Robert Kegan > Quotes

“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.”
― Robert Kegan

“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.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“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.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“Better Me + Better You = Better Us”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“If you have wanted to lose ten pounds for ten years and a diet finally helps you do it, you might well assume you have accomplished your goal. But your goal actually isn’t to lose ten pounds. Many people (even you?) have lost ten pounds many times! The goal is to lose ten pounds and keep the weight off. Dieting doesn’t lead to weight loss that endures. For this we must join a change in behavior with a change in the way we think and feel—and in order to change the way we think and feel, we need to change our mindsets. When we are working on truly adaptive goals—ones that require us to develop our mindsets—we must continually convert what we learn from behavioral changes into changes in our mindsets.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“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.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“All transitions involve leaving a consolidated self behind before any new self can take its place. At the 4-5 shift this means abandoning - or somehow operating without reliance upon - the form, the group, standard, or convention. For some this leads to feelings of being 'beyond good and evil,' which phenomenologically amounts to looking at that beyondness from the view of the old self, and thus involves strong feelings of evil. Ethical relativism - the belief that there is no (nonarbitrary) basis for considering one thing more right than another - is, on the one hand, the father of tolerance; it stands against the condemning judgment; but it must also stand against the affirming judgment, and so is vulnerable to cynicism. Every transition involves to some extent the killing off of the old self.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“But reflection without action is ultimately as unproductive as action without reflection.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“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.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“The problem is the inability to close the gap between what we genuinely, even passionately, want and what we are actually able to do.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“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.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“The way we’re going to be a better company is by your working on yourself, and helping others work on themselves.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“This book, in other words, is another empirically grounded speculation, another conceptual itinerary.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Even small changes in our Big Assumptions can have big implications for permanently altering our once-captivating equilibrium.”
― Robert Kegan, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation

“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.”
― Robert Kegan, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation

“What is self and what is other may be a question of the person's 'biology,' but it is equally a question of the person's 'philosophy': what is the subject-object relationship the person has become in the world?
That question suggests at least two things...First, subject-object relations become; they are not static; their study is the study of a motion. Second, subject-object relations live in the world; they are not simply abstractions, but take form in actual human relations and social contexts.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“They all succeed at changing both their mindset (the meaning-making system that shapes thoughts and feelings) and their behavior; rather than changing only mindset or behavior, and hoping the other will eventually follow. • They all become keen and focused observers of their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and they learn to use these as information. They see the agenda that is driving them, not just the agenda they are driving. • Changes to their mindsets are always in the direction of seeing and feeling more possibilities: Spaces people had previously thought they could not or should not enter (because they were out of reach or too dangerous) are now fully accessible. • They take focused risks and build a new set of muscles and metrics around assumptions based on actual, rather than imagined, data about the consequences of their new actions. Their anxiety around the initial adaptive challenge is reduced, if not eliminated, while their experiences of pleasure significantly increase. • They experience increased mastery, more options, wider control, and greater degrees of freedom. They make progress on, or even accomplish, their column 1 commitment, and, more often than not, their accomplishments extend considerably beyond the initial aspiration. Because they have developed new mental capabilities—not just a new solution to a single problem—they can bring these capabilities to other challenges and other venues, in their work and in their personal lives.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“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”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“But people only complain about something because they are committed to the value or importance of something else.”
― Robert Kegan, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation

“Kohlberg's stage 4 is essentially the psychological birth of ideology, which is a meaning system that is above all factional - that is, it is a truth for a group, caste, class, clan, nation, church, race, generation, gender, trade, or interest group. This ideology can be implicit and tacit, or explicit and public. It is identified, in any case, by the extent to which it makes the maintenance and protection of its own group the ultimate basis of valuing, so that 'right' is defined on behalf of the group, rather than the group being defined on behalf of the rights”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“But what is happiness? The definition most in vogue, fueled by the positive psychology movement, is one of happiness as a state, characterized by pleasure; a banishing of pain, suffering, and boredom; a sense of engagement and meaning through the experience of positive emotions and resilience. This is the dominant version of the new incomes sought and paid in the most widely celebrated “great places to work.” Think of flexible work hours, pool tables and dart boards, dining areas run by chefs serving fabulous and nutritious food at all hours, frequent talks by visiting thought leaders, spaces for naps, unlimited vacation time. However, the research literature on happiness suggests another definition, one that is overlapping but significantly different. The second definition sees happiness as a process of human flourishing. This definition, whose roots go back to Aristotle and the Greeks’ concept of eudaemonia, includes an experience of meaning and engagement but in relation to the satisfactions of experiencing one’s own growth and unfolding, becoming more of the person one was meant to be, bringing more of oneself into the world.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Piaget may 'be about' stages or cognitive development only in the way that Newton 'is about' gravity, or Columbus the West Indies, or Jefferson reconciling the claims of the individual with claims of the state, or Joyce a literary approach to consciousness. These were the 'problems' that consumed these men and they resolved them brilliantly - but so brilliantly that the resolutions become Trojan horses lying in wait to reveal what they were really about.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“All growth is costly. It involves the leaving behind of an old way of being in the world. Often it involves, at least for a time, leaving behind the others who have been identified with that old way of being. The two-year-old's 'No" is really a repudiation of his own old way of being. Seen from the point of view of his evolution, his declaration is really to his old self, which had been embedded in the world. ... To discover basic limitations in one's whole way of knowing can be by itself an anxious and difficult experience; but it is the creation of the new other in the process which makes it also a potentially shameful experience.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“It is easy for us to delude ourselves into thinking that our notions of the healthy person are unbiased by our particular circumstances or partialities. It is comforting for us to think that, in totalitarian societies, where troublesome people are often psychiatrically hospitalized, the indigenous mental health professionals are themselves aware that their behavior is nakedly political and actually aimed at social control rather than the health of the person. Bus what is the possibility that American mental health workers are themselves vulnerable to what amounts to the goals of adjustment couched in notions of health, and which lead to equal - and probably equally unwitting - exercises of social control?”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“The company’s other primary commitment—to radical transparency—goes much deeper than the glass office walls. Every meeting is recorded, and (unless proprietary client information is discussed) every recording is available to every member of the organization. Each office and meeting room is equipped with audio recording technology. For example, if your boss and your boss’s boss are discussing your performance and you weren’t invited to the meeting, the recording is available for you to review. And you don’t have to scour every audio file to find out whether you were the subject of a closed-door conversation. If your name came up, you’re likely to be given a heads-up, just so that you will review the file. In effect, there is no such thing as a closed-door conversation; everything is part of a “historical record of what is true.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Central to Piaget's framework - and often ignored even by those who count themselves as Piagetian - is this activity, equilibration. Whether in the study of the mollusk or the human child, Piaget's principal loyalty was to the ongoing conversation between the individuating organism and the world, a process of adaptation shaped by the tension between the assimilation of new experience to the old 'grammar' and the accommodation of the old grammar to new experience. This eternal conversation is panorganic; it is central to the nature of all living things.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“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?”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“+ Reflection = Progress”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“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”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization