What To Think About Stages of Development
Discussion
Jon Freeman:
"I would like to suggest that there is a need for general agreement that either-or conversations are less generative than both-and conversations. The former lead to closed loops and are anti-evolutionary. The latter lead to open loops, potential and possibility.
Going a step further, I would like to suggest that there are some deep roots, many arising from our religious systems (all of them) but also from other credos and formulaic “right ways”, that caused the basis of many conversations to be about fixed rights and wrongs. This is built in to both our upbringing and our education systems. We are taught how to gain approval and qualifications from being right and ticking the correct box in the multiple choice grid. That makes our decision-making inflexible and insensitive to either changes of context or contingencies of shifts in the exterior conditions. It makes us prone to following one path even after the evidence begins to show up that is has ceased to work. We get overshoots, blaming, recrimination and corresponding excesses from the new “right answer”. The oscillation never ends. Integrated, responsive, contingent, adjustable and flexible choices are prevented.
Accordingly, my contention is that we need to be willing to see both continuums and stages and to be flexible regarding which viewpoint will assist us at different points or with different aspects of our enquiries. We humans are not so conspicuously successful right now that we can afford to reject possible toolkits of sources of intelligence. We need all the help we can get.
Complexification The objection to developmental theories is that stages indicate sequences. It is presumed that this implies that earlier stages in the sequence are of less value than later stages. Unfortunately there have been times when policies have been created or justified as if that implication were correct. No doubt there are theories which do carry that implication and in many cases they may contain an unconscious bias or a hidden agenda.
It is an evolutionary fact that humans evolved first in Africa and were black-skinned. You and I, if not recently out of Africa, can for a small fee track the sources of our DNA back through that very long migration and adaptation to cooler environments with less sun. We are hopefully well past the time when moderately intelligent people could believe that later means in any way superior.
The same applies to the development of human thinking systems. Black skins were adapted to sunny conditions. Whiter skins are adapted to cloudier ones. Tall, thin Nile-delta populations are also heat-adapted to equatorial conditions. Shorter, squatter Eskimos are adapted like seals to cold and the benefits of more body-fat insulation. As the human race spread across continents we developed greater complexity and diversity in the range of our genetic options. Thinking systems changed too. Shifts over time and growth in numbers went alongside a gradual change from hunter-gatherer and herd-follower to settled agriculture, livestock management and from that to villages, towns and cities. With those developments came added requirements for the ways that we need to think in order to thrive. While no later stage in that trajectory is inherently better than any earlier one, there are shifts in the capability of those mindsets to deal with greater complexity. These mindset shifts are at the core of the adaptive process that is described by the Graves Theory/Spiral Dynamics model.
More individualistic development methodologies, such as Loevinger, Kegan, Torbert and Cook-Greuter, have commonalities with each other as well as with the collective trajectory of societies as just described. Such systems have different maps and they cut the continuum at different points with varying degrees of granularity. In their different ways, all describe the ways that people think rather than who they are. They are not typologies because people have the potential to develop and change. Maslow’s system is somewhat different, because it is based on the way that people perceive their needs, and accordingly what they value. Although it is called a hierarchy, the needs form a stack that is dependent on what is below. The more basic needs do not cease to be part of a person’s make-up as they focus on more advanced ones. But people generally cannot give priority to the needs of connection or personal fulfilment or transformation when they are hungry or struggling to thrive economically.
Here is the nub of the challenge that all such systems and anything that involves “stage” terminology or developmental sequences are unavoidably “colonial as hell”. There is nothing inherently prescriptive about any of them. At the same time there are elements to all of them where later or more complex stages are identified as being associated with increased capacities — a larger bandwidth of perception, expanded cognitive complexity, an increased level of skill with leadership, and correlation in some cases with non-stage measures such as emotional or spiritual intelligence.
How are we to deal with these developmental realities, from number of teeth to cognitive capacities, to cultural scales to complexity of thought. What is the answer to the challenge that by even assessing such dimensions, let alone by offering descriptions of identifiable shift points, we are doing violence to people — particularly to those who have developed differently? How do we deal with the charge that our view of priorities carries cultural biases that are not relevant to other cultures and that we thereby diminish them and make them less? How can such apparent hierarchies not be simply wrong?
The conclusion that this paper has been leading to is that all the features we are concerned about are reflections of the way that living systems function. Human systems extend the same principles into our socio-psychological space. The requirement is to balance co-operation and collaboration (emphasis on “I” or “We”) to manage inherent conflicts and tensions, to cope with complexification, diversification and scale. We have to accommodate shifts over time in the relative viability of past developments in relation to changes in the contexts and conditions. All of these are natural processes. This is what life is like, as much for humans as for every other species. Our human ecosystem has been true to all of these dynamics and we are trying to manage our future by making the best use of the mindsets that we have and to manage the human ecosystem in its relationships to the planetary ecology as a whole.
The problem is not in our history of describing such shifts in such a way as to identify shift-points in that continuum. It is not with the idea that mindsets and ways of thinking are different. It is with the ways that we manage the conflicts between those mindsets. Most of all it is in our history of making judgements.
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Our problems are not with stages, but with judgement and excess. Whatever the system, if the stages identified are real, then they exist because they have a contribution to make. They are not dispensable, so the error is to treat them as if they are. The error is in the judgement of a stage, not in the observance of its existence. Rejection is shadow-creation. Rejecting stages and stage theory wholesale does nothing to change their existence and expressions in reality. Such blanket rejection merely prevents people from understanding what is and thereby making better choices for themselves and society as a whole.
At the same time, any stage can be expressed in a way that is unbalanced. Some people will behave in those ways. The solution is not to eliminate that stage (even assuming that were possible) or to exclude all people who are operating from that stage as if they are inferior or worthless. No competent system or model would work that way. Instead it would be seeking to help all stages to be expressed within healthy degrees of balance and to avoid extremes.
In the same way any competent system or model and any sustainable way of living would recognise that since all stages reflect something that was needed by the system and none are dispensable, the task is to support a healthy balance of expression between the stages.
What then, constitutes a healthy balance? From the outset, the thrust of this article has been that living systems make their own demands, and that those demands are contextual, reflective of the conditions that are present. Since conditions change, those shifts in context will alter which thinking systems are most supportive of our ability to thrive. Our task is to respond.
We cannot afford to eliminate potential responses. We have to live in the moment and function in present time. Wherever our reaction is to perceive a potential response as tarnished by some kind of historical failure, or a resonance with previous expressions and applications of that thinking, we should pull ourselves up short and instantly question ourselves because we have traded our awareness in the moment for a trigger from the past. Of course, if something was simply a bad idea in the past, such as slavery, our awareness in the presence will continue to tell us that. The point is that we don’t cease to plant cotton or sugar cane because slaves used to harvest them. It is in the nature of a volatile and complex system that our adaptability needs to function better than ever.
* Summary and Conclusion
While this article has been quite discursive and has pulled its components apart, the key elements are relatively few and quite simple.
1) All living systems demonstrate the same need to deal with inbuilt tensions
a. The tension of individual and collective needs
b. The tension of adapting to the presence of new forms
c. The tension of competition and collaboration
d. The inbuilt reality that any part of the system may damage another part simply by existing and that “violence” is in that sense unavoidable
2) All systems in their trajectories of change over time show up as both continua and as identifiable points within the continuum and the identification of stages provides more data and enables us to understand the dynamics of interaction between the elements better. This enhances our predictions, provides better understanding of risks, helps us inform people more fully and make more informed choices.
3) Human psychological and sociological systems are subject to the same dynamics and the same inbuilt tensions as other living systems. Expanding scale demands of us increased abilities to manage complexity, including the presence of more sub-systems that are persisting from the past.
4) Human systems evolve in response to the perceived inadequacies of what has been before. At any point, the new is evolving via its compensations for the old and its rejections of what no longer works. This has led to dynamics of polarisation, of idealising the new, demonising the old and expecting that we will find “right” answers. This causes us to expect it to be possible to make reliable “either-or” selections.
5) Recognising that we have been through such cycles previously, have experienced that previous utopian solutions turned out to be flawed and learned that no single answer has ever been satisfactory should lead us to understand that we need inclusive, both-and choosing processes, with mindsets that integrate and depolarise all options.
6) Since all the stages and elements are recognised as inherently valuable, and that value is context-dependent, we are less easily confused about hierarchy. Hierarchies are not absolute or permanent, and instead reflect the priorities of what is needed in what context, for what purpose.
7) Since all the stages and elements together with the people who occupy those niches are inherently valuable, there is no requirement for any of them to change. No-one has to be pushed/pulled up an imaginary ladder or denigrated for being where they are.
8) The health of the system as a whole depends not on shifting people from where they are, but on supporting them to function in balance and health in those niches, and on articulating the system so that balance between those niches is optimised and there is less inherent tension and conflict.
9) Because the need for this new integrative mindset is evident and because a platform of multiple prior mindsets is present, some individuals will naturally emerge with the new mindsets and motivations required to support the design of new sub-systems that assist the functional optimisation of the whole.
10) (Corollary) None of this requires that anyone, at any level should be or become enlightened. This remains an option on the curriculum for those who wish it."