March 2024
Taking a fresh look at Vertical Development: A Pop-up event with George Collins
I’ve known George for almost twenty years, since we first met on some work at Swindon Council. She’s made vertical development part of her practice since those days, taking her expertise into HR teams and transformations in sectors ranging from branded FMCG to regenerative food. So I was really looking forward to this pop-up – and the conversation that unfolded was indeed fascinating.
Vertical development is based on the theory of lifelong human growth, and concerns work that seeks to expand an individual’s ways of seeing and making sense of the world. Broadly stated, the approach suggests that the ability to see more of the system, to recognise and work well with the inherent complexity and unknown, increases the scope of leaders and organisations to work purposefully and wisely in turbulent and shifting times. In GameShift we tend to talk about “seeing more of the system”, “seeing more richly” and developing the ability to take actions that “poke the system differently” as a non-theoretical way of expressing what this work does.
There are many clusters of vertical development work, and some people will know of it through Spiral Dynamics, through Ken Wilber’s work, or perhaps through Frederick Laloux’s immensely popular work. For George and I the roots lie in the work of Bill Torbert and Dennis Rooke and their development of a framework of Action Logics over the past forty years. We’ve provided some links so you can explore further if you want to.
It was a wonderful conversation, and as usual we’ve provided a link to the recording here.
For me personally, one of the richest conversations was about the “shadow side” of vertical development. How the framework has an inherently hierarchical nature – the sense that “higher” action logics are “better”, at least in terms of being more complex and more deeply systemic. Many of the people on the call were wary about the impacts this could have, and all of those who practice with the approach recognised the potential for inadvertently creating “in groups” in ways that might be unhelpful. This led to a good discussion about practical ways of working that address this difficulty, for example using the internal logic of the models without the labels, and using the behavioural indicators of highly systemic work to guide team aspirations irrespective of the actual action logics of individual team members. Whatever our individual action logic, we can all work to improve our shared ability to collabnorate and explore well, for example.
One of my personal interests is in the linkage of action logics to the work of Roberto Assagioli on sub-personality development, which I encountered during my training in psychosynthesis therapy. This has led me to treat the action logics less as stages and more as co-existing elements of personality, that we inhabit (or don’t) according to the degree to which our life provides us with the possibility to encounter and explore them. I do wonder whether there could be a non-hierarchical re-telling of the action logics story through the lens of sub-personality. But perhaps that’s a story for another pop-up!
Meanwhile below is the recording. Thanks again to George for a fantastic session.
Our Next Pop-up event: Ecosystem Eats Industry for Breakfast
