The Developmental

While empirical evidence for adult development theories is robust, we still have much to learn about the cognitive and neurological substrates of human development. What changes in our brain when we develop vertically? How can the idea that humans evolve in ever-increasing stages of mental complexity and perspective-taking be reconciled with research on neuroplasticity and cognition?

I was very excited to step into this fascinating in-between space together with Johan Mellerup Traekjaer a cognitive scientist with deep expertise in adult development. Here are a few of the key ideas we touched on:

Brief Episode Notes:

[00:00:00] Alis and Johan dive into the intersection of adult development and neuroscience.

[00:02:00] Johan's background: From feeling like a school misfit to exploring cognitive science and time in the military.

[00:08:00] Introduction to non-linear dynamics in cognitive development.

[00:10:00] The brain's preference for predictability and its growth implications.

[00:18:00] The brain's models of reality and their subjective nature.

[00:31:00] The value of stepping outside one's comfort zone

[00:33:00] Role of emotions in adult development and perspective shifts.

[00:39:00] Connection between learning and inherent discomfort.

[00:44:30] The brain's "handbrake" activates in overwhelming situations.

[00:47:30] Value of taking small, uncomfortable steps for brain development.

[00:49:00] Stress's influence on working memory, decision-making and perspective-taking

[00:59:00] We're part of larger systems, not isolated entities.

[01:00:30] Vision of a society prioritizing development and collective wisdom.

[01:03:30] Societal benefits of focusing on developmental work.

[01:05:30] Closing reflections and gratitude.

About Johan Mellerup Traekjaer

Johan has a diverse background ranging from academia to military and security work. In the early years, Johan worked on the frontline as a protection officer, security operator and consultant as well as in the rehabilitation of young offenders. He eventually swung in an academic direction, lecturing and researching cognitive science and organisational psychology, while still keeping a foot in the high-stakes world training various operators in stress management, threat and tactical security behaviour, and high-risk conflict management. He has been leading an academic leadership program for senior noncom officers and Air Force pilots. 

Previously associate professor at UC South Denmark and currently a senior consultant at Amara Collaboration and scientific advisor at Shifting Horizons, Johan has been exploring the space between science, spirituality, and adult development for two decades and will continue to do so. His primary interest is the interplay between human consciousness, biological systems and physics. Johan lives in Denmark and enjoys his free time reading extensively, sea kayaking, running, self-defence and when there is time, exploring the wild. 

Are you finding this content useful? Refer a friend (or more) and unlock complimentary access to our paid webinars. Learn more about how that works.

Additional resources:

Amy Arnsten’s research on stress: https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/amy-arnsten/

A brilliant article from Johan on the importance of action towards building wisdom: https://amara.fi/it-often-hurts-to-become-wiser/

An initial study in the neuroscience of adult development: Toward a Neuroscience of Adult Cognitive Developmental Theory: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2018.00004/full

A study on the brain of contemplative practitioners and links to adult development: "Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Correlate with Psychosocial Development in Contemplative Practitioners and Controls" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34070890/

Navigating the Affordance Landscape: Feedback Control as a Process Model of Behavior and Cognition: http://www.ldnc.uns.edu.ar/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/pagina3.pdf

Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

Spread the word…

If you want to bring your bit to building a wiser, more conscious world, I hope you share this article with others who could benefit from the learning.

and, if you haven’t done it yet, Subscribe!

Join your nerdy community and let’s keep on staying curious and learning from each-other.

Recently I began exploring some prevailing (and to my mind, quite damaging) myths around vertical development. You can find the first article in this series below.

Another one of these myths is that adult development is an individual journey. Much of the existing research on vertical development (including my own) has focused on individuals’ journeys through the stages and on the impact leaders operating from various stages (particularly later ones) can have on their teams and organisations. This is partly perhaps because individuals are much easier to study than whole systems. Whatever the reason for this preference for the individual perspective, we still have much to do in exploring the interconnectedness of individual and system and how that plays out in adult development.

Thank you for reading Vertical Development: How Grown-ups Grow Up. This post is public so feel free to share it.

On the other hand, practitioners in the complexity/systems space have been criticising the overly individualistic views of human development and have been advocating for a systems perspective as the way to foster sustainable, scalable change. In calling out the imbalance, some of them have swung the pendulum to the opposite end of the spectrum, dismissing any focus on individual growth/change as irrelevant and suggesting system-level interventions are the only way to have an impact.

My lived experience working both within organisations - with groups large and small - as well as individually, with hundreds of leaders – has shown me that neither of these extremes seems to be the full picture. System and individual seem to be inextricably connected and I have come to believe that trying to influence one in isolation from the other is futile, as is trying to dismiss one or the other as irrelevant.

Watching the ongoing debate between advocates for individual lenses on change versus systemic lenses has made me wonder if what we might be dealing with is, in fact, a polarity and whether we might learn something new from stepping back from it to see the broader perspective of the individual AND system. So I have set out to explore this myth of development as solely a function of the individual in more detail and sought to invite an alternative perspective that can illuminate the role of system, while also honouring the individual.

On today,’s episode, I am thrilled to dialogue with a guest whose work I admire and who I believe holds precious wisdom at the intersection of these two fields – individual development and systemic change. I have learnt a lot from this conversation with Joan Lurie and I hope it offers you as much food for thought as it did to me.

Finding this content useful? Refer a friend (or more) and unlock complimentary access to our paid webinars. Learn more about how that works.

About Joan Lurie

Joan is the Founder and CEO of Orgonomics, an organisation strategy and leadership development consultancy she established in 2008 to help leaders and organisations develop, perform and transform. She is a Fulbright Scholar with a Master’s Degree in Adult Education and a Master’s Degree in Developmental Psychology.

Joan works with boards, executives and leadership teams to help them develop systemic intelligence and to design and lead complex adaptive change in their organisations with turnaround results. Working together they emerge new cultures, operating models and organisational forms.

Joan applies the Orgonomics™ methodology she created which is most often referred to as ground-breaking. It’s a novel theory and practice for organisations which integrates strategy, systems thinking, complexity and adult development theory. It provides an ecological ‘map’ for leaders to navigate the unique challenges they face and be fit for the current complex landscape we are in. It enables leaders to fundamentally shift how they take up their roles; reframe their assumptions, mental maps and ways of knowing and repattern their organisational systems for new ways of relating and operating to function as coherent wholes.

In a nutshell, Joan’s work enables leaders, teams and organisations to liberate themselves from the constraints and patterns which no longer serve them, but in which they are stuck.

“When I first created Orgonomics™ my core purpose was to assist leaders and organisations to develop their systemic and adaptive muscle - to enable them to continuously develop and grow with complexity. Back then, this was a “nice to have” but now it is an individual and organisational imperative, one which we have to accelerate for the good of our whole ecology”

Read more about Joan’s work here and here and I’m looking forward to your thoughts and comments after listening to our conversation.

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

Spread the word…

If you want to bring your bit to building a wiser, more conscious world, I hope you share this article with others who could benefit from the learning.

and, if you haven’t done it yet, Subscribe!

Join your nerdy community and let’s keep on staying curious and learning from each-other.

As those of you who listen to this podcast or read my articles probably already know, the topic of ‘walking the talk’ – the capacity to be the person you are asking (or raising, coaching, teaching) others to be – is very important to me. I believe this to be true in many contexts, but particularly so in professions where the very focus of our work is supporting others’ growth. Therapists, Coaches, Facilitators – all have, I believe, a big responsibility in doing the work of development for themselves, just as they do it with their clients. Scaffolds like mentoring and supervision go a long way to keeping us honest and evolving, but so do our own efforts, day in and day out. But what do those efforts look like? What does it mean to ‘embody the work’?

In this episode I explore these very questions with my dear friend and fellow coach, Priya Ahuja. I’ve met Priya in a context where I was a newcomer, entering an established group of long-time coaches of which she was part. From the get-go I was touched by her authenticity, integrity, openness, and generosity in helping me feel right at home in that high-stakes environment. Over the years, we have become friends and I have learnt so much from her on the art of coaching, but also on the art of being a wise human being. To me, Priya is a coach who walks the talk and I have invited her to unpack what that means for her, what is the inner work she is doing to keep herself honest, aware and cultivate within herself the wisdom she is striving to support in her clients.

About Priya

Priya brings more than two decades of experience at McKinsey & Company as a leader supporting individualand institutional transformation. She now works for herself as a leadership coach and facilitator. She also mentorscoaches seeking to further develop their capacities.

Priya supports senior leaders across the globe on tailored, individual leadership journeys anchored in their current strengths, helping them realise and live into their full potential. She facilitates large scale leadership transformation programs locally and globally, working simultaneously at the individual and group levels to support individual leaders, executive teams and organisations more skilfully navigate the extreme turbulence emblematic of the current global environment.

Priya’s coaching and facilitation is informed and supported by leading edge thinking and practices in the fieldof adult development, systems leadership and change, and the human potential movement. Her own experience of growing up, living, and working in 4 countries across 3 continents has also shaped her approach to coaching, facilitation and mentoring, as she brings this rich diversity of lived experiences to her work.

Priya is a certified Integral Master Coach™. She holds a Master’s degree in Organisational Psychology and a Master’s degree in International Relations.

Resources mentioned in this episode

You can read more about Ken Wilber’s take on lines of development:

Here: https://www.integrallife.com/the-many-ways-we-grow/

Here: https://www.thegreatupdraft.com/ken-wilber-fundamentals-developmental-lines/

And specifically about the moral line of development Priya mentioned in the podcast, here: https://www.simplypsychology.org/kohlberg.html#:~:text=Kohlberg%20identified%20three%20levels%20of,typical%20of%20the%20earlier%20stage

Here is an article I wrote introducing the idea of lines for those not familiar with the concept.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. If you are curious to dive more deeply into Vertical Development learning, check out our online library of webinars and ICF-accredited programs for coaches and leaders: https://courses.verticaldevelopmentinstitute.com

Thanks for listening to The Developmental Podcast! Subscribe for free to receive new episodes and support my work.

This has been a very important and emotional conversation for me. The topic itself, being a developmental leader, is at the core of my own work and research. With every new answer I uncover, a hundred more questions come up so this subject is likely to keep me busy for the rest of my professional life. On a personal level, I am very grateful I was gifted with people like Mike Vierow in my life, who have supported my own development, encouraged my crazy dreams and have demonstrated for me what it actually feels like to be in a nurturing learning space and surrounded by people who are embodied developmental catalysts.

We talk a lot about what impactful leadership means and I believe we don’t hear enough true stories about the lived beauty and messiness of being that leader for others and developing yourself in the process. As you will hear, it’s not all joyful, it’s definitely not easy, there’s a lot of fear, risk-taking and failure involved. But it’s also about love, integrity and staying anchored in positive intent, even at the hardest of times.

I hope Mike’s story as a leader and my own story of being at the receiving end of his leadership style will invite all of you who listen to reflect on who the developmental leaders in your own lives might have been and what exactly did they do to nurture your growth? And most of all, I hope it invites you to consider who are the people you are being a developmental leader for? Who are you impacting through the way you show up every day? Who are you going to believe in next, who are you going to lift up, coach, encourage, let fail and learn and be there with no judgement when they get lost, trusting they’ll find their way again?

Finding some interesting ideas here? Feel free to share this podcast with others who might use the reflection.

About Mike Vierow

Mike has had experience in leading complex adaptive transformations and large-scale capability building in various industries. He grew up in Brisbane, Australia and began his career as an officer in the Royal Navy after graduating from the world’s oldest leadership school, the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, UK. Following his military service, he worked in program management roles in technology and banking before joining McKinsey & Company as a transformation expert.Over eight years at McKinsey, Mike worked at the intersection of strategy and transformation in unlocking the full potential of people and organisations. Beyond transformation, Mike founded McKinsey's senior leadership development programs that served Australian & New Zealand rising leaders and was responsible globally for the Firm’s research on teaming and psychological safety. Mike now works in the aviation industry.

Resources and people mentioned in this episode

Ron Heifetz’s work on Adaptive (versus Technical) Leadership

Robert Kegan’s work on adult development

Tom Harkin’s work at Tomorrow Architects & Tomorrow Man

We hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. If you are curious to dive more deeply into Vertical Development learning, check out our online library of webinars and ICF-accredited programs for coaches and leaders.

Our guest for this episode is one of the leading researchers and practitioners in the space of vertical development. Nick Petrie has been a pioneer in bridging the science and application of adult development theories into organisational learning. His whitepapers on designing and implementing developmentally effective learning programs have inspired a whole new generation of researchers. Nick is currently breaking new ground in studying burnout and its developmental implications, as well as supporting leaders and learning designers to create their own developmental programs through his Vertical Incubator project.

Nick is a researcher and speaker on leadership, resilience and burnout prevention. A New Zealander, with significant international experience, Nick has lived and worked in the U.S., Europe, Asia, The Middle East and Scandinavia. His clients include Google, Walmart, NASA, Delta and Novartis. He has worked globally across industries including healthcare, tech, banking, education, energy, law and television. He holds a Master's degree from Harvard University and is the author of the book "Work Without Stress: Building a Resilient Mindset for Lasting Success". To learn more about Nick and his work you can visit his website here.

In this very special episode, we explore how raising children can be a catalyst for vertical development and how our kids end up, in a very real sense, raising us, just as we are raising them. My dialogue partner is a dear friend, senior leader and a mother who has walked the talk of personal transformation in the act of raising her (now adult) children and has then taken those lessons back into her leadership.

Genevieve Hawkins is General Manager Transformation and Supply Chain at Coles Liquor Group and the author of the book "Mentally at Work" - a powerful and practical guide for creating workplaces where humans can thrive.

From the start of her career as an occupational therapist, Genevieve has had a passion for understanding and influencing the psychology of how people not just cope but thrive under pressure. This passion led her to further study and exploration of how leaders, teams and cultures perform and has seen Genevieve move from the health system to insurance, to risk management consulting, to the corporate world. 

Genevieve is now a senior executive with extensive experience in leading major change programs in large organisations and is cognisant of seeing things from a different perspective given her mix of experiences and qualifications which includes parenting two, now adult children, of which one is transgender. It is this different perspective that led Genevieve to write Mentally at Work to help current and future leaders, lead in a way that makes a difference to individuals, teams and organisational performance. And it resulted in her becoming the sponsor for Pride at Coles.

She believes in the value of simplicity, pragmatism, finding the right way to talk about the elephants in the room, embracing clunky conversations and the importance of sticking to your ‘true north’ in order to get the right long-term outcome for a business and its people and herself.

Enjoy our vulnerable conversation about motherhood, dying and birthing identities, leadership and growing up the hard way.

In this episode, I am joined by a self-confessed fellow 'nerd' to explore a topic that has hardly ever been discussed in relation to vertical development: adult giftedness and neurodivergence.

Dr. Tracy Winter is is a leadership coach specializing in neurodiversity and the founder of Nerd Coach⁠. She enjoys coaching clients who are gifted, ADHDers, autistic, dyslexic, and more. Each client she meets has a unique brain that deserves its own unique approach, and she partners with her clients to use their strengths to reach the outcomes they desire. Tracy trains new ADHD coaches and is a mentor coach for students at the International ADHD Coach Training Center. She also facilitates leadership development training with organizations such as Tesla and has been an adjunct professor at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. 

Tracy earned a Ph.D. in Human Development, an MA in Human and Organization Systems, and an Evidence-Based Coaching Certificate from Fielding Graduate University. Her dissertation focused on the social-emotional needs of highly gifted adults. Tracy also holds a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential from the International Coach Federation (ICF) and is the immediate Past President of the ICF Greater Austin Chapter.

Here are a few of the things Tracy has learnt in her work and which we explore in our dialogue together:

• Many neurodivergent adults (particularly gifted ones) don't self-identify as such


• Neurodivergent people often have different social-emotional needs that go unnoticed.


• Development in neurodivergent people is by excellence asynchronous - with some exceptionally developed capacities in some areas and limitations in others. That holds true of vertical development more broadly - where lines of development rarely, if ever, evolve at the same pace.


• People often have the solutions within them; they just need the right questions to find them - so that's why coaching can be an extremely powerful tool for neurodivergent people.


• Being and feeling truly seen can make an incredibly positive difference to someone's long-term development and yet is an experience neurodivergent people are most often deprived of.

This has been both an intellectually stimulating and enlightening conversation and a very personal one. Tracy and I dove into some of our lived experiences of neurodivergence and the gifts and challenges that come with that and explore why leaning in with curiosity towards the 'different other' might be the smallest most transformative thing we could do in families, teams and society to help harness the huge (and often untapped into) potential of the neurodivergent among us.

Useful Resources:

• Theory of Positive Disintegration

  
  



• Tracy’s dissertation on the self-concept of gifted adults

  
  



• Tracy’s coach (and neurodiversity expert): Kate Arms

  
  

In this episode, we explore the bridges between the new field of vertical development and the ancient practice of mindfulness with the help of Michael Bunting - author, researcher, and leadership expert. We discover how certain types of meditation - such as insight-mindfulness practice - can actually create an impact on vertical development by teaching us to recognise and lean into the most difficult feelings (the ones we usually try to avoid). This ancient practice is consistent with the newest research on adult development and the role of contrasting emotions in vertical growth. We also talk about love, addiction, what it takes to open up our hearts and how organisations might become places of healing, instead of suffering.

Michael is the author of the bestselling books The Mindful Leader and A Practical Guide to Mindful Meditation and co-authored Extraordinary Leadership in Australia & New Zealand with Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, some of the world’s premier researchers and authors in the field of leadership.

His latest book, published in October 2022, Vertical Growth, is a must-read book for anyone wanting to master self-awareness and lifelong growth.

He is the founder of Awakened Mind, a mindfulness IOS/Android App and The Mindful Leader leadership consultancy. Michael and his team have worked with some of the world’s most prestigious organisations in the area of executive leadership, mindfulness, mental health, adult development and scaled culture change. Several of his clients are award-winning best employers, and his app has been academically researched and proven to produce substantial improvement in key areas impacting mental health and team performance.

He lives with his wife and 4 children in Sydney, Australia.

Beyond his books and app, Michael recommends two well-known apps for beginning meditatiors - Calm and Insight Timer. 

This is a very special episode of The Developmental, featuring two adult development experts who are also best friends. They will open up the inner sanctum of their 12-year friendship to explore why and how it has transformed each of them, and what other people might learn from it all. This is an episode filled with personal life stories, but also one grounded in a research-based framework on transformative relationships. The story of one friendship will illuminate how this framework actually works and how you might bring it to life in your own friendships or other meaningful relationships. 

Veronica Brejan is Managing Partner at NeuroMindfulness® Institute and a former international HR Director. Veronica held top HR positions in London, Paris and Eastern Europe: Chief People Officer Europe (Pizza Hut, Yum! Brands), Global Head of Talent (Vodafone), and internal HR advisor roles in KPMG, Cargill and Alstom. Her areas of expertise are leadership development, executive coaching, talent strategy and organizational culture.

Veronica holds an EMBA from the Maastricht School of Management and Master in Business Communication. She is an ICF-certified executive coach (ACC), holding certifications from Barrett Values Center (Evolutionary Coaching) and the Institute of Human Excellence founded by Sir John Whitmore (Transpersonal Coaching). She is also a trained Yoga teacher and accredited Practitioner of NLP, Timeline Therapy and Hypnotherapy with the American Board of NLP.

Veronica and Alis have been best friends for 12 years. Their career paths have intersected, then diverged in complementary ways. Their life paths have been at times uncannily similar, and at other times radically different. They have lived in the same city, then in different countries and finally on different continents for years, and discovered how to keep friendship alive over long distances. They have been through ups and downs - separately and together - and have learnt how to be there for eachother not when it's easy, but most of all when it's hard. They almost lost their friendship, only to recover it stronger than ever before. 

Join them for the story of five seasons of friendship and an exploration of five ingredients of developmental relationships. Read more about the five ingredients framework in Alis’ PhD Dissertation. A dedicated article on this topic will follow soon here, on the VDI website.

In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Valerie Livesay, a passionate researcher who has devoted her work to illuminating the darker corners of our beings and the role our worst moments play in our long-term development. We talk about a core concept stemming from Valerie's research - Fallback - which describes those moments in life when we involuntarily revert to less mature ways of behaving and find ourselves simply unable to access our usual sense of perspective and wisdom. We discuss how vertical development is not at all a linear journey and is more of a 'two steps forward-one step backward' progression. We explore what triggers fallback, and how it manifests in our life both at work and at home. Valerie shares her insights into how we might turn moments of fallback into precious lessons for growth. 

Valerie introduces us to the metaphor of theatre as a description of our multi-faceted self and the idea of "Ghost Light" as an invitation to shed light on the 'inner characters' we usually avoid facing. While befriending those 'fallback characters' can be e lifetime's work - Valerie makes an excellent case as to why it can be deeply rewarding, worthwhile work. 

To dive more deeply into Dr. Livesay's work and gain a more thorough understanding of your own Fallback patterns and ways to change them, I invite you to read her book: "Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating Fallback in Embrace of the Fullness of You" and explore the course by the same name, which Valerie will be facilitating in 2023.