Good post. But I feel your Alice grows obviously more intelligent as she advances in Kegan stage, despite the claim that intelligence does not cause Kegan advancement. Here is Claude depicting Alice 3 as intelligently as you depicted Alice 5:
——
alice walks into the postmortem having already war-gamed the social topology. she knows the eng director respects “systems thinking,” so she’s prepared a framing that distributes fault across capacity planning, client team communication, and monitoring—a causal graph where her review approval is one node among many, weighted low.
she lets bob speak first. she’s modeled that he’ll deflect defensively, which will slightly irritate the room and make her measured response look better by contrast. she doesn’t plan to throw him under the bus—that would backfire socially—but she positions herself as “the one trying to fix the system” rather than “the one who approved the change.”
when she speaks, she pre-empts the obvious attack surface: “i approved the config change, and in retrospect the TTL interaction with their load pattern wasn’t something our review checklist surfaced. that’s a process gap we should close.” she’s taking exactly enough responsibility to appear accountable while framing the failure as systemic.
she reads the room continuously. when the director leans forward at “process gap,” she elaborates there. when a peer frowns at blame-shifting, she softens with “bob and i were both working with incomplete information.”
by the end, she’s authored a narrative where she’s the reasonable actor in an unreasonable system. no one leaves thinking “alice screwed up.” several people leave thinking “alice handled that well.”
I'm wondering why I didn't think to try making a higher IQ version of Alice 3.
Part of this is because Bob and Alice are based on a composite of real people that indeed changed in this way over the years. But I guess intelligence is not supposed to change as one ages? I guess another thing that changed was "experience"? On the other hand, I've met peers with a similar level of wall-clock experience that didn't change at all.
I haven’t read Kegan, but from your description I feel that there is a bit of an uncanny valley at Stage 4. Why would one abandon the social maneuvering that so often pays off, in order to develop a self-consistent world model that often fails?
I suspect that Stage 4 is not actually an advancement, and is instead the default adult development stage of shall-we-say “not socially inclined” folks. 3 and 4 seem to me to be roughly equal in their deficits vs the integrated 5. Putting 4 above 3 seems to me to be a kind of autistic put-down of the value of social skills.
This makes it obvious why the hard part is jumping from either the fluent 3 or the proud 4 to the Jedi 5.
Thanks for the comments, they've been really helpful for me to get clearer on all this!
It seems that there's a few things going on:
- Stage 3 to 4 isn't actually about abandoning the social maneuvering that so often pays off. That's what the concrete example pointed to, but it was incomplete. Kegan's claim is that each stage incorporates the previous one while making it the object rather than the subject. A Stage 4 person doesn't necessarily stop being socially aware or influenced by the group. Rather, they gain the ability to deploy social awareness strategically rather than being captive to it. Even in the high IQ example of Alice 3, her actions are still organized by the perception of the group. A stage 3 person can't really ignore the room when the room isn't aligned with them, but a stage 4 person can.
- The other way in which the example was deficient was that it showed a specific frozen interaction of the post-mortem. But an individual is staged based on their overall patterns of interaction across context. Specifically, there's an important limitation of stage 3 that my example didn't demonstrate. Stage 3 can't resolve conflicts between competing relationships, and are most subject to whoever is most emotionally salient in the moment. They can't genuinely decide without a stable internal criterion that stands outside all of their relationships. And that begins to look like stage 4.
- I talked to Claude about the bit about putting 4 above 4 seems to be a bit of an autistic put-down. It seems that what you're pointing to is that some Stage 4 are actually 2 who never developed the relational capacities of 3.
Stage 2 would be something like "I don't care about what you think because I'm focused on my goals".
Stage 4 would be something like "I've heard and understood what you think, and after reflection, I've concluded differently".
- Although I do think it's true that Stage 4 can seem like a regression if one's within a social context that heavily reward "social cohesion". As an aside, I've been wondering what Stage 4 might look like in a far more collectivist culture. And whether Kegan's been biased by the West.
Nice one. I loved the little vignettes, they illustrate how different stages operate. I didn't see how it follows that they posses higher tolerance to nebulosity.
Hmm, it's possible we may have to discuss this on our next recorded call, so that I can write a follow-up post.
Note that I use nebulosity/emptiness and pattern/form interchangeably in my head. If this isn't what David originally meant, then I'm perhaps confusing my readers.
One marker for examining someone's tolerance for emptiness is to gauge the breadth and depth of possibilities they can both see and realize within some context.
For example, the possibilities available to stage 3 folks are heavily constrained by their social relationships. They can't easily navigate contexts where multiple social bonds are making mutually exclusive demands of them. But the context is empty and there are many possible meanings that could be made fit to that context. The amount of nebulosity they can navigate is limited by their relationship to social bonds.
Overcoming this requires stage 3 folks to create a separate self-authored value system (i.e. stage 4). Inherent to Kegan advancement is include and transcend. That is, they still have the capacity to see things from a stage 3 view. But the increased distance from their self-authorship allows them to see far more possibility than what was available at stage 3. However, their self-authored value system is also empty. But it risks being turned into reified forms limiting the space of possibility that's available to them.
Stage 4 can overcome this limitation by realizing how empty their self-authored value system is. That is, they gain the ability to participate in lots of different self-authored value systems based on what seems most authentic to the context. This unlocks yet another layer of possibility.
In this way, advancement through Kegan's stages correlates with increased capacity to navigate nebulosity.
I am so grateful for your substack and for this is particular. I look forward to reading the subsequent posts on this topic. I do hope you will have an opportunity to address how the "readiness" of other individuals and organizations determine how levels 4 and 5 are received! Many scientific and technological advances in the span of human history have been ignored by the masses initially...or exploited horrifically. Your article makes me strongly suspect that it was more of a reflection of "where we were at" and genuinely has me focused on the role of "generative AI" today and how we use it. Thanks for the great thought-provoking writing!
Thanks for reading, and especially thank you for dropping a comment!! It's nice to know that people read and enjoy this stuff!
Yup there's a lot to write about everything you're describing. This post and the next few set of posts are trying to build out the "foundation" of the overall map. And then I hope to go a lot deeper into each topic.
Good post. But I feel your Alice grows obviously more intelligent as she advances in Kegan stage, despite the claim that intelligence does not cause Kegan advancement. Here is Claude depicting Alice 3 as intelligently as you depicted Alice 5:
——
alice walks into the postmortem having already war-gamed the social topology. she knows the eng director respects “systems thinking,” so she’s prepared a framing that distributes fault across capacity planning, client team communication, and monitoring—a causal graph where her review approval is one node among many, weighted low.
she lets bob speak first. she’s modeled that he’ll deflect defensively, which will slightly irritate the room and make her measured response look better by contrast. she doesn’t plan to throw him under the bus—that would backfire socially—but she positions herself as “the one trying to fix the system” rather than “the one who approved the change.”
when she speaks, she pre-empts the obvious attack surface: “i approved the config change, and in retrospect the TTL interaction with their load pattern wasn’t something our review checklist surfaced. that’s a process gap we should close.” she’s taking exactly enough responsibility to appear accountable while framing the failure as systemic.
she reads the room continuously. when the director leans forward at “process gap,” she elaborates there. when a peer frowns at blame-shifting, she softens with “bob and i were both working with incomplete information.”
by the end, she’s authored a narrative where she’s the reasonable actor in an unreasonable system. no one leaves thinking “alice screwed up.” several people leave thinking “alice handled that well.”
ohhh I like this comment and this observation!
I'm wondering why I didn't think to try making a higher IQ version of Alice 3.
Part of this is because Bob and Alice are based on a composite of real people that indeed changed in this way over the years. But I guess intelligence is not supposed to change as one ages? I guess another thing that changed was "experience"? On the other hand, I've met peers with a similar level of wall-clock experience that didn't change at all.
I haven’t read Kegan, but from your description I feel that there is a bit of an uncanny valley at Stage 4. Why would one abandon the social maneuvering that so often pays off, in order to develop a self-consistent world model that often fails?
I suspect that Stage 4 is not actually an advancement, and is instead the default adult development stage of shall-we-say “not socially inclined” folks. 3 and 4 seem to me to be roughly equal in their deficits vs the integrated 5. Putting 4 above 3 seems to me to be a kind of autistic put-down of the value of social skills.
This makes it obvious why the hard part is jumping from either the fluent 3 or the proud 4 to the Jedi 5.
Thanks for the comments, they've been really helpful for me to get clearer on all this!
It seems that there's a few things going on:
- Stage 3 to 4 isn't actually about abandoning the social maneuvering that so often pays off. That's what the concrete example pointed to, but it was incomplete. Kegan's claim is that each stage incorporates the previous one while making it the object rather than the subject. A Stage 4 person doesn't necessarily stop being socially aware or influenced by the group. Rather, they gain the ability to deploy social awareness strategically rather than being captive to it. Even in the high IQ example of Alice 3, her actions are still organized by the perception of the group. A stage 3 person can't really ignore the room when the room isn't aligned with them, but a stage 4 person can.
- The other way in which the example was deficient was that it showed a specific frozen interaction of the post-mortem. But an individual is staged based on their overall patterns of interaction across context. Specifically, there's an important limitation of stage 3 that my example didn't demonstrate. Stage 3 can't resolve conflicts between competing relationships, and are most subject to whoever is most emotionally salient in the moment. They can't genuinely decide without a stable internal criterion that stands outside all of their relationships. And that begins to look like stage 4.
- I talked to Claude about the bit about putting 4 above 4 seems to be a bit of an autistic put-down. It seems that what you're pointing to is that some Stage 4 are actually 2 who never developed the relational capacities of 3.
Stage 2 would be something like "I don't care about what you think because I'm focused on my goals".
Stage 4 would be something like "I've heard and understood what you think, and after reflection, I've concluded differently".
- Although I do think it's true that Stage 4 can seem like a regression if one's within a social context that heavily reward "social cohesion". As an aside, I've been wondering what Stage 4 might look like in a far more collectivist culture. And whether Kegan's been biased by the West.
Ohhh I love this perspective!
A foundational essay that clarifies how humans must adapt to the inherently nebulous nature of AI.
Thanks Natalie!!
Nice one. I loved the little vignettes, they illustrate how different stages operate. I didn't see how it follows that they posses higher tolerance to nebulosity.
Hmm, it's possible we may have to discuss this on our next recorded call, so that I can write a follow-up post.
Note that I use nebulosity/emptiness and pattern/form interchangeably in my head. If this isn't what David originally meant, then I'm perhaps confusing my readers.
One marker for examining someone's tolerance for emptiness is to gauge the breadth and depth of possibilities they can both see and realize within some context.
For example, the possibilities available to stage 3 folks are heavily constrained by their social relationships. They can't easily navigate contexts where multiple social bonds are making mutually exclusive demands of them. But the context is empty and there are many possible meanings that could be made fit to that context. The amount of nebulosity they can navigate is limited by their relationship to social bonds.
Overcoming this requires stage 3 folks to create a separate self-authored value system (i.e. stage 4). Inherent to Kegan advancement is include and transcend. That is, they still have the capacity to see things from a stage 3 view. But the increased distance from their self-authorship allows them to see far more possibility than what was available at stage 3. However, their self-authored value system is also empty. But it risks being turned into reified forms limiting the space of possibility that's available to them.
Stage 4 can overcome this limitation by realizing how empty their self-authored value system is. That is, they gain the ability to participate in lots of different self-authored value systems based on what seems most authentic to the context. This unlocks yet another layer of possibility.
In this way, advancement through Kegan's stages correlates with increased capacity to navigate nebulosity.
This is awesome! Felt like the essay I needed to read
Thanks for reading and glad to hear it!! Positive comments are very motivational and puts the wind under my sails!
I am so grateful for your substack and for this is particular. I look forward to reading the subsequent posts on this topic. I do hope you will have an opportunity to address how the "readiness" of other individuals and organizations determine how levels 4 and 5 are received! Many scientific and technological advances in the span of human history have been ignored by the masses initially...or exploited horrifically. Your article makes me strongly suspect that it was more of a reflection of "where we were at" and genuinely has me focused on the role of "generative AI" today and how we use it. Thanks for the great thought-provoking writing!
Thanks for reading, and especially thank you for dropping a comment!! It's nice to know that people read and enjoy this stuff!
Yup there's a lot to write about everything you're describing. This post and the next few set of posts are trying to build out the "foundation" of the overall map. And then I hope to go a lot deeper into each topic.