Justificación de los pesos y puntuaciones

The primary task in front of us if we really want to be smarter is to ‘wake up’

and ‘grow up’. Physiological and emotional coherence will certainly facilitate a significant improvement in cognitive function and ability, but if we are to

make a quantum leap then vertical development of adult maturity is the only way. If we are to prosper and genuinely thrive in a VUCA world, we need to expand our awareness and maturity so as to raise the calibre of leader-ship exponentially – Shaun Usmar, one of the most energetic and innovative financial leaders I’ve ever worked with, is clear on the importance of leader-ship. Reflecting on Enlightened Leadership and his time as Chief Financial Officer for Xstrata Nickel – the world’s fourth largest nickel producer – Shaun explains:

We put aside lots of time to help mostly inexperienced managers and vice presidents who had grown up in technical functional roles to think more broadly. We would dedicate half a day or a full day to work through scenarios.

We also broadened out the attendees and included people who were not necessarily the most senior, but who had good promise or something to contribute to a particular part of the discussion. Having worked through those scenarios, our people had the ability to think through what might happen or what course of action or decision we might need to take when things got tough... We used very different thinking and tried to challenge each other, not to be destructive but to get people to stretch their thinking.

We worked on helping them to think from a broader, macro perspective and to understand how decisions interrelated and how their decision could impact on the whole business. The most senior people at the centre don’t have the monopoly on brains. We discovered that if you combine challenging discussions with decent models and data then you can make profound changes... We entered the financial crisis in the upper third quartile on costs in our industry, but we exited in the lower second quartile – we had leapfrogged the competition.

You can read Shaun’s full case study at www.coherence-book.com.

In the last chapter we explored how consciousness emerged and how that emergence is inextricably entwined with emotion and our sense of self. But awareness or even self-awareness is not simply an on/off phenomenon; there are many levels and degrees of sophistication that we must evolve through.

The way that we think and lead an organization is fundamentally altered by the level of consciousness, awareness or maturity we operate from at any given time. These levels literally transform our ability to succeed (Rooke and Torbert, 2005).

Everyone understands that children go through key stages of develop-ment – physically, emotionally, cognitively and morally. These stages are often visible and very obvious. Most of us, as parents or aunts or uncles, have witnessed this development first hand. Infants wake up to the world around them and figure out their place in that world as they physically grow up.

When most human beings reach the level of development of the average 14-year-old they have most of the necessary skills and capabilities they require to function in an adult world. In most cases there is no ‘burning platform’ or strong need for them to develop further. A few years later, they leave school or university and believe they’ve finished their development.

But in reality they’ve just completed one stage of development. The next stage is where the real magic happens. Once we reach physical maturity – that’s when the really important adult development work should begin. It is this internal, invisible work that is critical to vertical development and holds the key to unlocking the vast reservoir of human potential.

Adult development is an invitation to become more sophisticated, not just physically but energetically, emotionally and mentally. This vertical development facilitates a broader, deeper, more mature perspective. When we expand our awareness in this way it can radically alter behaviour and results, not to mention health and well-being.

Most corporate training or leadership programmes focus on horizontal development or the acquisition of knowledge, skills and experience. Although worthwhile, horizontal development creates incremental shifts at best and does not result in much expanded awareness or increased maturity. Just because someone looks ‘all grown up’ on the outside doesn’t mean they are

‘all grown up’ on the inside. Remember the successful female executive from Chapter 1 who was given additional horizontal development; because she hadn’t woken up to the world around her and grown up as an adult human being, the horizontal development just made her a more sophisticated mani-pulator. She was the same person, just more knowledgeable at how to get her own way. That’s not helpful.

The horizontal development journey is just the beginning – it gets us to the starting line not the finish line. The vertical development journey is the real journey and it can create quantum leaps in development that can immeasurably expand capacity, creativity and productivity. And yet most organizations are blissfully unaware of the significant academic literature on adult development. Most companies have not yet realized that the future of their businesses and their leaders fundamentally depends on their ability to develop vertically.

When it comes to adult development and maturity there have been many significant contributions, from the early days of Piaget (1972), Kohlberg (1981) and Loevinger (L-Xufn Hy, Loevinger and Le Xuan Hy, 1996) to luminaries such as Ken Wilber, Susanne Cook-Greuter, William Torbert and Clare Graves.

Each describes the vertical evolution of maturity and adult development from a slightly different perspective (Table 4.1). Wilber, whom we’ll unpack