The hidden architecture of change

Why lasting development begins beneath the visible behaviour.

In the winter of 2016, I proudly ticked an item off my bucket list that had been there for the better part of a decade. With the sponsorship of my employer, Bendelta, I flew to Boston and spent a week studying under Professor Robert Kegan, who held the chair in Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Kegan’s work had been shaping the way I thought about adult development long before I met him. His ideas kept finding me, referenced in papers and mentioned by practitioners I trusted. Each time they named something I had been observing but had not yet found clean language for.

When I arrived in Boston, Kegan was approaching the end of a forty-year tenure at Harvard, and I was aware, sitting in that room, of the enormous privilege I was experiencing. A week later, with a very full heart, I left Boston as an accredited Immunity to Change practitioner. Since then, the framework has been central to my executive coaching and many of the leadership programs I have designed and facilitated. But what I think about most from that time is not the credential, it’s the experience of having ideas that had lived in my margins for years made live, specific and applicable, in the presence of the person who had spent a lifetime building them.

In the decade that has followed, I have continued to observe women arrive at development programs having genuinely done the work. They have read the books, attended the workshops, received the feedback and engaged sincerely with every process on offer. They understand the frameworks and can articulate what good leadership looks like.

And then they soften their sentences before speaking. They apologise before offering a view. They calculate, in the fraction of a second before opening their mouths, how much of themselves is acceptable in this particular room. They qualify and hedge and make themselves smaller in ways they are not always aware of doing.

Kegan draws a distinction between two kinds of development. The first, horizontal, adds to what we know: more frameworks, more models, more strategies, more skills. The second, vertical, expands the system that does the knowing. It doesn't add more to the container, it changes the shape of the container itself. Most corporate learning and development is horizontal. It is designed to give people more information, more capability, more technique. That's not without value. But it's limited in a particular way that most organisations have not yet reckoned with seriously.

A woman who softens her sentences before she speaks does not need another module on assertiveness. She needs to be able to see, with some distance, the pattern she is running. She needs to examine the belief beneath the behaviour, the assumption about what will happen if she takes up more space, asks for more, expects more.

In Kegan’s language, she needs to move from being subject to that assumption, to holding it as object. To look at it, rather than through it. That is a different kind of development entirely.

Kegan argues that most people and organisations fail to change not because they lack commitment or capability, but because they hold hidden competing commitments beneath their conscious awareness. A person may genuinely want to change, while another part of their meaning-making system is simultaneously organised around preventing that very change from happening. The woman who wants to speak up more confidently in meetings may hold a deeper, unexamined assumption that making herself visible is dangerous, both professionally and relationally. She doesn’t know she holds this assumption, it’s not a decision she consciously made. It’s a meaning she has constructed, often over many years, and it’s running her behaviour with considerably more force than any framework she has ever been taught.

The Immunity to Change work is designed to surface exactly that: to make the invisible visible, and to bring the competing commitment into the light where it can be examined. That is vertical development in practice. Not giving someone a new tool, but helping her understand the structure that prevents her from using the tools she already has.

This matters for women’s development because the barriers women encounter are not simply capability gaps. Ibarra, Ely and Kolb named this clearly in their 2013 Harvard Business Review article, ‘Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers’. They argued that many organisations invest in women’s leadership pipelines but see limited progress because they fail to address the identity work at the heart of becoming a leader. The women bring commitment and effort. The organisation brings programs and good intention. But too often, the level of the intervention does not match the level of the problem.

You cannot think your way out of a meaning-making system using the same meaning-making system that constructed it.

Changing the frame is slower, less tidy and harder to measure than changing a behaviour. It requires a woman to examine the assumptions that have been operating beneath her behaviour, often for years. Not simply what she does, but what she believes will happen if she does something different. That is why vertical development cannot be reduced to a toolkit. The work is not only behavioural; it is interpretive.

I have designed and facilitated leadership programs around vertical development for more than a decade, inside organisations of varying size and sector. The pattern I observe consistently is this: the women who shift most significantly are not necessarily the ones who receive the most feedback or attend the most programs. They are the ones who begin to see the architecture beneath their own behaviour, the belief underneath the apology and the assumption underneath the hesitation. That shift can happen in a formal leadership program, in a coaching relationship, in a carefully held peer conversation, or sometimes in a moment of honest reflection that finally gives language to what has been running quietly underneath. But it does not happen simply because more content has been delivered. It happens when the development reaches the level at which the issue actually lives.

If you are a woman reading this, the point is not that the programs you have attended were without value. It is that the gap you may still feel, between knowing what you need to do and being able to do it consistently when it matters, may not be a gap that more tools can close.

If you are someone who commissions development for women, the question worth sitting with is whether the level of the intervention matches the level of the problem. Are you adding more information, or creating the conditions for women to examine the assumptions shaping what they believe is possible?

What women often need is not another program layered on top of the same old frame. They need development that helps them see the frame itself, the beliefs shaping what feels safe, what feels dangerous, what feels available, and what feels out of reach.

This is part of the ground Kith Salon was built from: the belief that women need the space, language and developmental conditions to examine the frame itself, not simply add more tools on top of it.

Not more tools. A bigger frame.

References

Ibarra, H., Ely, R.J. and Kolb, D.M. (2013). 'Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers.' Harvard Business Review, 91(9), pp.60–66.

Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kegan, R. and Lahey, L.L. (2009). Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization. Harvard Business Review Press.