Quotes from Robert Kegan

Learning is the making of meaning.

Successfully functioning in a society with diverse values, traditions and lifestyles requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions rather than be captive of them. To resist our tendencies to make right or true, that which is nearly familiar, and wrong or false, that which is only strange.

We uncovered a phenomenon we call "the immunity to change," a heretofore hidden dynamic that actively (and brilliantly) prevents us from changing because of its devotion to preserving our existing way of making meaning.

We all know that change is hard, but we don't know enough about why it is so hard and what we can do about it.

Better Me + Better You = Better Us

What Cathy took from her rejection experience was self-doubt. Until this current traumatic hospitalization, Cathy hadn't realized the fear she was carrying around, how burdened she was by it, and how that fear kept her in a mode where she had to continuously prove her value to others and herself.

But reflection without action is ultimately as unproductive as action without reflection.

A DDO represents, instead, a rethinking of the very place of people development in organizational life. What if a company did everything within its power to create the conditions for individuals to overcome their own internal barriers to change, to take stock of and transcend their own blind spots, and to see errors and weaknesses as prime opportunities for personal growth?

The way we're going to be a better company is by your working on yourself, and helping others work on themselves.

We may feel less a part of a cohesive society today not so much because of all the outrageous behavior we see reported in our media but because we are deprived of an accompanying sense of collective offense in response to the outrageous behavior.

Reflection = Progress

If you want to understand another person in some fundamental way you must know where the person is in his or her evolution...the way in which the person is settling the issue of what is 'self' and what is 'other' essentially defines the underlying logic (or 'psychologic') of the person's meanings.

At the simplest level, any particular expression of the immunity to change provides us a picture of how we are systematically working against the very goal we genuinely want to achieve.

It is a consistent mark of the DDOs we studied that the senior people are as deeply engaged in the personal growth journey as the newest hires. Working

The problem is the inability to close the gap between what we genuinely, even passionately, want and what we are actually able to do.

Even small changes in our Big Assumptions can have big implications for permanently altering our once-captivating equilibrium.

Instead of regarding them as things that just need to go away, we look at the behaviors as a precious resource, valuable information that can be mined to develop a more satisfying picture of what may really be happening. Another

This book, in other words, is another empirically grounded speculation, another conceptual itinerary.

In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for...Most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people's impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.

Bridgewater's Ray Dalio, for example, places a high premium on what he calls "radical open-mindedness," by which he means something qualitatively beyond a mere willingness to listen to a competing view when and if it comes to call. "To be radically open-minded," he says, "you need to be so open to the possibility that you might be making a mistake and/or that you have a weakness that you encourage others to tell you so.

Like the two other DDOs, Next Jump challenges employees by moving them into roles for which they're not yet prepared to succeed and then provides them with steady streams of feedback to help them grow into those roles. In all three companies, if you're completely able to perform your role, it's no longer the right role for you; it has no 'stretch' left.

When people hear 'flourishing,' they think of appreciation and good feelings. But growth and development does not always equal 'feeling good.' Our culture is not about maximizing the minutes you feel good at work. We don't define flourishing by sitting-around-the-campfire moments. We ask people to do seemingly impossible things.

What the eye sees better the heart feels more deeply.

The team's diagnosis of a problem this morning centers on Sergio. The entire group has just spent time discussing Sergio's most recent review. On any given day, all employees are getting and giving feedback from multiple sources about how they're doing their jobs. Nothing in a formal review comes as a surprise. But it's also expected that individual reviews will be discussed with the entire team and with total candor. Niko