume. It's an important volume. It's an important topic. And I believe as I've had these conversations for the last couple of years with scholars and practitioners from around the world, I think it's probably foundational to our work, this human development conversation. So Jonathan, maybe, if you would, what's the impetus? What's the source of this project? Maturing leadership.

Jonathan Reams  2:56  

Oh, I think there are many sources, you know, it's a big, deep sigh, because, in a way, it's a kind of life work and project, I got into graduate studies at Gonzaga in the leadership program, really wanting to bring together my kind of personal background in consciousness development and spiritual practice, and find some way to connect that to the world and leadership studies jumped out the place where people were talking about these kinds of things. And there's something about leading that requires you to kind of go beyond yourself to stretch your boundaries and challenge yourself. And that requires some kind of maturity. And we all have the experience of bosses who are not so mature and the impact they have. And we know that this is an ongoing issue in general terms. But then I wanted to look at, well, what are some more specific ways to look at that, and then I came across adult development theory in general, as a more specific way of talking about how does consciousness evolve? And then I'll tell a short story. So at the ILA in Barcelona in 2015, I was approached by one of the publishers because they said they troll through the abstracts and look for interesting things and talk to people if they could write an article or something. So he was talking to me, and we went for a walk. And as we talked, it became clear that there was more than just an article worth of topic here. And I said, "look, you know, the field of combining adult development and leadership has had some pioneers," some of the people you've had on the show already, like Bill Torbert and Keith Eigel, and Carl Kuhnert. Many more, but it hasn't gotten a cornerstone of credibility in the academic field, putting together an academic anthology seemed like a step forward in giving some legitimacy to say it's not just, you know, “woo-woo” stuff for a few marginal people, there's actually a body of work around this. I looked at their book proposal and was highly intimidated. I thought, "Oh, my God, I can never do this!" And then a couple of years later, you know, the ILA is building bridges series invites proposals. I put in a proposal for this because, oh, maybe that's easier, they know me, you know, that'll be friendly. And it didn't get accepted. But the publisher, Emerald, said, “Hey, but we're actually interested in this outside of that series.” And so we made a deal. And I basically just tapped the shoulders of a number of people that I had known in the field for a while and said, Hey, would you be willing to contribute something there were a couple of years of protests as it often is, and now we have it out in paperback even.

Scott Allen  6:00  

Yes, and it's an incredible resource. And I think, really, for listeners, this episode, the purpose of this episode, I don't I personally have not come across someone who has the depth and breadth of knowledge about adult development that Jonathan does, even spending time with him in Washington, DC, going deeper into some of these conversations, where I'm feeling like I'm in the deep end. I think for listeners, these next eight episodes, they're gonna challenge listeners, in some ways, they've challenged me in a lot of ways; I think they challenge all of us because it's a gnarly topic in a lot of ways without, as you said, some of that clarity. But I think that's also the really, really nice opportunity. This episode is really about providing listeners with a bit of a primer, so they can go into future episodes, really having a base-level understanding of this field of adult development. You and I were talking at ILA...I'm excited I kind of have a concept for a new set of interviews where maybe we do some one on ones with some thought leaders, right? I'd love to hear Susan Komives talk about some of her theories from a one-on-one perspective, or Ron Riggio, or Bruce Avolio, talk about transformational leadership from a 101. standpoint. So this is a little bit of an adult development one-on-one in 30 minutes.

Jonathan Reams  7:28  

That's right. That's the challenge you've given me, Scott. I think that's one of the aims is to do that, but also to then link that to some of the chapters in the book just so people get a kind of high-level overview of what's the basic foundational theory from that context. And then how is it applied in relation to different aspects of leadership?

Scott Allen  7:51  

Yes, I think that's great. Where do we begin, Jonathan?

Jonathan Reams  7:56  

Well, in the dim, misty past. You know, I've given various talks on this subject. And the concept of maturity or development is perennial. Okay, you can go back to Plato and Plato's caves and notions of somehow our view of the world evolving into more and more enlightened views. You can see this in the Enlightenment Era. So people like Göthe, Shaftsbury Nietzsche also wrote about this in a way that you can see almost exact parallels to some of the modern models. There were influences than from that into some of the conceptions that have influenced various parts of modern society. But in more recent times, so let's say 100-120 years, we had people like James Mark Baldwin in the US who brought out notions of subject-object and lines of development and all these kind of like, what are the ways we can describe this? We had Jean Piaget, who is relatively well-known and studied. How does our structures of meaning-making or structures of knowing things in the world evolve as children? And then people like Lawrence Kohlberg or others took this up and said, how does this apply to moral development, and how does it apply in adulthood? And then people like Robert Kegan, built on that. Integrating essentially, Piaget and Freud. What are psychodynamic models of development, because Freud has a developmental model. There are stages that children go through. And there's principles involved in that that Kegan took and linked with Piaget's and said, here's something that can inform us about this and a brief story...I remember we had, you know, were our heads for class one night in my doctoral program. And I remember we complain bitterly because we couldn't skim the book. No. And what is this guy talking about? You know it? It is because, and I think this goes back to why you say this is so important it is the air that we breathe, the water that we swim in it, it's all around us. It is the essence of our experience. And because of that it's often invisible to us. It's taken as given. It's just the way we see the world. And that's how it is. And Kegan tries to lift this up, and make it visible for us.

Scott Allen  10:41  

Well, and why is that critical to leadership? Give us a quick preview?

Jonathan Reams  10:45  

Well, I think that we've all seen, and there's plenty of literature that says that self awareness is a key foundation for good leadership. Because if you're not aware of your own shadows, your own tendencies, you will act them out in unconscious ways and project them onto others and create unintended consequences. Oh, you may have great ideas. But if how you act on them is filtered or colored through some of these limitations, then you wonder why doesn't it work the way I thought

Scott Allen  11:24  

That's just one of the most beautiful ways I've ever heard that communicated. Jonathan, that was wonderful. That was absolutely wonderful, I think been a very succinct, nice way, you helped me and listeners understand why this is critical to this conversation. So as you think about the book, what are some of those theories that are utilized in book chapters that people should have some level of awareness? I mean, you mentioned some, some really big names, whether that's Piaget or Freud, what do we have to know from a foundational level? And if we're going to provide just, you know, listeners, we're going to provide you with some links in the show notes. Jonathan, you have a wonderful paper that takes people through the landscape that we can link in the show notes, so people can do a little deeper dive for those of you who are interested in doing so. But what do you think?

Jonathan Reams  12:13  

Sure. So what I thought might be helpful is because a lot of the chapter authors go a little bit deeper into, and we're not going to be asking them to provide intros to the theory that they're using more focused on the application because that's more interesting. What are the nuances and facets? So for those who aren't familiar with these, we thought it might be good to give some examples of what are these series talking about? What are the basic principles? Nice. I've explained this in different kinds of ways. But I think one of the easiest things to start with is this example around mathematics. Okay, we all kind of can either remember or have kids where, we've seen this before. You know, at the age of three or four, arithmetic isn't really in their court. Numbers are fluid, and things are magical and mythical because the structure of their meaning-making, you know, their stuffed animal is suddenly a dragon. And you know that your cover a blanket over your head, and you're in a foreign land. And yes, so that fluidity to reality, which is fantastic imagination, but doesn't lend itself to logical structure and logical reasoning. So something happens around five or six years of age, where you move into this structure where you can suddenly teach arithmetic; one plus one equals two makes sense. And then you can learn the reverse and that two minus one equals one. Oh, and now you can reverse operations. And then you can eventually. Oh, and you can do multiplication. And there's this developmental sequence in that you learn concepts and principles of arithmetic. Now, at the same time, you don't teach an eight-year-old algebra, yes. Because algebra requires taking any number for X. But at that age, no, it needs to be a specific number. It needs to be a concrete number. So Piaget talked about pre-operational thinking, concrete operational thinking, where there are two apples, not X number of apples, but he then talked about formal operational thinking, which we could call abstract reasoning, where the ability to think more broadly and generally comes into view. Yes, so that's an example of how this principle of our epistemology or the structure of our meaning-making evolved in ways, and I've got another example I'll use a little later now out. What we can also look at is, for instance, we mentioned Robert Kegan. And I thought, you know, one of the highlights of this podcast series for me was you explaining Robert Kegan to Henry Mintzberg. You did a great job of it. So it may feel repetitive for people. But in the context of this, we could say Kegan is looking at what is the holding environment. That is the air we breathe and swim in and don't notice what holds us in the world? And what can we take as an object and reflect on and operate on it? Yeah, nothing?

Scott Allen  15:38  

Would you talk about subject-object really quickly, just for a moment, just because I know, you're you've used that phrasing a couple of times. Now, just for listeners,

Jonathan Reams  15:46  

I think the most foundational, the way he starts out is, you know, for the fetus is the holding environment the womb. Life is supported through all these physical, biological ways in the womb. Now, we know now from more modern research that you know, the mood of the Mother, and the type of dietary intake all these things have an effect on the development of the fetus holding environment. Yeah, it's a holding environment. So it's shaping the way that life is evolving. Now you come out into the world, and your mother and or father is your primary caregiver, they provide the world. They hold you safe; they allow you to start learning how to function in a body to how to move your hands and how to find your teeth, and you know, all of these kinds of things. So, at this stage, that's Kegan's first stage, so you're, you are subject to your needs. And your reflexes become an object; you can kind of look at and work on your reflexes as an infant. But if you're hungry, you just cry, and you're hungry, you can delay gratification; you're subject to that feeling. As you evolve, at some point, you can have this delay of gratification, and you are no longer subject to your needs; you can say, I'm hungry, mom, and she said dinner is in half an hour, and you can wait, hmm, you now can take your own need and reflect on it as an object and make choices about it. And Kegan talks about this and is the kind of Imperial self; I believe that the egocentric self because what's happening here is your world is very close to you. It's how you make up things; you don't really have much of a perspective, and others are kind of two-dimensional, outside of maybe your immediate family. But even then, the way you conceptualize them is somewhat flat; your own world is just starting to unfold somewhere in the early teenage years, maybe or 10, and somewhere in there, you start to bump up against the limits of it all about me. And realize that other people have feelings too, and you need to take them into consideration. And you start becoming socialized into peer relationships and family relationships; you grow into this where you take your own ego desires and can suspend them and make choices about them in relation to building your identity around peers.

Scott Allen  18:38  

Well, I imagine Jonathan back to the holding environment concept. I mean, I have an image of a tree in my mind. And imagine a tree; one tree is they've got wonderful soil, just the right amount of sunlight, and a fairly mild environment. And yet you have a seed that is the exact same tree placed in another context where that holding environment might be harsher. The weather may be much more destructive, the soil isn't as rich, and you're going to have two different holding environments that are going to impact that development. Correct?

Jonathan Reams  19:14  

Correct. I think the thing that's important in my view, at least, is that impact or influence but not determined, okay? Okay, because I can remember some research when I was not even in grad school yet, but around resilience, and there's something about, you know, kids in the inner city where the holding environment is not necessarily robust, but they somehow transcend it. So there's often something within the individual that also has a role to play in how they go through and relate to their holding environment. But it definitely has an impact and shapes how you internalize meaning, and then we get into where a teenager is starting to grow into adults. And then this notion of having, as Kegan says, A socialized mind where you're very concerned about and build your identity around influences from the outside, whether it's a boss, a teacher, a friend, whatever these external models really, are what helped you because you need something to go by, you don't just come up with it out of nowhere. So you internalize it, great. But at some point in life, you're asked to do more than that. You're asked to step outside of that, take those influences and object, and make choices about how you would like to write your own script in this context. And then Kegan talks about his self-authoring.

Scott Allen  20:49  

So, for instance, if I grew up in a family where we have Liberal Democrats who are members of unions, and I've grown up my whole life that that is good and right and correct, at this self-authoring stage, I may still value unions and appreciate certain, but I also might be able to be critical of certain elements of it or think, think independently of what my family's perspectives were, we can say that about faith, we can say that about our communities, politics, a number of different topics, I kind of, as you said, self author, my own perspective on the world.

Jonathan Reams  21:26  

That's right. And so you build your own kind of value system, in a sense, and how you relate to those former influences starts to have more flexibility and fluidity. You can pick and choose and reconstruct in a way at a certain point. And this is what they see in the research is less common, as people can outgrow this and start to actually have what they call a self-transforming mind. This means that you have the ability to recreate or deconstruct your sense of self-authored identity and recreate it for other contexts. more dynamic flexibility. So a classic case of this former friend of mine, who was at Cisco wrote this paper about the innovator's dilemma. You have this whole thing where CEOs have a challenge because you've got the bread-and-butter operations that need to be stable and need a certain type of leadership style and that to maintain that stability. But you need a different kind of style to be entrepreneurial. And how do you combine both of those mindsets in one mind?

Scott Allen  22:44  

And Clayton Christensen was brilliant. Think Kodak. Right.

Jonathan Reams  22:50  

Yeah. Right. And this is maybe a good example. And I don't know the detail. But we can hypothesize very easily that the failure of leadership was the failure to be able to switch to another mindset, understand the need to read the signals, and adapt to an emerging context. And to stay within my ideology of what's right. And what I'm conditioned into, and run over the cliff.

Scott Allen  23:20  

Well, and each of these stages, because if I'm not mistaken, Jonathan, a certain percentage of adults are at stage two, according to Kegan, was at around seven to 10%, roughly like that, maybe half of the adults make it to stage three. And you know, then there's some other set of

Jonathan Reams  23:39  

third or something that may. Yeah, and of course, these are not hard and fast levels; there are lots of nuances in between. And one of the things that we'll get into in some of the other author's chapters to is this doesn't mean you always act or perform in the same way. So you may make meaning or sense of it at your best in a certain way. But in different contexts, you may act better or worse. So your performance can vary. And that goes into so what I'd like to do then is give a shorter overview of a couple of other of these kinds of theoretical threads because that's Robert Kegan, in-depth.

Scott Allen  24:22  

For all of these that you're about to discuss, there are very real ramifications for leadership. If I give someone who's at stage two authority while they're making sense of the world in a very, very different way than that person who's at stage three or four.

Jonathan Reams  24:38  

Sure. So I had somebody just yesterday that I was talking about that was so frustrated in their workplace because their leader was clearly not able to understand or take into consideration enough of the concerns of that team and organization. to really hold the people in the team in place, they couldn't create a container for them; they couldn't lead them. They were continually reducing the issues to overly simplistic formulas. So that's a big consequence. So one of the other strands or models that came out of Freud's work, Harry Stack Sullivan, and then Jane Loevinger, who...and this is there's a kind of common pattern with this, where she was looking at women's post-World War Two experience. And she interviewed people, she noticed differences in the way they talked about their experiences. So you observe a phenomenon. And then, she tried to understand well how could we categorize these differences. She started looking at this and then bootstrapping a methodology to say, Well, how could we calibrate or measure this? And so you have these sentence completion tests, where you give people a sentence stem, and people fill it out. And what you see is that as people mature or bring more considerations or perspectives into their thinking, they're able to show that in the way they answer a question; she did this Washington University sentence completion test, which is then worked on with a Bill Torbert to Susann Cook-Greuter, there's an HBR article, The Seven Transformations of Leadership, that's one, it's in their top 10 list. Because it talks about, well, what happens, we noticed a slightly different slice in Kegen, slightly different names. But we see that some people are just opportunists. The only way they can look at the world is it's kind of a jungle out there. And I gotta grab whatever opportunities and might make right and all these kinds of things. And that's, that's their mindset. And then they get to the kind of limits of that, and they say, Oh, God, we got to take other people into account, and they become more diplomats. They're great at making things smooth among the team and taking care of everybody's needs. But they don't necessarily contribute a real depth of knowledge, which is more than the next level, the expert. Are you individuating yourself by having specialized knowledge. Now go beyond the kind of my way or the highway and opportunism and or just smoothing the waters and being diplomatic. And you say, no, here's some truth, here's some knowledge, here's something that can help us move forward. Eventually, you see that you also need to start thinking about the process a little bit, you need to think about the larger context and goals, and you move into this achiever mindset. And then now people are changing the language a bit, but you move into autonomous or reframing, there's a number of names for but you started getting a post-conventional, these earlier stages are more of a conventional mindset, then you move into post-conventional, where they will tend to start to have you could even say a postmodern mindset into our people's perspective depends upon their context, you know, what they see, depending on where they're looking from. People don't become aware of that till these later stages, and then you can start to facilitate processes of reframing people's meaning to help them see a bigger picture. So transformational leadership, the idea of raising the morals and values of followers, is very much a reframing type of process, helping people address questions and deconstruct their values and everything and re-construct them at a higher level. And then you get strategist and construct aware of those kinds of later stages, where a lot of what's going on, as you start to see, oh, even the way we talk about things is socially constructed in the way other people understand words isn't always the way I understand them. So yes, we have some shared meaning, but I can't always assume it. So as and when you can do that, then you can even have a more robust, deeper kind of organizational process. So there's a study that Bill Torbert and some colleagues did, or they looked at 10 CEOs undertaking organizational transformations, and they look at multi-year processes. And the success or failure was very clear, like a .98 correlation between the success of the transformation and the developmental stage. They were at the ones where the conventional stages couldn't make those kinds of transformations happen. They wanted to post-conventional stages and were able to do that multiple times. So that's the ego development line. But there's a whole other lineage of developmental thinking. And I go into this because we've covered all of these in the book.

Scott Allen  30:13  

So we kind of go, we've got the Kegan strand, we've got the Bill Torbert. Loevinger. Piaget, Kegan Loevinger. Torbert, Susan Cook Greuter.

Jonathan Reams  30:25  

Terri O’Fallon, I should mention, is in there too. She's built on Suzanne's work and has a model that's evolved from there.

Scott Allen  30:33  

Okay. And then this third strand, great, okay.

Jonathan Reams  30:36  

And the third one comes from Lawrence Kohlberg. And a man named Kurt Fischer. Someone named Michael Commons, who was also a student of Kohlberg's who said, Hmm, there's all these descriptive moral people have observed things and then try to describe and make sense of that. But what is the theoretical model as a foundation of this? What is actually going on? And he developed this model of hierarchical complexity to try and understand what was going on. Fischer, in a similar parallel way, had this dynamic skill theory. And what Fischer did that I thought was quite interesting. He took Piaget's notions of the development of our meaning-making. And he combined that with behaviorism, which is the notion of how does the environment operate on us notice the context affect our performance? And how does the dynamic intersection of these support the building of skills, and so we're looking at skills in particular here, and the way this builds up is we have these infant reflexes as we said, then you get into sensory motor skills, then you get into representations in language, as a simple example, the word truth, when we think, Oh, it means whatever, right? We have all sorts of associations with the word truth. But when it's we see it at first being used; it tends to represent a one-to-one correspondence between something physical and a statement about it. It's connecting to representations. This is a microphone; this is a table. The truth? Yeah, it's very concrete. But you gotta realize it as a five-year-old or six-year-old. That's how the word truth makes sense to them. Yep. But then you start building on that route conception. And then you say, but that's not the truth. Or that's really the truth. And you start to build a system of these representations is truth when, and you build these up, and at a certain point, you go beyond representations to an abstraction. And the notion of being truthful is an abstract concept, just like we talked about algebra in relation to mathematics, and charity, truthful, has many instances of truth, or not truth or truth, when so you can generalize it. And then you can build that up - finding the truth, the whole truth. And you can start to take two abstractions and talk about the ugly truth or a grain of truth. Hmm. So you build up conceptual tools that allow you to do work in terms of the thinking you're doing. And so Theo Dawson, who you had on not so long ago, we've worked with her a lot to try and understand how can we help leaders build the thinking tools they need to do the kind of knowledge work they're asked to do. 

Scott Allen  34:01  

So that's the strand she's coming out of? I didn't know. Okay, yes. Interesting. Because I have not explored Kurt Fischer, I have not explored this. I guess we could call it dimension or this orientation to the topic of adult development.

Jonathan Reams  34:17  

It's less known, but in the history of developmental theory article, you'll put it in the notes. I devote about four pages at the end to elaborating Kurt Fischer's work, and he has some colleagues he's worked with, like Mike Mascolo, who we were within ILA, but the implications of that for leadership, I see very clearly having worked with these kinds of tools is, for instance, I did a presentation on this for the Society for Organizational Learning in Norway. And, you know, Peter Senge had presented, and then I showed this, I said, Well, the thing is that this linear thinking if/then where you can take two abstractions and hold them at once and connect them. That's where the majority of people are thinking of what Senge is doing is he's asking people to combine many abstractions and look at the relationships between them in very complex ways. Yes, that's not what everybody's doing. And this guy came, he says, wow, now we see we're trying to implement a learning organization. We give people all these ideas, and they go off, and they do something else. And we wondered why and I now understand because they have to take it down to what they can operationalize. And so what this kind of skill theory gives us is a way to understand what people can perform, what they can actually do, and how we can support the development of that because we can get more granular about what they're able to do. 

Scott Allen  35:50  

Well, and I just loved her definition of a skill, something you can practice, right? Just so beautiful, simple, easy, and boom.

Jonathan Reams  36:02  

Right? And, of course, there are; there are more rich definitions. So I think of it also as it's a way to regulate any kind of cognitive function and cognitive meaning, sensory-motor, emotional thought form; being able to regulate the performance of any of those is a skill.

Scott Allen  36:25  

So in these conversations that we're about to have with authors, you can really put them in one of three buckets, or we can put them in one of three buckets. They were gonna have kind of a Kegan strain; we might have a Bill Torbert strain. And then we might have this Theo Dawson, Kurt Fischer strain. So, listeners as they're listening, can start trying to hang on to those life preservers.

Jonathan Reams  36:52  

Yeah, so I get ready. I can just give a little overview of that, for instance. So Chuck Paulus and John McGuire, in their chapter, use primarily the ego development model. And David McCallum uses that, Aiden Harney uses that but also does something else with it. Abigail Lynam and Jeff Fitch, in their chapter, use Terri O’Fallon's model, but they're all coming from this notion of how the ego or self develops. Then Harriet Rasmussen and Mohammed Rai, take Kegan's model specifically and apply it to trust. How does trust evolve in terms of our subject-object relations? And how do we start to work with that to enable us to understand what people value and what creates trust for people through these different developmental stages? My own chapter and one of the other ones use Kurt Fischer and Lectica. There's also a strand we haven't talked about yet. It's a little different. Michael Basseches's work on dialectical thinking and Otto Laske’s work, Eva Vurdelja, goes into that. And this is taking a layer and giving it another name, and talking about it. We'll learn more about that when we hear her, but there's a series of models. And if I step back, then part of my intention with this book, and I really had two audiences in mind when I conceptualized this. One is the existing community of researchers in adult development and in or consultants in adult development and leadership. And there's a number of a growing number of consultancies that are actually using these models in practice. And I wanted to help these people expand their horizons; you may be using this model. But look, there are three or four others here that you might want to be aware of, think of, or know a little bit more about; at least it's the kind of existing community to broaden and deepen it. But the larger community of leaders, scholars, and practitioners, who are maybe peripherally aware of it or not aware of it, I wanted to expose them and say there is a robust set of work going on in understanding, applying, and researching how these concepts are actually impacting leadership.

Scott Allen  39:31  

Exactly. Well, there are some interesting studies. I mean, you'd mentioned Karl Kuhnert and Keith Eigel. A lot of Karl Kuhnert’s work he, CCL, You know, there's pockets of some of this that have at least shown indications that people at these more advanced levels, meaning-making systems are more effective in these leadership roles, right? And it's one important component didn't know that we haven't found a silver bullet, Jonathan, unless you strongly feel otherwise. But it's not the, but it's an important piece of the puzzle, a very important, it's a corner.

Jonathan Reams  40:15  

So yes and. No, what I want to emphasize it's true that it's one strong consideration or influence. Yep. And that is primarily, you know, what is the impact of the leader and the leader’s self. But of course, there's the context of leaders in the larger systems; there are many other factors that influence performance. The other thing that I want to really emphasize, and it will see as we talk to the different authors and explore their chapters and work, is that there is much more nuance and granularity, and robustness behind these models. Now, I've presented a very kind of quick overview of these things. But the actual kind of depth of detailed application and knowledge and implications of it is much richer, and it's not nearly so simplistic as we might present it here that, yes, higher is always better. Well, being fit for purpose is actually more important. What is the level of challenge or issue that you're facing? And what is the level of your individual and collective thinking around it? So it's not just up to one individual? It's how you can help a team think together more intelligently rather than less intelligently. And that's, there's a leadership component in facilitating that and enabling that. But there's also something about the Death of Superman and the birth of the Avengers, this notion of leadership teams where everybody contributes some component of it, and everybody has shadows and challenges that they need to work through as well.

Scott Allen  42:05  

Well, and there may be times where someone who, again, this goes back to Kuhnert and Lewis, I think that was 87. Somewhere around there. There may be times when someone who's at stage four trying to speak to an audience of stage two or three, they might come off as if the audience doesn't understand what they're saying,

Jonathan Reams  42:24  

Well, and many people found Obama very difficult to understand because he, and I listened to his first inauguration speech, you know, I could hear he was touching, like, five different value systems in one paragraph speaking to all right, but for somebody who's like, well, he's wishy-washy, or flip-flopping or something, you know? No, he's trying to lay out all the considerations he sees. But that's immensely complex and overwhelming for people who want the leader to provide the answer.

Scott Allen  42:58  

Mm-hmm. Well said, Jonathan; we need to wind down. I think for today, that's a good primer, but I'm going to place your paper in the show notes. So listeners, when you go on this adventure with us, you have a primer. And I think I want to reinforce another thing, Jonathan, that you said was so important that we probably flying at about 40 to 50,000 feet today, right? Each of these are worlds in and of themselves. And I think for scholars and practitioners is a really nice opportunity to build awareness and to come along on this adventure with us and learn. We are going to with each of these authors, try and stay kind of in the middle of the pool; we're not going to be in the shallow end; we're not going to try and take you to the deep end. But we're going to try and stay in the middle of the pool where our feet are just barely touching. That's, that's where we're going to try and exist. So listeners, provide us with feedback and let us know what you think. Because we really value your opinion. Jonathan, I always close out with this question. What have you been listening to streaming that's caught your attention in recent times? I know you still haven't watched In and of Itself.

 Jonathan Reams  44:09  

I know. I know. It's. I have been reading Daniel Kahneman's Noise. My current reading. I also started Matt Alvesson’s the triumph of emptiness, okay, a great analysis of the way things like grandiosity, pumping everything up without substance and creating illusions and having mass consumption. That's not ever kind of enough how all of these things are symptoms of some deeper sense of emptiness. Okay, but the thing that was most interesting for me to read it's related to skill theory. I've read a lot of neuroscience and neuroscience and learning lately. The very popular book, Dan Coyle, The Talent Code, okay out as myelination emission of neurons basically speeds up and makes them more efficient. So that as you have a specific form of deep practice, you get ignited for the motivation to do that. And you're emulating and noticing what it should look like and what you're doing, and you're so focused on it, you actually practice deeply. How does that actually build skill neurologically in the brain? 

Scott Allen  45:29  

Dan Coyle is right here in Cleveland, Ohio, so maybe you and I can have a conversation with him after this series is done. We'll do that in 2023. Go for that. Okay. Well, Jonathan, thank you so much. Thanks for jumping into this adventure with me. And we're gonna have a lot of fun. So I appreciate your time today. Well, sir, thanks for the good work you do. Thanks for providing a landscape for us. I think I learned today, and I very, very much appreciate that.

Jonathan Reams  45:57  

Thanks for inviting me to go on this adventure. And you know, being willing to have me come along as the co-pilot here for the next few episodes. I'm really looking forward to that opportunity to try and emulate your skill in the interviewing process.

Scott Allen  46:16  

Well, it's going to be a good time, and we're going to have fun, and we're going to learn in the process. Okay, be well