We live in a culture that prioritises youth over genuine wisdom, the speediness of the moment over what takes time to mature and grow, and obviousness and immediacy over the deep understanding of complex, interrelated systems. Given all of this it’s wonderful to see serious coverage in the mainstream UK press given to the possibilities of development - and all that it brings - as we grow older.
The capacity to be powerful in the midst of the super-complex systems and organisations upon which we rely does not come easily. It requires a significant set of interrelated skills in sensing, understanding, speaking and listening, self-care, self-awareness, request making, and acting into the unknown. These skills do not come immediately to us and require years of practice, diligent self-observation, commitment, and a genuine capacity to let go of what seems certain so that what’s less obvious can be encountered. So it should be no surprise to us, as reported in this week’s Guardian newspaper, that such capacity is more often found in those who have had longer to live so far (as long as they have remained sufficiently open to the developmental opportunities that have come their way).
The Guardian article draws on a paper published by consultants PwC, itself drawn from research carried out at Harthill, that shows that people who have reached this skilful strategist stage of their development are more frequently found among women over the age of 55 than among any other group. This is important for us to see - because we don’t take adult development nearly seriously enough (it’s vital if we are to be able to effectively manage and run contemporary systems and organisations for the benefit of everyone), and because we don’t see that there is a kind of systemic wisdom we need that is rare, necessary, and most widely found in those people we quickly write off as ‘past it’.
David Rooke and his colleagues at Harthill are among a number of people who have done excellent work in describing what development is - descriptions which make it easier for us to talk about and identify the kind of wisdom we most sorely need, as well as what can make it possible for people to bring it about.
For a clear introduction which goes far beyond what’s included in either the Guardian or the PwC paper, you could read Rooke & Torbert’s paper ‘The Seven Transformations of Leadership’ published originally in the Harvard Business Review, summarised here, and available from Harthill's Leadership Development Framework website.
And for a deeper understanding of what development can be, and the consequences of our blindness to it, read Robert Kegan’s book ‘In Over Our Heads’ or his more recent (and more straightforward) book with Lisa Laskow Lahey ‘Immunity to Change’.
You can read more about what I’ve had to say about this topic here and here.
Photo Credit: jenny downing via Compfight cc
And so any of us who leads, or wishes to lead others, could do well to study ourselves closely through taking up (1) some kind of 
So much of what it is to be a person is invisible to us.Yes, we can see outward behaviour, but we can't see the thoughts, intentions, vows, commitments, bodily sensations, meaning, love, joy, grief, sadness, hope or pain of others.In order to see and understand other people as people and not as objects we need to be able to understand the contours of their inner worlds. And in order to do that, we need to know our own inner worlds: we need the language and discernment to notice and distinguish what's happening inside us. But we have abandoned the practices that can support us in this.We've abandoned reflection and replaced it with busyness.We've abandoned sitting quietly with ourselves and replaced it with consuming.We've abandoned patient and disciplined self-observation and replaced it with entertainment.We've judged the contemplative practices of those peoples and traditions that came before us to be irrelevant, spooky, or superstitious - at odds with our apparently sophisticated, rational way of being.Our capacity to understand ourselves, and to understand others, has been flattened out, rendered shallow and inconsequential as a result. We barely know ourselves, and we barely know how to respond to the suffering and difficulty of those we work with, and those we live with.If we want to build families, communities and organisations in which people have a genuine chance to thrive, we need to take care of this.It's time we took back what we've so comprehensively abandoned, so we can learn to treat what's invisible about others and, first, about ourselves, with the seriousness and wonder it deserves.
I wrote 
We're all joining the dots... connecting up what we observe and experience of our lives in ways that are coherent to us. And we each have preferred ways of doing so - habits of heart, mind and understanding that have the world show up the way it does for us.I've noticed recently, for example, how familiar it is for to me to connect up other people's action (or non-action) with a story of their current or impending withdrawal. I've done something wrong, I imagine, that they know about and disapprove of and of which I am hardly aware. A call not returned, a terse email, a silence, apparent distance during a social encounter - all of these are the dots I'm paying attention to in this way of making sense of the world. And the joining that I do has me be the outsider, the one who has to work and prove and be kind to get back in, the one who ought to feel ashamed of myself.It's a habit, this way of making sense, almost certainly born in my early years and practiced repeatedly since then. And, as I keep on finding out, not only is it just one way of joining up the phenomena I experience, it's often far from accurate and rarely life giving to me or others. Moreover, when I fall into this habitual way of making sense I tend to pay attention to only some of the 'dots'. Other phenomena - such as the enormous love and affection that comes my way, the contribution I'm making, or simple gratitude for being in the presence of others without my having to do anything - receive much less attention than they deserve.I'm having to learn again how to join up the dots in a way that lets me see and feel the enormous love and support there is around me.How you join the dots - how you interpret what happens - matters. As does the choice of which dots to notice. And each depends upon, and shapes, the other.When you start to see that you are not experiencing life as it is but as an act of dot-joining, you can start to ask yourself some important questions about relationships, work, and about life itself.It turns out that for any set of 'facts' (which is what we usually call the phenomena we're choosing to observe) there are an infinity of interpretations, not all of them equal, and some filled with much greater possibility or much greater suffering than others.And it also turns out that there are an infinity of 'facts', many of which are supremely significant in a life well-lived or in work well-done, that your current interpretation may be blinding you to.So how you join the dots of your life is a significant question, as is the choice of dots you ignore as you do so. It can be difficult to see what you're doing here without patient observation, because our habits of interpreting are most transparent to us - forming the usually hidden background to our lives and relationships. But the quality and possibility of your life, and all that you undertake, may hinge on your answer to this most invisible and most important of questions.
Our special guest at the 
On Thursday night of last week, at a celebration to mark 10 years of 
One of the most necessary liberations comes when you discover that what other people think of you is not the same as who you are. When you can stop identifying yourself with the stories and assessments of others, you can also free yourself from the constant inner pressure to appear as you think people want you to.But once you know this, you have to understand that other people are not the same as your stories or assessments either. That means that whatever you think you know about them can only ever be partial, one angle on a situation way more complex than you’ve allowed for.It means you’re going to have to learn to be way more imaginative and listen much more deeply, if you’re ever going to understand what’s going on when others are involved.
If you want to be up to something beyond fitting in, settling down or taking up the roles others have made for you, you’re going to have to look closely and seriously at your relationship with tension. And ask yourself, when you feel your body tense, which way do you go?You may not be able to address this question until you spend some time quietly observing yourself. What does tension actually feel like in your body? Where does it show up? What is its quality? How does it move?The easiest way to interpret tension is as a problem to be resolved. So you move away from it, dissipate it, release it so that it can’t trouble you. You’ll have your own well practiced ways of doing this, and if you continue to observe yourself for a while you might find out what they are.But know that if your move is away, always away, you’re acting to keep the world exactly as it is. Because tension is stirred at that exquisite moment when difference or possibility present themselves to you. The possibility of speaking with courage, of standing out, of surprising others and yourself, of being known in a new way, of being fully and radically in contact with others, of standing for something – all profound sources of tension.So take on a bigger, more generous interpretation of what your body is up to. How about tension as an invitation, a doorway, the opening of a new horizon that you’ve never experienced before? Tension as a profound call to throw yourself wholeheartedly in to the riskiness and creativity of being alive.If you want to be up to something in the world, sooner or later you’re going to have to step in and learn to stay in the midst of what you’ve turned away from for so long.
Does it strike you how small an orientation to work, and to life, it is to focus only on efficiency or performance?And how small an orientation to engaging with the world it is to demand knowledge rather than cultivate wisdom or discernment?We are so convinced by our rush to produce, to measure, to attain and to know that we give little space to two deeply important human disciplines - the capacity to wonder and the capacity to be patient.And the more convinced we are, the more we turn our organisations and ourselves away from an encounter with what could both be meaningful, and what could matter.And it's a tragedy, because meaning and mattering are two of the foundational requirements of a human life well lived.