The Challenge

Living in our modern world is hard. Living effectively, with meaning and joy, harder yet. Going to another skills seminar or reading another book on the characteristics of those who live well is unlikely to make much difference in the quality of our decision making; the touchstone for a deliberate and effective life. But why? Why do increases in our fund of knowledge, or the addition of skills to our repertoire leave us making the same mistakes over and over again?

Robert Kegan, Professor of Education, Emeritus, Harvard Graduate School of Education, spent his entire career spanning many decades exploring adult development. In a collection of research studies, Kegan, and his colleagues at Harvard, interviewed hundreds of people, focusing on their mindset or meaning-making system (the set of beliefs and assumptions that shape the way they make sense of experience). What he found was startling: across studies 58% of the adults interviewed, including professional and highly educated persons, were not constructing the world as complexly as the fourth stage in his theory of adult development (Kegan, 2003, p. 40). In other words, nearly six out of every 10 people he studied were “in over their heads” (Kegan, 1994), lacking the maturity, mindset, or meaning-making system to effectively manage the complex modern world in which they raised their children, tended to their intimate relationships, and managed themselves at work.

Kegan argues that one’s meaning-making system can have big impacts on human performance. Changes to mindset occur, primarily, at the epistemological level (the way we know what we know or the way we make sense of experience). And though changes to our mindset also occur at the information level (what we know or our fund of knowledge), these changes are of relatively minor importance when compared to changes of epistemology.

Of course, acquiring knowledge at the information level is important. When leading an expedition it is what enables us to navigate to safety in a whiteout. It is the knowledge required to find a safe place to camp. It is the skill necessary to extricate our rope partner from a crevasse. But often, skill alone is insufficient to solve complex problems. The AMGA/ACMG student leading a group through avalanche terrain (e.g., on an AMGA/ACMG guide training course) may have the technical skills to do so, but may lack the mental complexity, mindset, or maturity required to make decisions that are in the group’s best interest. If that student leader is making meaning at Kegan’s third order of mind, he may be unduly influenced by his desire to “get along” and in so doing, be persuaded by those with less experience and skill to make a costly error. In other words, though guide students are likely to acquire new skills and a wider array of responses to complex problems, they may not necessarily develop at the epistemological, or meaning-making level, leaving them essentially the same person they were before the course. It is possible they have “learned but they have not… developed” (Kegan & Lahey, 2009, p. 12). When students change how they know what they know, they “undergo qualitative advances in their mental complexity akin to earlier, well-documented quantum leaps from early childhood to later childhood and from later childhood to adolescence” (Kegan & Lahey, 2009, pp. 12-13). As mentioned above, Kegan refers to how we know what we know as our level of mental complexity, epistemology, or meaning-making system and it is this aspect of our thinking that has the most bearing on how effectively we manage the complex world in which we live. Consider Kegan’s comments about leadership development.

“The field of ‘leadership development’ has over attended to leadership and underattended  to development. An endless stream of books tries to identify the most important elements of leadership and help leaders to acquire these abilities. Meanwhile, we ignore the most powerful source of ability: our capacity (and the capacity of those who work for us) to overcome, at any age, the limitations and blind spots of current ways of making meaning. Without a better understanding of human development—what it is, how it is enabled,  how it is constrained—what passes for ‘leadership development’ will more likely amount   to ‘leadership learning’ or ‘leadership training.’ The knowledge and skills gained will be like new files and programs brought to the existing operating system. They may have a  certain value—new files and programs do give you greater range and versatility—but your ability to use them will still be limited by your current operating system. True development is about transforming the operating system itself, not just increasing your fund of knowledge or your behavioral repertoire. (Kegan & Lahey, 2009, pp. 5-6).

In summary, the challenge every Blue Goat Expedition addresses is this: many of us are “in over our heads” (Kegan, 1994) and no measure of developed skill or acquired knowledge will change that fact. So what can we do about it? Read on for our response, but please be patient with our answer: it’s an attempt to distill 35 years of sophisticated research.