Robert Kegan

Just diving into your work, I loved your book, Leading in Chaos, and several themes sort of jumped out at me and I wanted to explore some of them that really caught my attention.

And the first thing I wanted to explore was this notion of self-authoring, right? I'm a big fan of Bob Keegan and had an opportunity to talk to Jennifer Gavi Berger on the podcast who speaks about this as well.

But a lot of the transition work I do is often in the realm of moving people from a socialized mind to a self-altering mind.

Can you talk to us a little bit about how you help people cross that bridge?

And you've mentioned, I believe you have, sorry, I'm working on too many books at the same time.

But you've worked with Bob Keegan at Harvard, correct?

Yeah, when I was in sabbatical at Harvard, I took a class with him and I knew him.

He was a good guy.

And that's when I started to read adult developmental psychology and came into contact with people or thinkers or the texts of people back then.

Bob Keegan, Bill Torbert, and other models that was used in the business world for supporting this vertical development.

And that fascinated me a lot.

One book that definitely shifted my thinking around these things were Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology, where he's sort of laying out the map of different ways of understanding inner development and combining and Letting us see that what religion and spiritual traditions have been speaking about for thousands of years and what philosophers from the German idealist philosophers to modern philosophers have been speaking about for 300 years and what developmental psychologists are speaking about today is really the same thing.

And we need a certain number of people.

And we don't know exactly how many who are even self-transforming and can kind of have some meta reflective capacities themselves.

If you are using Bob Keegan's model, which is one model to see this through, if you think that that model is too crude, and I usually say that all models are wrong, but some models are useful, at least in some contexts.

And I find Bob Keegan's model very useful in some contexts.

Hmm

... there's a n- there's a story in, in the latest book about reading one of Robert Kegan's books and how that was the, that was like the thing that took...

Im- implication of the story, that was the thing that took you to adult development.

I wonder if you could just, you know, give us a sense of that story and that, particularly the insight that was in that book that, that really caught you.

These are Greek, for people who don't know, maybe, uh, you know, if again, I may be getting this wrong, but chronos is essentially normal time, Greek word for normal time, kairos for times of chaos, but also times where a lot of things are possible.

And he talked about if you're smart and brave in those times, a lot is, lots is possible.

And if you've been preparing for a long time, like maybe somebody who studied developmental psychology and complexity [chuckles] for many years with Robert Kegan and all these other amazing people, and then has built this company, then suddenly there is real possibility in those moments for creating change.

Um, I guess maybe to, to get specific, if you can, how do you think about or hold that balance with a client around accepting their vision or their dream as perfect as it is and inviting them to dream more?

So there's a concept, let me make sure I get the name right.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lasco Leahy talk about, which is immunity to change.

So why people don't change even if they really, really want to.

And I, I'm, I'm not, I may not explain this great, but the concept is because the opposite of the change you wanna make, you are deeply committed to for probably some really good reason.