Robert Kegan

The Deliberately Developmental Organization (DDO): Messengers from the future?

If an organization so valued developing the capabilities of all its constituents that it would seek to create a work culture integrating the best of what neuroscience and Adult Development theory teaches us, what would such an organization look (and feel) like?

Robert Kegan and his colleagues have been studying (and helping) such organizations for the past several years, as first documented in his award-winning co-authored book, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization.

Mixing story and concept, brief exercises and video examples, this talk will bring us into the life of what Kegan and his colleagues are learning, and give us the chance to think about its implications for our own schools.

Understanding (and Overcoming) Your Personal Immunity to Change

Connect & Engage

You will be invited into a novel, fast-moving, highly interactive learning space built to promote personal reflection and rapid insight. Via a recurring think-write-pair-share format, you will gradually develop a ‘mental X-ray’ of your own mindset as it relates to some high-value personal improvement goal you select. Throughout, it will be up to you how much of your learning you want to share.

Learn

You will come to better understand the following:

• the operation of your own mindset as it relates to some high-value personal improvement goal,
• how that mindset unintendedly preserves the status quo and prevents the desired change,
• a new pathway for improvement focused less on “will power” and “behavioral efforting,” and more on identifying one’s limiting assumptions and overturning them, and
• what you personally would be working on in a DDO, and what it would feel like to do so.

Reflect & Apply

In his keynote, Robert Kegan will talk about the way most people in most organizations are doing a “second job” no one is paying them for, which detracts energy and attention from their real job, and the shared mission of the organization. That “second job” is a form of self-protection, often bent on preserving others’ good opinion, hiding mistakes or felt inadequacies.

This session will give you a more granular picture of your “second job,” how it interferes with your accomplishing your improvement goal, and how you can reduce it, for your own benefit and the benefit of your colleagues.

***For those who are interested, there will also be the opportunity to participate beforehand in a survey that will give you a multi-dimensional picture of how developmental is your current work-culture for the adults in the school; and to receive the results in the session. We designed the Growth Culture Indicator (GCI) to help organizations in all sectors to better understand not only their current developmental strengths and optimal areas for improvement, but also to learn how much Will there is in the system to improve upon the current reality.

This will-to-change (which we uncover 99 percent of the time) is an unrecognized organizational asset. The survey requires only 15 minutes of each person who fills it out. We will offer a limited number of these surveys at cost, and — in order to complete analysis before the conference — data-gathering will need to be completed by the end of August. Please contact Claire Lee at clee@waytogrowinc.com immediately for more information.

Save paper and effort where possible!

For your convenience, and to support our efforts in being "green", all handouts/files posted here have been notated with an A, B, C or D indicating the following:

(A) hardcopies needed at workshop
(B) electronic version on laptop is sufficient (for viewing during the workshop)
(C) required reading PRIOR to the workshop
(D) file not needed for workshop itself, but simply material of additional interest/reference

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Updates to handouts may be made until shortly before the start of the conference.