A Research Paper By Nele De Peuter, Vertical Development Coach, BELGIUM
Vertical Development: Different Stages of Development
As an Adult, We Are Grown Up, Right?
Every now and then something happens in your life that changes who you are and how you think. Major life events or crises such as starting a first job, becoming a parent, divorce, burnout, and loss of a loved one,… create shifts in who we are.
Does that sound familiar?
It is a universal story of development that we all experience throughout our lives. At different times we make progress, start to plateau, get stuck, and then have a breakthrough.
For some time, developmental psychologists have been mapping the stages through which children evolve as they mature. The first researcher to notice these stages was the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. In a fascinating series of experiments, he demonstrated how children’s thinking abilities develop through different stages as they grow. Piaget observed that with each new stage, children are able to think in more complex and sophisticated ways. This means they become increasingly adept at tackling challenging problems. For example, my 14-year-old daughter can grasp the abstract concept of a book. She knows that a book has content, which she can read or even study when needed for exams. My 6-year-old daughter doesn’t see yet what content means. A book is an object she can use to sit on and only when there are pictures in it, she might do something else with it.
Piaget’s stages didn’t describe adults. For a long time, conventional wisdom assumed that these stages of development would stop once you reach adulthood. After all, you are a grown-up, right?
We now know this isn’t true. Adults also can move through different stages of development.
Contemporary theorists (e.g. Robert Kegan, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Jane Loevinger, Ken Wilber, Bill Torbert, …) have extensively studied the ways adults grow and evolve, even after they are chronologically mature or ‘grown-up.’ Working on their own streams of research, but coming up with similar results, these three mapped the distinct stages through which adults can grow, if the conditions are right. Yet, it is not the same as in children; adults go through the stages differently.
Adults Continue to Grow, Yet Differently to Children
Whereas children move rapidly through the stages, an adult’s pace of development slows dramatically, almost to the point of plateauing. We spend most of our adult lives between two stages. In addition, while a child’s development appears to happen automatically, it is not so in adults.
Research into adult development tells us that there are broadly two ways development happens. First, life does it to you. Difficult life experiences can have significant developmental benefits. And secondly, you deliberately engage in your own development and invite others to support you in the process.
Like ever-expanding rings of a tree, these stages offer people the chance to grow into more extensive and more complex versions of themselves while still holding on to the inner rings or earlier stages through which they’ve developed. It is called a ‘transcend and include’ model. Another metaphor that is often used is Russian dolls: a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. As adults, we also still hold on to these previous versions of ourselves.
Vertical Development and Horizontal Development
Evolving through these stages of mental development is called vertical development.
Before moving on, a word is needed about the terminology.
The field of adult development theory essentially describes how adults develop more comprehensive ways of making sense of themselves and their experiences. Other names that are being used for the same theoretical field include integral theory, stage development theory, constructive-developmental psychology, and vertical development. I have made a conscious decision to consistently use the term ‘vertical development’ for two reasons: (i) this term is easier to translate into other languages, e.g. Dutch and French; and (ii) it explains the difference between horizontal and vertical development often helps people understand these abstract concepts.
Horizontal development is about gaining more knowledge, skills, theory, methods, tricks, etc. Horizontal learning happens through schooling, higher education, structured programs, self-study, and other types of learning or training. Horizontal development is absolutely necessary, e.g. nobody wishes to be operated on by a surgeon who never properly learned the correct techniques. However, it is also ‘additive’, meaning that horizontal learning can only fit into one’s current frame of thinking. It doesn’t necessarily change a person’s view of themselves, the world, life, etc.
This happens through a different process, called vertical development. Vertical development is learning to see the world through new eyes and changing the interpretations and meanings we ascribe to life experience. It’s about changing your mindset, transforming the way you think, and affecting what you do and how you behave.
Vertical development means rising to a more expansive level of thinking. It requires you to look at your beliefs and assumptions with a magnifying glass and look at the world entirely differently.
Vertical development enables you to understand and hold multiple insights and viewpoints. It gives you greater adaptability, more self-awareness, and a greater chance for good relationships and efficient cooperation with others. You become wiser and leave an (often unconscious) mindset that you may have been stuck in for a long time.
It’s also important to realize that horizontal and vertical development do not exclude each other. On the contrary, the two make up a powerful duo. The real opportunity lies in the combination which produces sustainable change. Vertical development gives you the wisdom to choose the right course of action. Horizontal development ensures you have the skills and experience to apply your chosen course of action in your life and relationships. Also, knowledge learned horizontally often requires practice and feedback, which can lead to awareness, e.g., discovering a blind spot. When there is a willingness to change, we can transform the way we know ourselves.
We Are the Incessant Storyteller
Human beings are meaning-makers. Growing as an adult means that we are evolving our systems of meaning-making. We take in all of the inputs around us and metabolize and organize them. Once we metabolize them, then we tell stories about what is going on.
We had a story about COVID and it changed and changed and changed again. As we get new information, we change our story and interpretation, and we change our story about ourselves.
What do we mean when we say it’s a story? A story explains what is going on outside. A story describes what is going on inside. It tells us what is important or meaningful, what is difficult, what is desired, how we hold experience, and what the story itself means to the storyteller.
As humans we are incessant storytellers (Susanne Cook-Greuter via Beena Sharma), we are constantly making meaning and we mostly do this without realizing it and with little awareness as to the exact shape of our own reality-constituting. Our meanings are not so much something we have, as something we are.
These meaning-making systems shape our experience and to a great extent give rise to our behavior.
Mapping Our Developmental Journey
Except during periods of transition and evolution from one system to another, a given system of meaning-making organizes our thinking, feeling, and acting over a wide range of human functioning. Although everyone makes meaning in their own rich and unique way, there are striking regularities to the underlying structure of meaning-making systems and to the sequence of meaning-making systems that people grow through. These are referred to as stages or levels of development.
A developmental move from one stage to the next is often driven by a felt sense of limitations in the current way of constructing meaning and making sense of everyday life. Life challenges us and pushes us until we have to see the limits of our way of making sense and then we have to find another way of understanding and then we come into a new perspective. We see the world in a certain way, then suddenly, that way that subject becomes an object, and then we come up with new meaning-making.
There are several schools of thinking each with its own frameworks, models, and language. However, they all share a high degree of consensus around the core concepts and propositions. All researchers, whatever the lens they used, identified patterns of meaning-making that human beings share, referred to as stages or levels of development. One of the core propositions of all the various schools of thinking is that people’s stage of development influences what they notice or can become aware of, and therefore, what they pay attention to, prioritize, and act on.
Let’s have a look at the different stages. There are several frameworks being used. I am presenting here briefly Harthill’s Leadership Development Framework, which is based on the research by Jane Loevinger on ego maturity and action logic.
- Opportunist: focused on own needs and doing whatever it takes to win
- Diplomat: wants to belong, get approval, and fit in
- Expert: wants own expertise to stand out
- Achiever: driven to achieve, accomplish, and get results
- Individualist: the radical shift from ‘doing’ towards ‘being’ with a unique approach to complexity
- Strategist: highly values personal and organizational transformations
- Alchemist: experiences deep interconnectedness and systemic nature of all things
Looking at the different stages, there is a hierarchy that some people object to. For some the framework – and the theory of vertical development in general – suggests that higher is better. However, there is nothing inherently better about the later stages of adult development. My daughters are 6, 12 and 14. The two older children are at a later stage of development, but that doesn’t make them ‘better’ than the 6-year-old.
What’s important is that there’s a good fit between the individual’s stage of development and the complexity of the challenges they face, both in work and life.
Here are a few other characteristics of adult human development:
- Every human being starts at the beginning. Although the earlier stages at times seem rather egocentric, this part of our growth process and every stage has its benefits and downsides. Life really is about exploring the width and depth of every stage we are in, it helps us to reach our full potential of being human.
- Development is unidirectional. We continue to grow, and we can fall back when we are ill, or stressed…but we will not undo the path of growth we have been on.
- We can’t skip stages, growth is a slow process.
- Later stages can understand earlier stages, not the other way around. This is why sometimes you don’t ‘get’ people and they don’t ‘get’ you.
- We mostly live in between stages, but there’s always a point of gravity.
- Most people will not pass through all the stages and will stay within the range that is most comfortable for them and is supported by their environment.
Every stage includes, transcends, and builds on the previous. We never leave ourselves behind. What we have, we keep, and travels with us.
The World Needs Us to Invest in Our Vertical Development
Vertical development is becoming more popular. It seems that our world has shifted to a point where the amount of complexity we face seems to have out-paced both our ability to make sense of it and our ability to thrive despite it. We are ‘in over our heads’ (Robert Kegan) with the ‘wicked problems’ of our time. Both at the individual and collective levels to invest in our evolutionary growth and development.
Most of this groundbreaking research was performed more than 50 years ago and has been expanded in the last 25 years, but it was never usually available to coaches to support others. Now, as coaches, we have the gift of facilitating vertical development. As coaches, we can tailor our coaching to the needs of our clients, and at the same time we can facilitate our own development.
Deciding to engage deliberately in your development is challenging and stretching, but also incredibly rewarding. Just like working on your fitness creates discomfort, deliberately engaging in your development is uncomfortable, but the benefits and rewards make it worthwhile. That does not always come easy. Yet, it is gratifying and rewarding to engage in our own development for ourselves, our environment, and the world.
References
Berger, J. G. (2012). Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World. Stanford University Press.
Bluckert, P. (2019). A Comprehensive Guide to Vertical Development. Peter Bluckert.
Ellison, S. (n.d.). Understanding Vertical Development.
Harthill. (n.d.). LDP Report – Leadership Development Profile. Harthill Consulting. Retrieved June 25, 2023, from
Kegan, R. (1980, January). Making Meaning: The Constructive-Developmental Approach to Persons and Practice. The Personnel and Guidance Journal, 373-380. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2164-4918.1980.tb00416.x
Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.
Petrie, N. (2011). Future trends in leadership development. Center for Create Leadership white paper.
Petrie, N. (2014). Vertical leadership development – part 1 developing leaders for a complex world. Center for Creative Leadership white paper.
Sharma, B. (2022, August 22). Leadership Maturity Coaching: Integrating Vertical Development and Polarity Wisdom, Part 1 [Lecture in The Art of Developmental Coaching]. Coaches Rising.
Torbert, W. R. (2004). Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.