By Ken Smith
The Complexity of a Modern Environment Demands a New Approach in Leadership In a more complex, uncertain, and exponential changing world organisations and individuals are constantly challenged to keep abreast.
This requires leaders to be much more aware of how they construct their thinking in the moment to have a better choice in how they respond to complexity, uncertainty, and change.
In this more complex, connected globalised business environment, the existing leadership methodologies are not enough if we are to tease out the future capacity of the leader’s decision-making capabilities in order to prepare them for the complexities that lie ahead.
Therefore, modern leadership demands a new approach where we need to look at leaders in a Vertical Developmental capacity such as the Theory of Constructed Development, a Developmentally different way of measuring leaders.
The Theory of Constructed Development focuses on how human beings utilise shortcuts in their thinking in order to construct their Intention, Awareness, Choice and Response™ in the moment.
The greater their awareness of their intention, the greater their capacity to choose their response in the moment.
We need High Dynamic Intelligence Leaders that are;
- Capable of seeing the meta-position
- Adapts to change easily
- Consciously motivated for collaborative relationships
- Sufficiently risk-aware to confirm decisions
- Interested in everyone’s opinion
- Can build the bridge as they walk it
- Able to see the bigger picture
- And able to explain it to colleagues
- Can see the long-term ramifications of their decisions as well as the short-term consequences
The development of leadership and talent has been with us for a long time.
Despite this, however, we find that it is still one of the leading challenges facing organisations today.
In a report released by Deloitte Touché Tohmatsu and the Economist Intelligence Unit titled “Aligned at the Top,” leadership development and pipeline were highlighted as the most critical issue in terms of people and business challenges.
Talent management was identified as the second most critical issue.
It is important to understand that all leaders and talented employees are individuals.
They come from diverse backgrounds and generations.
We believe that the development of these key and critical employees must be done on an individual basis focusing on what development tools will work with the employee.
The attraction, engagement, development, and retention of scarce and critical skills are at the forefront for most, if not all, organisations.
Jack Welch, the former Chief Executive of General Electric, said: ‘Any company that aims to be part of the future has got to find a way to engage the mind of every single employee’ The Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study highlighted that those companies with high employee engagement enjoyed a 51.9% higher change in operating income, a 17.5% higher income growth rate and a 39% higher earnings per share growth rate. It is no secret that organisations all over the world are faced with a critical shortage of skilled employees in leadership, managerial and specialist positions and professions.
Organisations' strategy for keeping and motivating these valuable employees relies on increasing reward packages, supplying more training opportunities or giving incentives and share options.
The fact is that scarce talent is on the move, and it is poached. Organisations lose out before return on hard investment or value-add from the employee.
Today we can measure, with 90% accuracy, specific factors that show whether the employee is going to stay in the organisation and to what degree they will add the value that you contracted them for.
If you want to win the talent war, you need to be one-step ahead of generalised or even generic management techniques.
This gives rise to the following questions:
- Do you know what the intensity and quality of engagement is within your organisation?
- What is the current working climate and how to improve it?
- How close are your employees to burn out or bore-out or “quiet quitting”?
- How do we direct our employees?
- How do we guide their growth?
- How do we develop their Self-Awareness?
- How is the leader’s habituated Thinking Style impacting their perception of and ability to solve problems?
- In answer to these questions there is now a brand-new unique approach to adult development.
Constructed Development Theory
CDT emerged from the doctoral research of Dr Darren Stevens. It is the idea that every moment, we construct our thinking based on cognitive shortcuts (heuristics) that have become habits over time.
We do this based on how we constructed ourselves yesterday.
This ensures we stay consistent over time, and it also avoids cognitive dissonance.
Dr Stevens figured out that how we think and behave is simply a collection of constructed habituated thoughts that appear from childhood. Importantly, we seldom get an opportunity to question these constructs.
If we did, then we could influence our thinking in the moment. It is implied in Constructed Development Theory that we are not necessarily who we think we are, but how we think we are.
CDT questions our construction of self by investigating the unique combination of fifty heuristics called Cognitive Intentions, that form our individual Thinking Style.
Only by bringing to consciousness the Intention, Awareness, Choice, and Response™ of our thinking are we able to grow our self-awareness and complexity.
These are called the Four Pillars of Constructed Development. The theory of Constructed Development is more holistic than traditional stage development theories in that the changes achieved in one’s level of awareness will not only affect a business environment, but also other environments, as our Thinking Style changes across contexts.
It is the bridge between domaingeneral and domain-specific thinking.
Cognitive Intentions
A Cognitive Intention is a shortcut in our thinking. It is a heuristic we have developed over time that has habituated and become an unconscious bias.
Jean Piaget called them ‘schemata’ and others used different words to emphasise how we construct biases that help us to navigate our thinking.
For example: if I were to ask you if you liked to cook, and you do, I would then ask if you also followed the recipe, or if you liked to tweak it a little, perhaps to spice things up. Depending on the level of how strictly you adhered to the recipe (Procedures) or the flair with which you changed the recipe (Options), I could ascertain your Cognitive Intention.
But more importantly, depending on how aware you are of this intention will decide the level of Choice you have in your Response in the moment: more nutmeg or less nutmeg!
Note that it is not the amount of nutmeg that is important here: it is your Awareness of your Choice to change the Intention (taste), not the change itself. To take this one step further, it is your Awareness of the relationship between ‘Options’ and ‘Procedures’ that is the measure of your Dynamic Intelligence. Knowing this gives us a firm foundation for your Dynamic Intelligence development.
So, the next time you add some salt to a dish, ask yourself if you did it with Awareness of the Choice, or if you did it solely based on taste, which would then be an automatic (habituated) Intention. There are fifty of these Cognitive Intentions uncovered in the research, and each pertains to an unconscious, habituated shortcut in your thinking. The question is: how aware are you of them?
There are no right and no wrong Cognitive Intentions, only useful or not useful, depending on the context. Cognitive Intentions exist as a result of our genetics, environment, experiences, and choices. Cognitive Intentions are not dependent on culture and can be found in all persons equally, regardless of their culture.
The degree to which they manifest themselves, however, varies greatly in each person and in diverse cultures.
The question is; what is the right mix of ingredients (Cognitive Intentions) needed to reach a certain outcome, in what sequence and how much of each?
Every single one of the Cognitive Intentions is necessary in a business – not, however, in every position, nor in every combination, nor to the same degree.
Thinking Styles
It was found in the research (of over 8,000 profiles) that the unique combination of Cognitive Intentions for each individual is considered a Thinking Style and this style is measurable on the Thinking Quotient™ (TQ) scale.
The ways in which the 50 Cognitive Intentions combine produce vastly different thinking and behaving outcomes for each person, and as such, a specific combination could be considered a Thinking Style, as governed by the person’s unconscious intention in the moment.
Dynamic Intelligence™
Dynamic Intelligence is the process by which we construct our thinking in the moment in order to figure out the path from Intention to Awareness, then Choice and finally Response and thereby enabling us to predict the outcome of a situation better.
The greater our Awareness of our Intention, the more Choice we create in our Responses in the moment, thus, the greater our Dynamic Intelligence.
Thinking Quotient™
Dr. Stevens mapped the individual Cognitive Intentions in the Identity Compass® profile to Kegan's Adult Development Theory principles in order to show how each stage could be deconstructed from a position of awareness - Steven's doctoral thesis explains at which level you reside, and how you can develop from there.
Dynamic Intention Awareness Model
Dr. Stevens model highlights one's capacity for thinking and awareness in a predictive fashion in that the earlier an individual can step out of their own perspective to predict the outcome of a given event, making use of their awareness of their use of Cognitive Intentions in the moment, the higher their potential Dynamic Intelligence.
As the ultimate goal of Constructed Development Theory is awareness and balance in one’s thinking, and choice in one’s behaving, the level of awareness of an individual’s ability to respond can be measured using the Awareness Quotient™ tool.
The Awareness Quotient™
The AQ was developed as part of the research to benchmark the participants’ thinking. Based on the combination of fifty Cognitive Intentions as registered by the Identity Compass®, the Awareness Quotient™ takes a measure of our use of them and returns a score that amounts to our Dynamic Intelligence™.
This scale is your benchmark for your Constructed Development to ease a greater choice in your Response. Thus, the greater one’s ability to predict the ramifications of one’s decisions, the higher one’s self-awareness.
A powerful tool to uncover your construction of self! The Identity Compass® The Identity Compass® is an innovative, scientifically tested analysis tool to reveal how people construct their thinking rooted in knowledge of 25 years. Dr. Stevens used the Identity Compass® to scientifically proof his theory of Constructed Development and measuring the Thinking and Awareness Quotient’s. The Identity Compass® registers Cognitive Intentions and how people construct their thinking and make decisions in typical work situations.
The Identity Compass® gives clear guidance on which employees are likely to perform best in which situations and how improvement can be achieved. It points out what motivates employees, what their values are and what their career goals are.
The Identity Compass® will help you understand how people will perform under stress, work in a team, or how best to motivate them to succeed on the job.
It is possible to accurately estimate how long a person is likely to stay on a particular job.
Comparison of the profiles of a whole team can also be made. All results will be visualised clearly.
The Identity Compass® can be used to create an "All Star Team" of employees that are highly likely to work well together.
The team application of this tool includes 12 pages of different team-reports. Correlations are given with skills sets such as leadership, communication, working accuracy, burnout or bore-out, teamwork, sales excellence, and project management.
The team assessments show common group behaviours and uncover gaps in perception and thinking. We explore internal dynamics and external stakeholder realities.
This creates shared understanding and increases effectiveness. Three doctoral theses have been written so far on the Identity Compass®. In the latest one Dr. Darren Stevens was able to show the stages of a person’s cognitive development, a ground breaking discovery in psychology.
Job Motivation and Satisfaction
The JobMotivation Edition® of the Identity Compass®, developed by Prof. Dr. David Scheffer, is based on the latest motivation theories according to Norbert Bischof, David McClelland, Friederich Herzberg and John Holland and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
How much fulfilment people find in their job situation and which factors in their work motivate and demotivate them.
A scientifically grounded interview developed by Prof. Dr. David Scheffer for the assessment of working motivation and job satisfaction. Prof. Dr. Scheffer succeeded for the first time worldwide in scientifically proving that there is a connection between working atmosphere and work performance.
Finally…
The combination of Constructed Development Theory, the awareness of one’s Dynamic Intelligence™ as measured by the Awareness Quotient™ tool and the increased capacity to respond in the moment via the four pillars - Intention, Awareness, Choice, and Response™ - creates a brand-new approach to individual and organisational development that forms the foundation for a more robust method of vertical development.
CDT facilitates self-awareness and cognitive growth. This is what we need in today’s complex and expanding world!
Get in touch today for a brief chat about requirements and how we can help you grow your employees in a vertical direction.
We are the only organisation offering this profound system for adult Vertical Development.
“Motivation may be high, but unless it causes people to go into action, it is of relatively little use.” Maus, H. Arne. Getting People Right (p. 54). Books on Demand GmbH. Kindle Edition.
We are the only organisation offering this profound system for adult Vertical Development.
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