My Journey in Developmental Psychology, Organisational Development, Social Systems Complexity and Narratives

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Having focused heavily on the sciences in my education, a revelation during my engineering studies at university in the UK was reading E F Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful". A fascination of the crossroads of developmental economics, ecology and social justice/equality triggered my organising a conference at the university on climate change (in 1991) with the participation of a leading UK media figure, and leaving the aeronautical sector I was bound for (after 2 years of accelerated management training), to join the overseas developmental charity that E F Schumacher had founded.  

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4 years at the charity with projects in Ghana and Nepal however brought me face-to-face with the realities of social change, especially in the context of contrasting cultural value frameworks (e.g. our definition in the West of the "Good Life", development or social progress can't be projected onto other cultures without inherent biases).

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I therefore returned to a mainstream career path in industry, working in France and the USA, to go onto completing an MBA in 2001. Whilst working in a Start-Up for 4 years, I continued a track of research started at the MBA into a variety of company turnaround case studies, that emphasised self-organisation and democratic principles. My differentiation was intended to be in the longitudinal nature of the case study interviews, which however revealed that my idealistic initial hypothesis of the universal 'good' of democratic principles in organisations, as being highly flawed.

The language and frameworks however of Ken Wilber's Integral Theory provided a powerful approach to interpreting the complexity, tensions and contradictions in my case study research findings. In 2008 I went to visit Ken Wilber in Denver to discuss my book project using the developmental lens (5 years before a very similar case study book by Frederick Laloux, "Reinventing Organisations"). It was apparent to me that although I could explore lots of fascinating angles with the Integral Theory lens (All Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States and Types), my book project didn't have a convincing hypothesis or robust approach to the research data validity claims (interviews with visionary turn-around CEOs were more prone to propaganda and biases in contrast to the social research vigour I was trying to aim for). 

I summarised the research on the "Organisation5point0.com" website, and moved onto to 'being in action' with regards actually working hands-on with organisations in organisational development and business psychology, founding the boutique consulting company Human-Equity Ltd in 2009.

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It was during this time that I qualified as a coach using the Post-Piagetian developmental psychology tool from Lectica USA, based on very robust metrics on how adults' cognitive capacities can develop (for whom Wilber was an advisor, and built on extensive academic research from amongst others Kurt Fischer's Dynamic Skill Theory, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education). 

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The journey as a consultant with Human-Equity Ltd was full of deep learning and often times painful lessons in engaging with clients on complex topics, whilst ensuring the commercial viability of the offer. However, it did lead to an incredibly rich intellectual journey in collaborating with thought leaders in complexity sciences for client work.

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In particular, and in distinct complement to Integral Theory, was applying Sensemaking principles for change projects, leveraging narratives and anticipating agents' biases. I was delighted to be bringing anthropological and sociological insights to our practices, and challenging the dominant 'engineering' mindset to organisational management.

What became clear however, was in all of my organisational development work I saw dangers in how supposed deeper understanding of employee behaviour and psychology, under the guise of 'making the workplace more humanistic' could lead to greater encroachment of the organisation in "designing" the employee experience for the ultimate its commercial ends.

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There seemed to be often a conflation of 'aesthetic' choices for the human experience in organisations that were only justifiable if they improved 'performance'. 

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The Role of Aesthetics

Although a very robust cognitive sciences tool and metric, my experience with Lectica revealed first hand the limitations of the cognitive development dimension (people can reflect in very high-order complex ways about morally corrupt concepts).

More broader 'ego-development' tools (for example Bill Torbert's Leadership Development Framework, Susan Cook-Greuter's extension of Jane Loevinger's research) do seem to incorporate a more integrated whole-person measure (see last section* here, evoking the higher stages of ego and notions of greater breadth/depth of consciouness, towards descriptions that resonate with many writings on spirituality), but still, the aesthetic dimension appears little explored.

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Hence my conviction of the opportunity to complement this field of the human potential movement, with a deeper exploration of spirituality and the arts.

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*Footote to the reference to Jane Loevinger above:

The ego development map proposed by developmental psychologist Jane Loevinger (1918-2008) conceptualizes a theory based on Erik Erikson's psychosocial model and the works of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) in which "the ego was theorized to mature and evolve through stages across the lifespan as a result of a dynamic interaction between the inner self and the outer environment". Loevinger's theory contributes to the delineation of ego development, which goes beyond the fragmentation of trait psychology and looks at personality as a meaningful whole.

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See Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology for an extensive curation and comparison of developmental models