🪵 What if thinking had growth rings?

Cut through the trunk of a tree and you'll see a series of rings.

Most of us know they tell us the tree's age, but they also tell the story of its development.

🌧️ Years of plentiful rain and nutrients produce wider rings.

☀️ Years of drought leave narrower ones.

🔥 Storms, fires and changing conditions all leave their mark.

🌳 As the tree grows, it doesn't lose its earlier rings – it adds new ones around them.

Adult Development (or Vertical Development), based on decades of research by Robert Kegan and many others, is much 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.

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. The value lies in having broader ways of thinking to draw on as situations become more complex.

🌳 🌳 🌳 Vertical Development applies to teams too. Just as a forest creates its own microclimate, a team's collective way of thinking is more than the sum of its individual trees... sorry, members.

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

🌏 I've just completed my accreditation as a MyWorldView (MWV)® Practitioner with Global Leadership Associates in the UK. It's an approach to discovering, understanding and developing "rings". I'm excited to add another evidence-based approach to my toolkit, helping leaders and teams develop not just what they think, but how they think.

Get in touch if you or your team want to understand your "rings".