People are often faced with uncertainty in complex situations that require them to develop new ways of making sense of their world and relating to the people they collaborate with. Robert Kegan’s Model of Adult Mental Development can be useful for people and leaders who are seeking  to understand the developmental opportunities that come with the challenges they face. It can also be used to support a client in creating a vision for their own growth and development that may motivate them to accelerate their own learning. According to Kegan (2009), a leader’s transformation is not just about getting new information, skills, or  knowledge; transformation happens when the way a leader thinks about information changes. Kegan & Lahey (2009) model above depicts 3 of the 5 stages of adult mental development. The framework suggests that development is spurred as people navigate the tensions between their desire to be included and belong and their desire to be unique independent or interdependent individuals. 

Most adults are operating from a paradigm in which they subconsciously see the world and make decisions in alignment with the ways they were socialized. Transformation for most people is a journey of  moving towards a self-authoring mindset in which they are able to establish their own sets of values and ideologies independent of the environment they were socialized into. In the final stage a person is able to hold, navigate and integrate multiple conflicting paradigms. This enables them to not only deeply understand people and perspectives that are distinct from their own but they can deliberately adapt and transcend their own perspectives, agendas, and paradigms. In a world where people have to find ways to collaborate with people who are cognitively and culturally different from them, cultivating this adaptive capacity provides a rare and powerful opportunity to enhance their effectiveness. It can serve as a helpful framework for thinking about a trajectory for personal transformation and can support in more deeply understanding the nature of challenges people face when attempting to engage across differences.

When certified in a developmental instrument that draw from Kegan’s (1998) work such as the Intercultural development inventory developed by Milton Bennet, a coach can use a an assessment instrument to help clients get insight into how developmental opportunities are linked to their challenges and accelerate learning through increased self-awareness. However, without being certified to use a valid instrument for determining a client’s developmental level, this framework should only be used by a coaching practitioner as a way of generally conceptualizing the process of leader development and to consider the possibility to challenges being beyond a client’s current readiness level. It is vital that a coach be wary of the risk of cultivating premature, under-informed or inappropriate limiting beliefs about the client’s capacity to face challenges. Insights from developmental frameworks should be grounded in a commitment to recognizing and supporting every clients resourcefulness.