“An Everyone Culture” is Kegan and Lahey’s most accessible book, by which I mean it asks you to agree with them the least about constructive developmental theory relative to their other books. I personally found it kind of boring since I read Kegan forward rather than backward and if you’ve read “The Evolving Self” then basically everything else he’s done since then is just an elaboration on the key insights found there, but if you want to gently understand Kegan without getting thrown straight in the deep end of philosophy then reading his works backwards makes a lot of sense. If you were to read only one book of which Kegan is the author, though, I think “Immunity to Change” is the best bet, since it provides the most concise explanation of the theory and the most how-to knowledge of all his and Lahey’s works.
A few words now on working/creating a DDO.
I don’t think anyone but me would call my employer a DDO, but I molded it to be that. It’s a startup, I was an early employee, and as we grew I got my hands dirty shaping the culture into the kind of place I wanted to work. There are lots of way I did this culture shaping from active nudging at the edges to major efforts to get folks aligned, but if I had to boil it down to a few slogan-sized descriptions of what I did it would be:
The whole person comes to work
Kaizen
Collaboration/cooperation requires that everyone feel safe
Everyone can be part of our culture, but not everyone is ready to be part of our culture now
Unlike a place like Bridgewater, say, we don’t spend much time talking about our personal lives in formal settings and almost no one yells at anyone else, but it’s a place where you can be yourself, no one is afraid for their job to tell their manager that they are causing problems (though they might not for other reasons), everyone gives and accepts feedback, and everyone supports everyone else (at least passively). If that sounds pretty ideal it’s because it is.
I also liked “An Everyone Culture”, but then I’m biased heavily in favor of Kegan, so no surprise there.
“An Everyone Culture” is Kegan and Lahey’s most accessible book, by which I mean it asks you to agree with them the least about constructive developmental theory relative to their other books. I personally found it kind of boring since I read Kegan forward rather than backward and if you’ve read “The Evolving Self” then basically everything else he’s done since then is just an elaboration on the key insights found there, but if you want to gently understand Kegan without getting thrown straight in the deep end of philosophy then reading his works backwards makes a lot of sense. If you were to read only one book of which Kegan is the author, though, I think “Immunity to Change” is the best bet, since it provides the most concise explanation of the theory and the most how-to knowledge of all his and Lahey’s works.
A few words now on working/creating a DDO.
I don’t think anyone but me would call my employer a DDO, but I molded it to be that. It’s a startup, I was an early employee, and as we grew I got my hands dirty shaping the culture into the kind of place I wanted to work. There are lots of way I did this culture shaping from active nudging at the edges to major efforts to get folks aligned, but if I had to boil it down to a few slogan-sized descriptions of what I did it would be:
The whole person comes to work
Kaizen
Collaboration/cooperation requires that everyone feel safe
Everyone can be part of our culture, but not everyone is ready to be part of our culture now
Unlike a place like Bridgewater, say, we don’t spend much time talking about our personal lives in formal settings and almost no one yells at anyone else, but it’s a place where you can be yourself, no one is afraid for their job to tell their manager that they are causing problems (though they might not for other reasons), everyone gives and accepts feedback, and everyone supports everyone else (at least passively). If that sounds pretty ideal it’s because it is.