From the arrival of Erik Erikson at Harvard in 1960, the graduate schools of Psychology, Education, Social Relations and the Divinity school all-together gained a cross-disciplinary interest in adult constructive development theory and practice. Educational psychologist Dr. William Perry’s Bureau for Study Counsel was a place where many assembled from multiple disciplines to collaborate and create through action research. From Erikson and Perry to Lawrence Kohlberg to Chris Argyris and Bill Torbert, to Jane Loevinger and Suzanne Cook-Greuter, to Bob Kegan, Bill Rogers, Carol Gilligan and James Fowler and more—developmental stages of adult development were explored through diverse lenses from identity to cognition to morality to stages of faith. Both Chuck Palus and I as well as subsequent friends and colleagues like Nick Petrie were fortunate to have moved through the “Harvard system” of post-Piaget constructive adult development and were forever impacted by the simple, observable brilliance of Vertical development as a consistently overlooked fact from business to politics and most particularly from the burgeoning field of Organizational Development.

Years later in 1990, as a senior manager in the services division of a Fortune-50 global company, and facing a harrowing organizational change challenge, I sourced Bill Torbert’s most recent book: Managing the Corporate Dream (1987). Quite uniquely, of all the adult-development “gurus” spawned by the Harvard school, Bill had boldly suggested that stage development was not only individual, but could also be developed in the collective. For me, the idea of Vertical Leadership Culture as a vehicle for team and organizational transformation was born!

I quickly began to adapt individual vertical models and tools into collective forms. But leadership culture was different—the collective from the individual was not the simple extrapolation it had appeared to be—the distinction of within the individual and shared between in collective was yet to be refined by me. In addition, the seven individual stages of development were too clumsy for the fast and loose transformation required in the world of 1990’s hi-tech, so I rapidly developed a simple, three-stage framework that incorporated all seven. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was the number two computer company in the world and chasing IBM. Agility was required, so I developed a simpler more intuitive framework of culture types: the Dependent-Conformer, Independent-Achiever, and the Interdependent-Collaborator, integrating expert and individualist individual stages into the two transition zones between the three cultures.

DEC was a thoroughly Achiever leadership culture. The high-end belief of interdependence was required, however, because the entire services-division strategy required operational and attitudinal interdependent collaboration throughout the value chain in order to first survive and then thrive. The case study of the services-division transformation, my first enterprise level executive and organizational transformation, was a smashing success. In six months, by moving expert people to the work across boundaries, we struck an increase from 34% to 67% in Billable Utilization and made a dramatic move from the red to the black. The shift to a Belief-in-Action of shared resources was that drove new behaviors and practices. Unfortunately, the rest of the corporation did not share that transformational dream. In the next few years we were acquired twice. A Fortune-50 company disappeared because it refused to acknowledge and shift its core system of embedded beliefs in order to develop adaptive new practices.

Less than ten years later, I was to learn that not only were Bill Torbert, Suzanne Cook-Greuter, Chuck Palus and I along with a select few colleagues practicing in Vertical Leadership Culture, but also the Center for Creative Leadership had also been advancing ideas about adult development in the collective since the early nineties in a form of “Relational Development”. This theory and practice celebrated leadership not just within individuals, but between leaders, through beliefs and practices—a truly breakthrough concept. Torbert, Palus, McGuire and a handful of close associates have continued this collaborative inquiry now for thirty years. Though many others have written theoretically or have searched to identify a variety of Vertical Leadership Cultures, to our knowledge we remain the core action-research practitioners of actually transforming Vertical Leadership Cultures toward more interdependent forms, in executives teams and organizations.

We invite all-comers to join, expand, collaborate, learn and transform this field and its beneficiaries.

February 2021