The contention of this item is that vertical learning and corporate maturity are broad terms that encompass principles, processes and practices that fit together, hand in glove and that both need to be at the core of leadership and organisational development.
What follows is a brief exploration of some of these ideas that lie at the heart of the True North Partnership raison-d’etre, the aim being to shed light both on the pragmatic, practical nature of vertical learning and its vital contribution to corporate maturity.
It’s a bit longer than the usual Grist to the Mill rules allow, but what the heck!
A very brief history
As I have outlined in previous “Grist to the Mill” offerings, my journey into vertical learning began during my time as a serving police officer, in the mid 1980’s, working on the Scarman Report with a small team based at the Met’s Hendon college. The term “vertical learning” however was not in the received business or common lexicon.
Neuro-science and research into adult learning and development (constructive developmentalism) has moved on a long way since then, giving substance to ideas and concepts that would, in those days be seen as rooted in “mere metaphysics” (Wilbur) or associated with the human potential movement.
And of the term corporate maturity? From what I can tell, definitions of corporate maturity have focused on the extent to which strategy, process and people align. Curtiss, Helly and Miller developed a model for a people capability maturity process. All good, worthy stuff.
As with vertical learning, principles and practices of corporate maturity are moving on at pace and have an increasingly important contribution to make to leadership styles and decision making, corporate governance, organisational culture and personal ethics and integrity. In these times of complexity and trending personal and social dis-integration, all matters that are figural and under the immediate scrutiny of news channels and social media.
If vertical learning has at its core the growth of individual capacity within a maturing, integrated, moral and ethical sense of self............
.......so corporate maturity can be described as growth in an organisations capacity to integrate its social capital and technological capabilities (1) for the purpose of effectively engaging with and satisfying the many and varied needs of multiple stakeholders in a rapidly shifting context.
When running the corporate business at Brathay about 2003, I was fortunate enough to meet David Jackman. David had just moved to Cumbria with his family having held a senior role with what was then known as the Financial Services Authority. He had served the FSA on the Ethics committee with a passion for ethical and moral leadership. I guess we’d now label this as authentic leadership, a worthy mission in line with the approach and values of Brathay.
When I left Brathay, I lost touch with David only to see him appear on television news programmes, on a regular basis, being asked to comment on the evolving story of the financial crash during 2007/8.
Fortunately, we are now back in touch. Our conversation has moved onto corporate maturity and his recent book, “Corporate Maturity and the ‘Authentic’ Company” (2) has added more fuel to the fire of my excitement about vertical learning.
Corporate maturity through vertical learning
David outlines a number of dimensions of maturity from quality of decision making and integrity to empowering leadership and organisational transcendence. Against these dimensions he proposes a 4-level process model for stages of corporate maturity:
- Minimum standards
- Compliance culture
- Business improvement
- Values led
Along with other adult development frameworks, David’s is a process model in the way of Piaget, Kholberg, Keegan, Cook-Greuter, Garvey-Berger or Rook and Torbert. These all identify a developmental direction of travel and evolution.
JACKMAN (2) – Corporate Maturity
Minimum standards
Could be a start-up or under- developed, established organisation.
The driver is short-term survival and myopic self- interest.
Compliance culture
An evolving organisation driven by compliance with everything they are told by external bodies.
High audit levels, low trust.
Business improvement
Developing maturity and wider perspective of contribution the business makes e.g. CSR initiatives. Sophisticated processes.
More empowering leadership.
Values Led
Doing the right thing against self- determined ethical framework.
Active commitment and belief in the organisation rather than passive compliance.
High trust/low audit.
Given the above corporate maturity map, we can now overlay this with current frameworks of vertical learning. The True North Partnership proposition is that organisational development requires a melding of both perspectives.
GARVEY-BERGER (3) – Levels of Personal Perspective Taking
Self-Sovereign mind
Myopic self/ego orientation.
Other perspectives and points of view a mystery.
“How can anyone see the world in any other way?”
“With me or against me?”
Compliance with external authority.
Socialised mind
Embedded perspective in his/her own “tribe”.
High need for acceptance.
Other cultures/perspectives threatening.
Self-authored
Ability to see multiple perspectives and embracing change within a defined existing paradigm.
Starting to feel internal values conflict but working to maintain personal equilibrium
Self-transforming
Seeks out, embraces and uses multiple perspectives to develop networks for working in complexity and change.
Authority comes from own values and sense of spirituality.
ROOK & TORBERT (4) – Personal meaning making and transitions
Opportunist (Pre-conventional)
Driven by self-interest and personal ego in seeing the world therefore a win/lose or right/wrong orientation to life. Power through status.
Diplomat (Pre-conventional)
Needs met by compliance with accepted norms and standards. Ritualised and clichéd meaning making and conversations with self and others.
Expert (Conventional)
Needs met by becoming highly expert in a subject or profession. Knowledge is power. Judges others against own expertise as higher or lower status
Achiever (Conventional)
Needs met through achieving goals and targets, usually set by others. Desires to work with other competent people to achieve goals and targets. Continuous improvement mind set.
Individualist (Post conventional)
Seeing the bigger picture and personal growth beyond task achievement. Questioning and polemical.
Strategist (Post-conventional)
Going beyond polemical to bring different “truths” together in a spirit of cooperative enquiry. Subject/object development
Alchemist (Post conventional)
Self and community transforming through heightened awareness and active acceptance of what is emergent in self, others and systems. Spiritual development.
All the above ideas work on the basis of an optimistic perspective, i.e. that it is in the nature of human kind to self-develop, unless we are blocked at some early stage, usually in our formative years, in which case we become “snagged”. (Part of the process of vertical learning is to explore where and how we become snagged and the leadership consequences of this).
Corporate immaturity
David contends with great authority, from research and his own experience, the “cost of immaturity” to organisations, communities and societies. As we all found out across the developed world, the financial crisis of 2007/8 highlighted all too starkly the consequences of low levels of maturity and high levels of inauthenticity.
My own experience of the Scarman report and the police “canteen culture” of the time, was a case in point of the cost of immaturity. MP’s expenses scandal is another example which also triggered a typically less mature response, an increase in the level of regulation and audit to a point where people regress to being no more than socialised or even self-sovereign!
More recently, the arrest of the CEO of VAG over “dieselgate” and an investigation into the ethics and practices of the big 4 accountancy firms are in the current business headlines.
In conclusion
There is good news. In developing a comprehensive model of vertical learning and corporate maturity we can uncover a number of points of enquiry for leadership and organisational development practice.
The idea of an organisation with a “values led” level of maturity would seem to correlate with an organisation that recruits and/or develops a sufficiently sized cadre of people with the right influence at the right level who would profile at least “self-authored” and certainly “post- conventional”. This idea feeds into the practicalities of recruitment, induction and ongoing development. Creating the policies and methods for doing this is the relatively easy bit.
Developing more post-conventional capacities within leaders therefore is the primary route to establishing greater levels of corporate maturity and all of its attendant benefits.
When looked at in this way and when considered in the light of the cost of corporate immaturity, not only is a vertical learning approach helpfully pragmatic, it is also a cultural and economic necessity.
Vertical learning approaches will drive levels of corporate maturity. The biggest single stakeholder group that will benefit from this will be the tax payer as audit and compliance costs are slashed. Perhaps more CEO’s will sleep more easily at night confident in the knowledge that a knock on the door early in the morning will be of a comforting domestic nature, not the local constabulary taking action based on last evening’s headlines of fraudulent practice and mal- governance.
And, for what it’s worth, a parting thought from a sage......
“Govern a country with upright integrity. When there are many restrictions in the world, the people become more impoverished.”
Lao Tzu
References
- Trist and Bamforth – Tavistock Institute
- David Jackman – Corporate Maturity and the Authentic Company” (BEP)
- Jenifer Garvey-Berger – Changing on the Job (Stanford)
- D. Rook & W. Torbert - Seven Transformations of Leadership (HBR)