I’m totally with you in wishing that Kegan levels weren’t getting socially entangled with claims to superiority!
...but that can’t be achieved in the way you describe: they would be a fundamentally different thing if they didn’t come in the order they do. It’s not a personality typing system, it’s a model of human development over time. Probably some people who are talking about them are self-aggrandizing; people are known to do that with just about everything they can get their hands on.
I suspect that your heuristics about not trusting people who brag about their Kegan levels are probably decently good heuristics, as it could be reasonably expected that that would be ineffective in just the way you’re describing here.
I first learned about the CDT model from a conversation I had with someone who used to work with Kegan, and who readily noted that he was not himself consistently operating out of stage 5. Robert Kegan has said that about himself too, which I found surprising and originally interpreted as being a failure mode in the opposite direction—false humility or something. But now it strikes me as not that unlikely. There’s a big difference between being able to recognize abstractly (or in others) what it means to be subject to one’s own interpretations & ideologies, and being able to actually not do it.
There’s an unfortunate phenomenon here, where the value of the concept gets diluted because the people who are finding the Kegan models helpful but aren’t claiming to be at higher Kegan levels than others… are harder to notice.
Anyway, I realize that I may sound like I’m making a superiority claim here myself. I will address that directly, kind of like Duncan is doing re: skulls above.
My understanding—based more on reading things like this than Kegan’s own work—is that the “fluid mode” (~=K-5) does have capabilities that the “systematic mode” (~=K-4) does not; much like multivariate calculus can be used to re-derive the equation for the volume of a sphere, but not the reverse. Is multivariate calculus superior to sphere equations? In functional senses yes, but not in a social status way. And also not in all domains! It’s certainly slower if you just need to calculate the volumes of a bunch of spheres.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the past year working to develop the ability to operate in the fluid mode, and I think that that makes a lot of sense for me and many other people, but I don’t think that that’s highest priority for everyone right now. Hence my strong support for Dragon Army.
I like the paragraph “my understanding” a lot. In particular, while I think I have some limited, flickering access to K5, I notice that operations which come out of being solidly K4 often cause me to outstrip/outperform people who are entirely in K5, which seems to me to be something analogous to “I’m successfully calculating the volumes of a bunch of spheres and you’re just stuck there mired in re-derivation.”
I’m not sure what it means to be entirely K5. To me the phrase sounds like Chapman’s description of the postmodernists who are at K3 and tried to skip K4 entirely and are without any real access to the ability to use a system.
Fair. “People who overwhelmingly operate from a thing where I’m comfortable applying the label K5,” where overwhelmingly means 90+% and comfortable means 90+%.
I’m totally with you in wishing that Kegan levels weren’t getting socially entangled with claims to superiority!
...but that can’t be achieved in the way you describe: they would be a fundamentally different thing if they didn’t come in the order they do. It’s not a personality typing system, it’s a model of human development over time. Probably some people who are talking about them are self-aggrandizing; people are known to do that with just about everything they can get their hands on.
I suspect that your heuristics about not trusting people who brag about their Kegan levels are probably decently good heuristics, as it could be reasonably expected that that would be ineffective in just the way you’re describing here.
I first learned about the CDT model from a conversation I had with someone who used to work with Kegan, and who readily noted that he was not himself consistently operating out of stage 5. Robert Kegan has said that about himself too, which I found surprising and originally interpreted as being a failure mode in the opposite direction—false humility or something. But now it strikes me as not that unlikely. There’s a big difference between being able to recognize abstractly (or in others) what it means to be subject to one’s own interpretations & ideologies, and being able to actually not do it.
There’s an unfortunate phenomenon here, where the value of the concept gets diluted because the people who are finding the Kegan models helpful but aren’t claiming to be at higher Kegan levels than others… are harder to notice.
Anyway, I realize that I may sound like I’m making a superiority claim here myself. I will address that directly, kind of like Duncan is doing re: skulls above.
My understanding—based more on reading things like this than Kegan’s own work—is that the “fluid mode” (~=K-5) does have capabilities that the “systematic mode” (~=K-4) does not; much like multivariate calculus can be used to re-derive the equation for the volume of a sphere, but not the reverse. Is multivariate calculus superior to sphere equations? In functional senses yes, but not in a social status way. And also not in all domains! It’s certainly slower if you just need to calculate the volumes of a bunch of spheres.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the past year working to develop the ability to operate in the fluid mode, and I think that that makes a lot of sense for me and many other people, but I don’t think that that’s highest priority for everyone right now. Hence my strong support for Dragon Army.
I like the paragraph “my understanding” a lot. In particular, while I think I have some limited, flickering access to K5, I notice that operations which come out of being solidly K4 often cause me to outstrip/outperform people who are entirely in K5, which seems to me to be something analogous to “I’m successfully calculating the volumes of a bunch of spheres and you’re just stuck there mired in re-derivation.”
i.e. relative strengths in different domains.
I’m not sure what it means to be entirely K5. To me the phrase sounds like Chapman’s description of the postmodernists who are at K3 and tried to skip K4 entirely and are without any real access to the ability to use a system.
Fair. “People who overwhelmingly operate from a thing where I’m comfortable applying the label K5,” where overwhelmingly means 90+% and comfortable means 90+%.