Are There Stages of Adult Development?

The older I get, the more I focus on maturity. One dictionary defines “mature” as “someone or something that is full grown or adult, either physically or in terms of behavior or attitude.” 

Becoming a full-grown adult psychologically and behaviorally, rather than physically, is the focus of this post. The subject is directly related to our blog’s central topic: leadership.

True, the Map ain’t the Territory, however . . .

When I discovered theories of human maturity extending beyond our childhood years it was exciting and daunting. Exciting because I could better understand myself and others, and the vast potential for human growth beyond the discovery of brain plasticity. Daunting because it became clear how far I and others had yet to go. For those curious, the field of developmental psychology covers much of this ground. Before taking a short swim into a few examples of such theories, let’s dip our feet in by riffing on the value and limitations of theories and models or maps as such. 

One of my biggest influences as a writer is the late Stanley Crouch, who didn’t like being overly theoretical, especially theories he viewed as simple-minded, woefully misguided, or worthy of the dustbins of history. Varieties of Black Nationalism and Marxism are examples of theories that met his ire. Yet the history of science has shown that models and theories have direct import and implications in the objective world.

While I agree with much of Stanley’s critique of such socio-political theories, the theoretical frameworks I have in mind are of a different order of evolutionary depth and life application. In my estimation, a theory’s value is directly tied to how well it helps us see the world as it actually is, how much clarity it brings to bear, and how comprehensive it is within a sphere of reference. A theory can be a heuristic guide and map, but still isn’t the territory. 

Nonetheless, if you go on a journey to someplace you’ve never been before, isn’t a map useful? Say you’re familiar with an area by foot or by car. Isn’t zooming out to see how your location fits and relates to other nearby spaces and places illuminating, or at least interesting? A 10,000 feet view can provide another perspective, another way of seeing the terrain of our lives. 

I agree with the exemplary executive leadership coach Jennifer Garvey Berger: “I have become increasingly convinced that understanding the terrain helps us walk it with more grace and less pain.” 

So a map or model can allow us to glimpse a wide angle shot of reality, a reality inclusive of the past, the present as well as future possibilities. But that wide angle vision isn’t the same as walking the terrain, similar to the way that listening to a bass player’s 4/4 pulse isn’t the same as learning how to sing, play or walk it gracefully with others who are swingin’ too.

Adult Development Microscopes and Telescopes

Consider the microscope and the telescope. A microscope helps us see smaller and smaller, a telescope extends our vision to the stars. A few years ago, Seth Godin riffed on these two inventions in relation to opportunity and trouble. 

“It pays to look at opportunity with a telescope. It’s real but it’s distant,” Seth wrote. “The telescope brings it into focus and helps you find your way there.”

Experiencing trouble, on the other hand, if viewed in “tiny component parts” can allow us to “learn how it is constructed” and lessen its hold on our dreams. “Once you realize how it’s built, you can deal with it.” 

So true. That’s why adult development theory is crucial: it telescopes, brings into focus, our potential to grow wider, deeper, and higher frequencies of meaning in our lives, increasing our behavioral capacity to handle the fast-paced complexities of contemporary life, while microscoping the barriers to psychological and cultural advance and generative change beyond the misty shadows of our social conditioning and the safety net comfort zones of our egos. 

Mental Complexity into Adulthood

Children grow physically and advance in cognitive stages well-researched and explained by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. In the past 40 or so years, several other researchers have engaged in empirical, longitudinal studies that demonstrate growth capacities developing over the course of an adult life. 

Such development, according to the work of Susann Cook-Greuter and results found in the assessment tools she deploys—the Maturity Assessment Profile and the Leadership Maturity Framework—extends into the domains of cognitive complexity, emotional competence, and behavior.

Harvard scholar Robert Kegan’s work provides another angle into this process of adult maturity. Until recent decades, most thought this was the totality of adult growth:

But Kegan and his research and writing partner Lisa Lahey found that adults can evolve different plateaus of growth. What Kegan and Lahey call “adult forms of mind,” levels of mental complexity, can advance in this manner:  

Although these plateaus don’t occur within all adults, mental complexity tends to increase with age. 

When an evolution occurs from one level of complexity to another, adults take greater responsibility for their thinking and feeling, can retain more layers of information, and can think into the future. 

—Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

Think of yourself and the people with whom you work as you read the forms of mind from socialized to self-authoring to self-transforming. Which aspects do you and they display? And which type of leaders are cultivated in the organizations you work in and engage with? Very few organizations consciously develop the capacities of their people to go beyond what, in developmental leadership coaching, is called their “growth edge.”

In a world of increasing complexity and exponential crises, leaders who are independently self-authoring are necessary, as the status quo won’t help us out of our ditches of confusion. For organizations to function well, socialized team players will of course remain essential. Yet, as we in the Jazz Leadership Project cultivate with the organizations and individuals we collaborate with, self-transforming leadership that enacts an interdependent action-logic—in self and with others—is necessary also. 

The latter two stages of the Kegan-Lahey model above align with the most advanced levels detailed by David Rooke and Bill Torbert in their 2005 Harvard Business Review piece, “Seven Transformations of Leadership”: Individualist, Strategist, and Magician/Alchemist. Without such advanced capacities coming online in greater numbers of leaders, it will be difficult to climb out of the ditch. If such advanced capacities begin to scale, the relational, embodied wisdom and soulful maturity for us to not only survive but thrive can become real.