🪵 Thinking has growth rings!

 Trees tell us their age, but they also tell the story of their development.

🌧️ Years of plentiful rain and nutrients produce wider growth rings.

☀️ Years of drought leave narrower ones.

🔥 Storms, fires and changing conditions leave a mark.

 🌏 I've just completed my accreditation as a MyWorldView (MWV)® Practitioner with Global Leadership Associates in the UK.  It’s based on Adult Development (or Vertical Development), and decades of research by Robert Kegan, Bill Torbert and many others. It’s an approach to discovering, understanding and developing "rings". 

🌳 As trees grow, they don't lose their earlier growth rings – they add new ones around them. 

We are the same! As we experience life and expand our ways of thinking, we don't replace earlier ways of making sense of the world - we build on them.

The more "growth rings" we develop, the broader our range of thinking becomes. 

This is handy! Sometimes we need to solve an immediate problem quickly. At other times we need to be more strategic, systemic, embrace uncertainty or think in entirely new ways. There is value in having broader ways of thinking to draw on in complex situations.

 🌳 🌳 🌳 The concept of growth rings applies to teams too. Just as a forest creates its own microclimate, a team's collective way of thinking isn't the sum of its individual trees... sorry, members. It's something unique, created by the interaction between team members and the relationship with their environment.

The good news is that both individual and team "rings" can be intentionally expanded - and that's where coaching and team coaching come in.

Get in touch if you or your team want to understand your "rings". I'm excited to add another evidence-based approach to my toolkit, helping leaders and teams develop not just what they do, but how they think.