Vertical development is becoming more and more common and possibly trendy…. But what is it?    It’s about developing the meaning you make to a greater degree of sophistication: you can grow your capability to think, relate and process your experiences with more nuance, variation and abstraction.  This of course can be very advantageous when working in the complex, uncertain, messy world we live in. 

What is vertical development?

There are four thinkers regarding vertical development: Keegan, Cook-Greuter, Tolbert and Egan/Chelsey.  They suggest that your brain can continue to develop and their research continues the cognitive childhood development work of Jean Piaget and Jane Loevinger’s work on ego development.  

These thinkers looked at the way in which the human brain develops its ability to relate to ideas, other people and oneself.  How we can increase our ways; to relate through time, to grow degrees of nuance, and to move from being subject to something to being able to take it outside ourselves so it is object.  We begin to understand that meaning is contextual and relational and one can navigate differently.

What is happening as we develop vertically?

As we grow as children, we learn that relationships are different, so an infant would know that their mother is their mother. But it’s not until a few years older that they start to understand that their mother is also their grandmother’s daughter and their aunt’s sister. As we get older, we then begin to see and understand that perspective of where we are in terms of physical distance: trees on the horizon are not small, they are far away. 

It’s our ability, for example, when we stand on a tall building and look down and see people that are tiny to realise that they’re not ants, they are like ants because they look small. 

Our ability to make meaning of time changes.  As little children, the next hour or day, even minute, is a long time away.  The next month or year have relatively little difference in meaning to a little one: it is just a very, very long time to wait! As we get older, we start to think in years and then eventually in decades because our capacity to experience time has grown and we can conceptualise time in a different way.  We can step outside a minute, day, even a year and know that things will change, and even conceive that the unknown has many possibilities to be held usefully in ambiguity. 

It is the same for feelings and our relationships to ourselves and others.  Many of us have the experience of the consuming nature of our feelings, like the red mist of anger, the greyness of depression, and the immersion of being in love.  These are moments or relatively short periods of time that feel intense, but when we’re in them they feel timeless and all attention is focused on that one experience.  We are engulfed.  The older we get and the more well developed we are, the easier it is to have any feeling and know that they will pass and that emotions are data that we set outside ourselves.  We don’t have to “be had by”, or subject to, the emotion, we can be more objective.  Very well developed people can hold multiple feelings about one thing, even when they might be in contradiction or tension.  The thing in question can often be a person or relationship.

Why does vertical development matter?

The reason vertical development has become more important in leadership and talent development is the increasingly messy world we live in.  Life inside and outside organisations and work is not straightforward.  We live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) and this requires not just new skills or expert knowledge, it needs us to have different capabilities to meet and navigate the current complexity of the world.  Our meaning-making needs to be different.  

This is the meaning we make refers to three areas: concept and ideas, others behaviours and relationship to ourselves, and our own internal dialogue and self-awareness.  The fourth is a meta level: it is our ability to make meaning of how we make meaning and to step outside the whole of the situation and to see patterns over time and space. 

In modern life, in the VUCA world, we will navigate more successfully if we are not “had by” our emotional reactions meaning we can connect differently with others, move around concepts and ideas differently enabling us to solve problems.  Understanding ourselves better also helps with finding the sweet spot of being our best selves, in balance, more of the time.  This in turn means we are more likely to contribute fully at home and at work, and enjoy our lives. 

How does vertical development help with relationships to people and ideas?

As much of day to day work life involves dealing with people and often it is interactions with others that provokes emotions, so learning to develop and deepen our ways of relating to others and ourselves is increasingly critical to our success and our wellbeing.

I talked before about the engulfment by emotions and learning to recognise them as data we can look at.  In vertical, first, you learn about when this happens and why, what is provoking you, then you learn about recognising your patterns, what are early warning signs that you currently don’t notice, what context and circumstances are supportive and what are not.  You do this by examining the reactions in different ways; through the eyes of others, reflecting on experience, and putting yourself into experiments.  In these ways you can examine what is happening outside the situation and the moment of your reaction.  You can learn to recognise your triggers, and how to mitigate them, and eventually how to use your somatic experience to understand what’s happening to you and how to support yourself.  You may even gain the ability to shift your own and other emotional states. 

The process of setting reactions out of us and exploring them like an object, a thing, can be done with ideas and concepts too.  We walk around how we construct our frameworks and assumptions, get curious about how they came to be, and what the implications are for having that way of thinking.  We might start to notice the impact of ordering and categorisation.  We might notice how our preference of ideas are different to another’s and that there is a relationship between the idea and its context.  I was once talking to a friend about malaria prevention in a Kenyan community she works with. Having travelled in Asia I said “of course, let’s buy nets, and we can run a fundraising campaign and…’. You can imagine my explosion of well meaning enthusiasm.  This rightly was met with a bumpy halt when she let me know that people were trying to find food and cloth themselves, and nets would be used for fishnets and tops.  They are focused on staying alive not preventing death. Ideas are great but contextual understanding is critical.  I am sure you can think of times when your fabulous shiny ideas have not landed!

As you mature your ability to hold more than one way of thinking about something can grow.  So we move from things about something in polarity: right or wrong, good or bad, black or white.  We might develop our thinking to have shades of grey, then we might get to “it depends”.

You might hear older people respond to questions with “It depends what school of thought you’re coming from.”

So for example from a psychological point of view, a person might look at someone’s behaviour from a psychodynamic, humanistic, CBT or existentialist lens. From the psychodynamic point of view, you might be exploring childhood experiences and expression of the unconscious, and by contrast from a humanistic perspective, you’d take a present view about what is happening now, how the person feels, and what needs are not being met right now.   The CBT view is more likely to ask what thinking is unhelpful and getting in the way and what tools can we use to develop helpful thinking about this situation.  The existentialist would focus more on what is under threat and how the person their life is meaningful.  All different psychology schools of thought and there are others you could add into the mix.  We can hold several different lenses considering one idea, action or relationship.  They all might add insight, and none will be the entire truth. 

Vertical and self-governance

The third aspect for development in vertical development is the relationship to ourselves.  Do we know ourselves: when we are provoked, unwell physically and emotionally, when we are at best and what it takes to continually support this best version of us? 

The more capable an individual is of knowing when they have gone out of their equilibrium and the quicker they are at rebalancing, the more they can work in messiness.  In VUCA world this really matters.  Paying attention to all the sources of data that they might have will really help and each needs development. So that’s their intellect- the brain data, the stats and the logic, their physical intelligence- what their body is telling them, their emotional intelligence- how does this feel, as well as their intuitive data- what does their gut say. 

Once you’ve learnt about the different sorts of data, and you’ve reflected on what takes you out of balance, you can explore mitigation and methods for returning to your equilibrium, within the safe range.  Then you could go on to explore ways to stretch your range so less throws you outside your comfort zone and reduces your ability to be at your best. 

Vertical and the bigger messy picture

Different schools of thought provide us with different ways of seeing something. This leads to our capacity to understand perspective. No one person can have the whole view on something, you will see different things and experience them differently. 

When we talk about getting a different perspective, we are trying to understand it from another point of view and get a bigger picture. We’re increasing our cognitive capacity and collective cognition. 

If we can get comfortable with knowing we can’t know everything and know there aren’t single answers to understanding complex problems then we can start to work with other people to understand problems and situations better.  

If we know that things are likely to change and live in the flow of change, we can harness the benefits of remaining open to learning and iterating processes so they can adapt with change. We can also enjoy the flexibility and information flow of good relationships.  The bigger your relational network, the more likely it is that you’re going to get information and intelligence that gives you information about what’s going on in the environment quicker.

If we are able to relate to lots of different people in lots of different ways, it makes us more capable of moving positions and gives us many different ways of responding. 

If we can learn about ourselves we have more choices and are more likely to stay in balance.

All of these help us in living well and navigating a VUCA world.  Vertical models help us make sense of what needs to grow and consciously and deliberately develop our ability to deal with time,  relationships to people and ideas, and our relationship to ourselves are useful in helping us live with the mess, the unknown and changeability of our world.  

We’re still going through a pandemic, we’ve got local elections coming up, and big structural changes in the NHS.  There’s uncertainty about the economy, rising costs of living, and how people are going to work in the future, and those changes are not going to go away, and another set, another cycle of changes will come as well. This level of changeability and volatility will continue, and for us to be happy, thriving leaders, having increased our capacity to cope with VUCA and how to cope with the messiness is going to be really important, and vertical does help you do that.