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The Dialogic Mindset: Leading Emergent Change in a Complex World
Gervase R. Bushe, PhD Simon Fraser University
Robert J. Marshak, PhD American University
The Professor of Leadership and Organization Development in the Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada,
Gervase Bushe’s career spans three decades of transforming organizational structures, culture and processes away from command and control toward collaboration. Using “field-experiment” research methods that partner with organizations to increase their effectiveness through inquiry, he is the award winning author, (twice recipient of the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award), of over 80 papers and three books on organizational change, leadership, teams and teamwork. Clear Leadership: Sustaining Real Collaboration and Partnership at Work (2009) has been translated into 6 languages and his Clear Leadership course is taught by over 100 certified instructors worldwide. He has consulted to blue chip corporations and start-ups, public sector and business corporations, in a variety of sectors. His newest co-edited book (with Robert Marshak) is Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2015).
Robert J. Marshak is Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Organization Development in the School of Public Affairs at American University,
Washington, DC. He has led a global consulting practice specializing in organizational change for more than thirty years and has trained thousands of participants in Organization Development certificate and graduate degree programs around the world. Bob is the author of Covert Processes at Work: Managing the Five Hidden Dimensions of Organizational Change (2006); Organizational Change: Views from the Edge (2009); and co-editor with Gervase Bushe of Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change (2015), as well as more than eighty-five articles and
Abstract
The “visionary leader” narrative and performance
mindset that predominate in theories and practices
of “Change Leadership” are no longer effective
in an environment of multi-dimensional diversity
marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and
ambiguity. Developments over the past thirty
years in organization development theory and
practice, which have led to what we call Dialogic
Organization Development, implicitly suggest
a different leadership narrative and mindset are
needed. Consistent with transformational OD
practice, seven core assumptions of a Dialogic
Mindset for leaders are described. Relying on one
person to “show the way” has become a barrier
to leaders enacting the kind of emergent change
processes needed in rapidly changing, complex
organizations. The contours of a new leadership
narrative are identified followed by a discussion of
the implications for leadership development.
Keywords: Leadership, leadership development,
organization change, dialogic mindset, VUCA
_______________
Bushe and Marshak
38 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
In this article, we describe the dominant
leadership narrative, which focuses on establishing
visions and plans, assumes organizations are
mostly stable entities, and presumes that data and
analysis can solve problems. We argue that this
dominant leadership narrative is no longer viable
in a complex, interdependent, and multi-cultural
world. A new narrative of leadership is forming that
is more capable of guiding the emergent, generative
organization and change processes required of
interdependent systems in a multi-dimensional,
diverse world marked by volatility, uncertainty,
complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). This narrative
also includes new organization development
practices that do not fit the dominant paradigm.
Our ongoing study of these newer change practices
(Bushe & Marshak, 2009, 2014, 2015) leads us
to argue that successful leadership will require
very different assumptions about organizing and
leading from the prevailing “Performance Mindset”
that emphasizes instrumental and measurable
goal setting and achievement. We identify seven
assumptions of a “Dialogic Mindset” we think
underlie successful leadership practice in a VUCA
world. The continuing emphasis on being a heroic,
strategic thinker who can envision viable futures
and the path to those futures does little to prepare
today’s leaders for the complex, ever-changing
challenges they face. Instead, leaders need to utlize
book chapters on organizational consulting and change. He received the Organization Development Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions as a consultant, educator, and author and is widely recognized for his leading edge thinking about organization development and change.
Contact Information:
Gervase R. Bushe PhD Professor of Leadership and Organization Development
Beedie School of Business Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada www.gervasebushe.ca
Email: [email protected]
Robert J. Marshak PhD
School of Public Affairs American University Email: [email protected]
39Bushe and Marshak
complexity and uncertainty in ways that encourage
and enable generative and transformational change.
We conclude by discussing three key attributes
such leaders will require: the capacity to manage
their own anxiety about “letting go” as well as the
anxiety emergent leadership creates for followers
who expect leaders to provide answers; practicing
high levels of self-differentiation; and operating
from advanced stages of ego development.
The Leader As Visionary Model
The prevailing narrative of leadership is
based on the assumption that great leaders must
have vision and the ability to lead followers to
that vision. Leaders, followers, and commentators
alike assume that being a visionary is indispensable
to organizational leadership. For example, more
than 70 years ago, Dimock (1945) described the
requirements of executive leadership, one of which
was “a clear vision of his goals and how to achieve
them” (p.139). Later, management gurus began to
distinguish between vision and goals. Some noted
vision is abstract while goals are concrete (Locke &
Latham, 1990) while others suggested that having
vision is the ability to see the goals realized in a
possible future (Levin, 2000) with enough clarity
that paths to those goals become visible.
The ability to set and achieve a vision
or goals continues to be central to definitions of
leadership (Rupprecht, Waldrop, & Grawitch, 2013;
Sternberg, 2013). However, there are other models
advanced in recent years that better address the
realities of today’s VUCA world. After all, what if
things are too complex and changing in our multi-
cultural, global world for any executive to know
what products or services to make, what markets to
pursue, or how best to structure and manage their
organization? How do we know if a vision is the
right vision, except in retrospect? What about all
those organizations that have followed a “failed”
or failing vision (e.g. Nortel Networks, Blackberry,
Washington Mutual, Circuit City, Ames Department
Stores, Lehman Brothers, and so on)? The complex
realities of what leaders must deal with on a
daily basis now challenge the traditional views of
leadership and have begun to stimulate alternative
ways of thinking about leadership and change.
For example, a leading voice supporting an
alternative paradigm is Heifetz’s (1998) leadership
model that indirectly challenges the heroic,
visionary orthodoxy. He divides the decision
situations leaders face into technical problems,
which can be defined and solved through a top-down
imposition of technical rationality; and adaptive
challenges, which can only be “solved” through
the voluntary engagement of the people who will
have to change what they do and how they think.
In Heifetz’s alternative narrative of leadership,
adaptive leaders identify challenges but instead of
40 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
providing solutions, they encourage employees and
other stakeholders to propose and act on their own
solutions. Others offer complimentary perspectives.
For example, David Snowden and his Cynefin Model
of contingency approaches to decision-making point
out that when cause-effect relations aren’t fully
understood, an emergent approach is more effective
(Snowden & Boone, 2007). Sharmer (2009) argues
that leaders need to “let go and let come” in order
to “lead from the emerging future.” Stacey (2001,
2015) argues that all organizing is inherently so
complex and emergent that the traditional narratives
about leadership are no longer applicable—if they
ever were.
Interestingly, over the past thirty years, an
increasing array of Organization Development and
allied approaches and methods implicitly call for
a leadership narrative different from the heroic,
visionary orthodoxy. These newer approaches
and methods differ from the founding principles
of Organization Development and require leaders
to be something other than “visionary” in how
they address change and transformation in their
organizations.
The Emerging Model Of Dialogic Change And
Leadership
Our research into the increasing number
of Organization Development approaches that
violate central tenets of foundational Organization
Development change theory led us to appreciate the
underlying similarities in assumptions and intent of
methods as dissimilar as Appreciative Inquiry (AI)
and Open Space Technology, Dynamic Facilitation
and Reflexive Inquiry, the Cycle of Resolution and
Narrative Coaching, among many, many others. 1
In our research, we grouped them under the label
“Dialogic OD” because all of these methods, in one
way or another, agree that transformational change
requires changing the conversation (Bushe &
Marshak, 2009). We chose this label also because it
contrasted well with foundational Lewinian change
theory, action research methods, and attention to
organizations as open systems, which we labeled
“Diagnostic OD.” Furthermore, we concluded
that these Dialogic OD methods emerged precisely
because they help leaders and organizations
respond to the complexities of managing change in
ambiguous, turbulent, complex, and multi-cultural
situations (Bushe & Marshak, 2015).
Diagnostic Organization Development
methods, in keeping with the models of
organizations and leadership prevalent during the
foundational period of Organization Development
(1950s-1970s), are designed to help leaders address
necessary changes by producing clear visions,
goals, and plans, and through collaboratively
1 See www.dialogicod.net/toolsandmethods.pdf for a continuously updated bibliography of Dialogic OD methods.
41Bushe and Marshak
collecting and analyzing data to guide action
planning. How much those who must change are
involved in data collection, analysis, and planning
varies, but “participation” is generally viewed as
the key to overcoming the inevitable resistance
to change. While the engagement of everyone in
problem-solving is encouraged, it is expected that
leaders will decide on solutions, identify goals, and
the path to those goals usually through top-down,
“waterfall” interventions. Research often finds that
such planned change efforts result in low success
rates, which raises the question: might some of
this failure be the result of treating the adaptive
challenges of today like the technical problems of
the past?
Implicit in all Dialogic Organization
Development methods is a very different narrative
of leadership more aligned with the needs of
adaptive challenges in a complex world. Notable
contributors to this new narrative of leadership
and change include Frank Barrett (2012), Harrison
Owen (2008), Deborah Rowland (Rowland & Higgs,
2008), Ed Schein (2013), Patricia Shaw (2002),
Marvin Weisbord (Weisbord & Janoff, 2015), and
Meg Wheatley (1992). This implicit model of
leadership, which is more aligned with the needs
of organizations in a VUCA world, runs counter
to the visionary leader narrative’s widespread
Performance Mindset. The remainder of this paper
will briefly outline the Performance Mindset and
then the assumptions of the Dialogic Leadership
Mindset implied by insights from Dialogic
Organization Development and based in practices
of inquiry and learning rather than command and
control. The article concludes with a discussion
of what will be required of leaders adopting such a
mindset.
The Performance Mindset And Organizational
Learning
A Performance Mindset looks at all activities
as a means to an end—how they are instrumental
to goal setting and achievement—preferably
with assurances that they will reliably produce
desired outcomes. From this perspective, dialogic
processes can appear to be of questionable value
as they focus on engaging people in reflection and
interaction, rely on self-organizing processes and
emergence, and seek to achieve desired outcomes
by “changing the conversation.” It’s all talk and
no action (Marshak, 1998). Operating from a
Performance Mindset, the concerned leader would
likely exclaim: “How is paying for my employees to
take a day off work, sit around, and talk about some
big complex issue going to be productive?” The
Performance Mindset just sees a waste of time unless
an identified problem is solved or there is a clear set
of action items produced that will be implemented
at management’s direction. Otherwise, the manager
42 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
is potentially losing a day of revenue paying for a
day in which no work gets done.
The Performance Mindset goes hand in
hand with the dominant leadership narrative: the
great leader is one who can shape the performance
of his or her followers and provide them the context,
targets, resources, motivation, and direction to
achieve. People who can do these things are
great leaders, and those who cannot are failures.
Recently, Schein (2013) has referred to this as Do
and Tell leadership and bemoans its dominance and
detrimental impacts on addressing today’s complex,
adaptive challenges.
To be sustainably successful, organizations
have to manage learning as well as performing. This
is one of the core paradoxes of management and
organization theory: how to create organizations that
can be simultaneously innovative and efficient; that
is, how to best organize in order to learn and perform
at the same time (Lawrence & Dyer, 1984)? The
most efficient forms of organizing, like assembly-
line manufacturing, are also the least able to adapt
and change. Our business models for succeeding
in complex, uncertain environments, like popular
music or pharmaceuticals, are highly inefficient
and spend lots of money on innovation hoping for
one monster hit to pay it all back. Learning and
performing are paradoxically related because when
someone is focused on performing well, they usually
are not learning anything, and vice versa. One of
the core dilemmas of business organizations in the
21st century is how to be efficient and innovative at
the same time.
To accomplish this, organizations need
ambidextrous leaders who can operate from a
Performance Mindset and a Dialogic Mindset. The
fundamental premises of Dialogic Organization
Development that we discovered can teach leaders:
1) how to structure collective inquiry to produce
high value learning, new ideas, new networks,
and people acting on their good ideas; 2) how to
create new performance levels from engaging
the motivation and ideas that lie dormant in their
organizations’ social networks.
The Performance Mindset isn’t necessarily
opposed to a Dialogic Mindset. It recognizes that
organizations cannot continue to perform without
learning. Stuff happens, things change, and people
have to adapt, yet in the dominant leadership
narrative, learning depends on experts, wise
teachers, and heroic leaders who can show us the
way. It does not know how to deal with situations
in which no one knows the “right” answers or ”best
practices” are not applicable. The Performance
Mindset knows very little about how to inquire
into collective experience in ways that catalyze the
emergence of new ideas, processes, and solutions by
aligning with and amplifying the untapped wisdom
43Bushe and Marshak
Development models based in complexity science
and those based in interpretive social science (Bushe
& Marshak, 2014). We identified the unique and
common characteristics of each approach and how
their underlying ideas and practices were merging
to create a new way of thinking about organizations
and change. Our focus in that work was on the
Dialogic Mindset of the Organization Development
Practitioner. Here, we adapt and apply those insights
to create what we call the seven assumptions of the
Leader’s Dialogic Mindset. These assumptions
are shown in Table 1 and briefly described in the
following pages.
1. Reality and relationships are socially
constructed.
What people believe to be true, right, and
in the organization.
Instead of telling people what to do and how
to do it, a leader using a Dialogic Mindset might
ask questions like: “Do we understand why people
come to work each day?” “When do they bring the
best of themselves and care about the company’s
results?” “What do we do to make it more likely
that people who work here will have new ideas and
act on the good ones?” “How do we ensure that the
people who have to cope with change at the front
lines are able to adapt quickly and effectively?”
The Dialogic Mindset: Collective Inquiry and
Learning as a Transformational Process
Our in-depth analysis articulated the
Dialogic Organization Development Mindset and
summarized the theory and practice of Organization
Table 1: Seven Assumptions of the Leader’s Dialogic Mindset
1. Reality and relationships are socially constructed.
2. Organizations are social networks of meaning making.
3. Transformational leadership shapes how meaning is made and especially the narratives which guide people’s experience.
4. Organizations are continuously changing, in both intended and unintended ways, with multiple changes occurring at various speeds.
5. Groups and organizations are inherently self-organizing, but disruption is required for transformational adaptation and change.
6. Adaptive challenges are too complex for anyone to analyze all the variables and know the correct answer in advance, so the answer is to use emergent change processes.
7. Leading emergent change requires mobilizing stakeholders to self-initiate action, then monitoring and embedding the most promising initiatives.
44 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
and leaders cannot just insert or implement new
social “realities” like they might a mandated
reorganization, new strategy, or new performance
standards. Indeed, attempts to implement a new
social reality using the same kind of processes one
would use to implement a new computer system
always results in unintended consequences—usually,
unhappy ones (Kotter & Heskett, 1992; Ogbonna
& Wilkinson, 2003). Social reality emerges out of
the multitude of day-to-day interactions embedded
in social contexts. Leaders need to have an eye
and ear for what people in the organization are
saying, reading, and writing about organizational
dynamics. Ignoring interactions that are dismissive
of critical issues could be as dangerous as ignoring
downturns in productivity, sales, and revenues.
It becomes an essential aspect of leadership to
encourage interactions, conversations, and resulting
social agreements about what the organization, its
people, and its stakeholders should pay attention
to and be concerned with, and then encourage the
development of new ideas to address them.
2. Organizations are social networks of
meaning-making.
Human beings are compelled to make sense
of what we and others are doing and what is going
on around us (Weick, 1995). In organizations, an
active fantasy life is always present where people
make up what is going on in the organization and
important emerge through socialization and day-
to-day conversations. In one organization, the
“bottom line” is all-important; in another, it is
growth and market share. Remember the dot-com
bubble, when businesses without revenue were
trading at astronomical valuations? That “irrational
exuberance” was a socially constructed reality.
Barrett, Thomas, and Hocevar (1995) demonstrate
how the introduction of quality management,
like any change, doesn’t happen all of a sudden,
but rather meaning and relationships are slowly
changed through thousands of conversations. In
1980, one of us worked at General Motors, when
“quality” in that organization meant: “conformity to
specifications,” “cost more to get,” and “automotive
engineers know what a quality car is and customers
don’t.” By 1990, “quality” meant “whatever the
customer wants,” and it could be achieved at lower
costs by building it right the first time. This change
did not occur as a result of any single change
program, planned set of events, or training program,
but rather emerged over time after many different
change programs, events, and changes in strategic
direction. And yet, there were still groups where a
different “quality narrative” held sway.
Social construction is powerfully influenced
by what leaders talk about, share, endorse, read,
comment upon, ignore, dismiss, negate, or downplay.
Nonetheless, there are other powerful influences,
45Bushe and Marshak
with their leaders—what they are doing, why they
are doing it, and what they are likely to do next.
How much is fantasy and how much is reality
depends on how much straight-talk takes place,
who talks with who, and how willing leaders are
to be transparent. And, of course, people don’t
just make sense of their leaders, but also make
sense of other groups, customers, suppliers, and
all important stakeholders. When things are not
making sense, people might go and directly ask
the source of confusion “what’s going on?” “Why
did this happen?” But more often than not, people
will talk to trusted colleagues, friends, and spouses
(or just themselves) to figure out what is going on.
These networks create common beliefs about what
others are thinking, feeling, and wanting, and then
people act as if their beliefs are true (Bushe, 2009).
The Dialogic Mindset assumes that what happens
in organizations is influenced more by how people
interact and make common meaning than by how
presumably objective factors and forces impact the
organization. This also means that attending to,
listening to, and including marginalized or excluded
voices is critical for innovation in a diverse world
with a complex array of factors, influences, and
stakeholders.
From a Performance Mindset, a leader
might seek to measure and diagnose the competitive
environment and the organization’s existing vision,
mission, strategy, structure, operating systems,
technological capabilities, human resources
practices, and the like. Drawing on experts and
trusted managers, these factors would be explicitly
“measured” against a model or standards, then
remedies to develop or re-align the organization
for competitive success would be announced.
This mindset assumes that the organization or
leader’s success and failure depends on how well
interventions to directly change these factors are
developed and implemented. A statement like,
“To be more competitive we need to move from
product-line divisions to a global three-way matrix
involving products, functions, and markets,” sounds
sensible and expected from leaders, even if we are
not sure what it means.
Environmental forces and organizational
factors are obviously important, but leaders
who also view organizations as social networks
of meaning-making will pay equal or even
greater attention to what people throughout the
organization are thinking and saying and how they
make sense of their daily work experiences. What
stories and anecdotes do they tell about what is
needed for individual and organizational success
and failure? How do they interpret current and
ideal performance? Who do they hold responsible
for what? What do people believe is possible and
not possible in their job and the organization?
46 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
may decide that off-shoring cuts costs and ensures
survival and growth. People who have a story about
their leaders as ruthless and greedy may decide that
off-shoring leads to job losses and decline.
Leaders with a Dialogic Mindset understand
that the actual reasons for why they take whatever
decisions they take are not as influential as the
interpretations people make about those decisions.
It’s the narratives people hold that will determine
how people see and react to leadership decisions.
Developing new narratives and meanings to shape
new and agreed upon ways of thinking is a core
part of transformational leadership. New narratives
stimulate new meanings which in turn will allow
previously impossible or incompatible actions to be
seen as not only possible, but long overdue.
This means transformational leadership will
encourage some meanings or interpretations over
others. For example, they will try to ensure that
“doing more with less” is interpreted as a call to
re-invent how work is done rather than a demand
to “work harder and longer with fewer workers
to achieve the same results.” They will also pay
attention to what meanings are being made in the
organization, how those meanings come into being,
what sustains or challenges them, and what the
leader might do to encourage the emergence of new
meanings to meet new situations. Finally, while
leaders may be able to influence meanings people
Furthermore, the meaning of things may differ in
different parts of the organization, inviting inquiry
into varying interpretations that may exist in different
sectors and networks of the organization. Leaders
who view organizations as networks of meaning-
making understand that complicated innovations
that worked in one organization cannot simply be
copied in another. The fate of any innovation will
depend on the perceptions that develop about what
the innovation is, the motivations and competence
of those championing it, and what will be lost
and gained. These perceptions are not random or
unpredictable, but emerge from socially constructed
realities and the networks of meaning-making that
foster and reinforce them.
3. Transformational leadership shapes
how meaning is made and especially the
narratives which guide people’s experience.
The meanings and interpretations that
arise in organizations are shaped and reinforced
by the narratives or “storylines” that help explain
to people how to make sense of what they see
taking place. For example, if a company decides
to build a new manufacturing plant in a developing
country, how people will make meaning of this
expansion will depend on the story they have about
the organization, its competitive environment, and
its leaders. People who have a story about the
organizations’ leaders as caring, capable stewards
47Bushe and Marshak
technological, economic, or natural environment.
Any single “planned change” has to contend with a
multitude of other forces pushing the organization in
a myriad of ways. The larger and more complex the
organization, the more likely a variety of planned
changes are simultaneously underway and at
various stages of unfolding. The image of change as
a unitary sequence of strategic analysis, vision, and
implementation seems like an oversimplification or
very limited view to the Dialogic Mindset.
For example, an organization, with which
one of us consulted, was formed as a major
division of an international corporation through the
acquisition of two smaller independent companies
in North America and Europe. The presidents of
these smaller companies were retained to run them,
but the organization put a new CEO in place to
oversee the total operation. Initially, the division
focused change efforts on operational efficiencies in
manufacturing. While working on this, the need for
a more “integrated” division emerged as a pressing
requirement. At first, the meaning of “an integrated
global organization” was unclear, yet sparked new
conversations that led to efforts to change the
division’s structure, brand and marketing plans,
career pathways, and organizational identity and
name. As these efforts were underway, outside
factors contributed even more requirements for
change. Stock market analysts were anxious to see
make about important organizational factors,
they will not be able to dictate them. Therefore,
leaders should also seek to influence the processes
of meaning-making, including the use of various
structured engagements and events intended to
influence how and what people think, as well as
what they do.
4. Organizations are continuously
changing, in both intended and unintended
ways, with multiple changes occurring at various
speeds.
One of the legacies from 20th century
thinking that influences the Performance Mindset
(and Diagnostic Organization Development)
is the tendency to think of organizations as
entities with inherent stability (inertia) where
change is something that occasionally happens
between periods of stability through processes of
unfreezing, movement, and refreezing (Marshak,
2004). Certainly, there are times of stability and
forces for stability, but the Dialogic Mindset sees
organizations as flow processes in which lots of
things are moving at different speeds and change
is merely a matter of temporal perspective. From
this point of view, “stability” is just slow moving
change. Furthermore, what is changing and why
things are changing is often out of the hands of any
person or group. Change inside organizations can be
the consequence of changes in the political, social,
48 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
self-organization will be more or less beneficial
to the organization depends on leadership and the
narratives that guide people’s meaning-making.
The Performance Mindset assumes that without
proactive leadership there will be disorganization,
anxiety, and chaos, so order needs to be imposed. It
may be true that you can impose (temporary) order
more quickly than it will emerge, and therefore this
may seem like a more productive route, especially
when anxiety is high. However, leaders cannot
unilaterally impose the meanings people will make
of situations. Furthermore, well-intended efforts
to control may lead to narratives of oppression,
and narratives detailing complex rules and specific
behaviors often lead only to compliance and
submissive responses. In a world of uncertainty
and complexity, the Dialogic Mindset seeks to work
with, rather than against, self-organizing processes,
and attempts to shape them, when possible, toward
organizational needs.
Unless the on-going processes of self-
organization are disrupted, they may continue to
recreate familiar, but limiting patterns of thought and
action and thereby pose a barrier to necessary learning
and adaptation. The self-organizing properties
of systems will re-organize into more complex,
adaptive states only when close to chaos (Waldrop,
1992); this is replicated in organizations (Pascale,
Milleman, & Gioja, 2001). While the Performance
improved profitability after the acquisitions and
pressed for cuts in employees and expenses; the
competitive environment was in the midst of shifting
from competition based on quality to competition
based on price; the costs of base materials began
to shift wildly; and political factors in Asia
were impeding efforts towards another planned
acquisition in order to complete the original vision
for major operations in North America, Europe,
and Asia. The political and cultural dynamics
within the top team composed of a new CEO, two
former presidents (who each thought he should be
CEO), and members from Columbia, France, The
Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the USA
all compounded these perturbations. All of this
unfolded over a period of only two and a half years!
5. Groups and organizations are
inherently self-organizing, but disruption is
required for transformational adaptation and
change.
In nature, order emerges without a plan
or leadership. Science has recently taught us that
complex behavior emerges from a few simple
rules (Holman, 2015). This is easily seen when
catastrophes occur and large numbers of people
are able to self-organize rapidly in response. Self-
organization occurs in organizations wherever
and whenever there is ambiguity and space for
innovation and adaptation to emerge. Whether that
49Bushe and Marshak
where diverse networks of people are socially
constructing reality in every conversation, where
meaning can be created, maintained, or destroyed
at a moment’s notice, and where factors emerge
and change in varying ways and at varying rates
of speed, it is impossible to know in advance what
will cause what. There are few “best practices” that
can be relied on to work in any specific situation.
What new technology will people embrace? What
HR practices will really engage employees? What
corporate policies will increase innovation? The
answers to these can only be seen in retrospect
after something has succeeded (or failed). Who
foresaw all the implications of the internet for the
music business, newspapers, and now the taxi and
hotel businesses? On the other hand, though widely
expected to be disruptive, why has it had, to date,
such small impact on the business models for higher
education?
When dealing with a complex, multi-
dimensional world, expecting a leader to be able to
see the future and show the way may cause more
problems than it solves. One of the most common
findings of studies of companies managing
complexity and innovation is that trying to figure out
the right answer before you engage the people who
will have to implement that answer is a road to ruin.
For example, Collins and Hansen (2011) found in
their study of companies that thrived in uncertainty
Mindset views disruption as an unwelcome threat
to success and thus something to guard against
and avoid, the Dialogic Mindset understands that
disruption is integral to transformational change
and embraces it (Holman, 2010). In order for
adaptive self-organizing processes to emerge in
organizations, people must believe that the old order
no longer works, there is no going back, and that
true transformation in thinking and action is needed.
The leader may guide a transformation in response
to an unplanned disruption (e.g., a new disruptive
technology that poses an existential threat to the
organization). Alternatively, the leader may have
to encourage disruption to existing narratives and
patterns of meaning-making to create the necessary
stimulus for innovation and adaptation. In the latter
case, the leader is, in effect, doing the very opposite
of the visionary narrative. Rather than show people
the way forward, the leader shows them that the
current way is no longer tenable and must be thrown
out. Instead of imposing a new vision to address
the adaptive challenge, the leader creates disruption
to support collective inquiry and processes of self-
organization and emergence.
6. Adaptive challenges are too complex
for anyone to analyze all the variables and know
the correct answer in advance, so the answer is to
use emergent change processes.
In a world of ambiguity and uncertainty,
50 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
ingredients are present (Bushe & Marshak, 2014;
2015): 1) Reactions to disruption are channeled so
that the natural processes of self-organization and
emergence lead to a reorganization at a higher level
of complexity; 2) The process of change stimulates
the creation of new core narratives that provide
people with new storylines about the organization
thereby shaping new adaptive behaviors; 3)
Generative images and processes surface and are
utilized to increase the production of new ideas and
the motivation to act on them.
7. Leading emergent change requires
mobilizing stakeholders to self-initiate action,
then monitoring and embedding the most
promising initiatives.
All the previous assumptions inform the
Dialogic Mindset’s basic framework for learning and
adapting under conditions of diversity, complexity,
and adaptive challenges. The leader’s job is not to
have a grand vision and show people how to reach it.
The leader’s job is to frame adaptive challenges and
complex contexts in ways that mobilize the diverse
networks of people who must change so that they will
want to change. This leadership focuses on creating
conditions that unleash the energy and ideas latent
in the organization so that emergent, self-organizing
processes serve the organization. This leadership
works to enrich social networks so that people with
similar motivations and ideas can find and support
that those pursuing big visions were outperformed
by leaders who did not try to identify the right new
product or service and made a big bet. Instead,
the more successful leaders encouraged numerous
small experiments, learning as they went, in a more
emergent process of change. In environments of
uncertainty, successful companies “fire bullets, then
cannonballs.” Snowden and Boone (2007) write
that what works and why can only be understood in
retrospect, so first send out probes, then sense and
respond. And yet, figuring out what to do before
you do anything is precisely what the dominant
leadership narrative calls for. Instead, try many
small, fail-safe experiments to see what, in this
situation, really leads to what, and will actually do
what you hope it will.
In the new leadership narrative, the leader
does not know in advance what the content of the
change will be, but does provide a process for
change (Rowland & Higgs, 2008) that engages those
people who will help the organization learn and
adapt through collective inquiry. However, unlike
the Performance Mindset, in which diagnostic and
analytic inquiry is used to collect information and
then to plan and implement change, the Dialogic
Mindset sees collective inquiry and change occurring
simultaneously. Through processes of engaging
people in collective inquiry, transformational
change occurs when at least one of three critical
51Bushe and Marshak
also included learning the principles of dialogue.
This provided a safe container for the exchange
of storylines and the relatively rapid emergence
of a new narrative about the importance of
“global integration.” At first no one knew what
“global integration” really meant, but it served
as a generative image (Bushe & Storch, 2015)
that fostered new meanings across the previously
independent units and functions and led the teams
to propose a variety of initiatives that advanced
this ideal. Teams were encouraged to act on their
proposals and, in conjunction with managers
throughout the organization, develop their own
ideas about what global integration meant in terms
of all aspects of the division: strategy, structure,
systems, image, culture, identity, and so forth.
Implications for Developing Leaders
The Organization Development approaches
of the past 30 years that we have clustered under
the “Dialogic Organization Development Mindset”
imply (implicitly and explicitly) a model of leadership
that differs from the dominant leader as visionary
narrative. We think these newer OD processes and
the beginnings of a new narrative of leadership
have emerged precisely because organizational
leaders now face complexity, uncertainty, and
diversity that cannot be successfully managed by
the Performance Mindset that emphasizes facts,
figures, and best practices to identify specific targets
each other in order to take on complex conditions and
adaptive challenges through self-initiated actions
and small experiments. Rather than vet ideas,
manage projects, check implementation plans, and
so on, the Dialogic Mindset wants to encourage the
emergence of new ideas and possibilities fostered
by different narratives and meanings that challenge
the status quo. This mindset seeks to tap into the
latent motivation that exists among small groups
of people who are passionate about their ideas and
unleash them to take action. The leader, along
with others, then monitors the results, and those
experiments that show promise are nurtured and
allocated resources. Once it becomes clear which
initiatives will work, they are built upon, scaled
up, and embedded into the organization (Roehrig,
Schwendenwein, & Bushe, 2015).
For example, in the earlier case of the newly
formed division, the leader and leadership team
had no clear ideas about what needed to be done or
how. They knew they needed to create a successful
division, but at first attempted to make each of the
acquired units independently successful. The CEO,
despite pressure to conform to the visionary leader
narrative, instead launched an effort that brought
key second tier managers from all geographies and
functions together on a quarterly basis to engage
each other and confront adaptive challenges in a
“management development” learning context that
52 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
and even anxiety, long enough to produce truly
innovative and adaptive responses to the complex
challenges facing organizations today.
In our experience, leaders who can do this
are currently rare, but those who can, in addition
to holding some or all of the assumptions of the
Dialogic Mindset, share some traits that make it
possible for them to lead others emergently. Here we
will note three such traits and suggest that programs
and coaching which seek to develop leaders for a
VUCA world need to focus on how to develop these
traits: increased capacity to cope with anxiety (their
own and others’); high levels of self-differentiation;
and high levels of ego development.
Coping with Anxiety
It is important to acknowledge the impact of
anxiety for leaders and organizational members in
effectively working in a world of high complexity,
ambiguity, diversity, and volatility. Anxiety and
change are widely acknowledged to be linked in
a “Goldilocks” relationship. If a person or group
experiences too little anxiety, there is no motivation
to change. If they experience too much anxiety they
will deny, distort, defend, or are otherwise too fearful
to change. Only when there is enough anxiety to
motivate a search for new thoughts and behaviors,
yet not so much as to lead to fearful debilitation,
will change occur. Given the demand for on-going
change and adaptation in today’s organizations, our
and how to move towards them. Instead, this new
model of leadership for a VUCA world emphasizes
emergent, socially constructed meaning-making in
order to foster collective attention towards adaptive
challenges and to stimulate bottom-up, locally
responsive solutions.
One widely recognized problem
organizations face is that lower level managers
advance up the ranks because of their ability to meet
performance targets and this produces too much of a
narrow, short-term perspective and reliance on what
was successful in the past at the executive level.
Often organizations and leadership development
programs try to ameliorate this through educational
and developmental assignments aimed at increasing
the “strategic thinking” of those grooming for senior
roles. While these approaches may help, they still
operate within the leader as visionary narrative.
More than skills, we believe a new narrative of
leadership is needed at this time, a widespread belief
about what a leader is and what a leader does that
is consistent with the assumptions of the Dialogic
Mindset. Then followers and other stakeholders
will understand why leaders aren’t offering a vision.
They will be able to recognize a kind of leadership
that manages complexity through emergent change
processes. They will appreciate those leaders who
can hold ambiguity and uncertainty in ways that
encourage people to manage their discomfort,
53Bushe and Marshak
control outcomes. As long as they explicitly or
implicitly hold to that narrative they have two main
options. One option is to continue to try and control
outcomes by adopting new planning models, hiring
more or different experts, blaming failures on others
or overwhelming resistance to change. The second
option is to deny the need for change, to adopt a
let’s wait to see how things develop attitude, or to
defensively explain how there is nothing anyone can
do about the situation. Both are ways for the leader
operating from a visionary leader mindset to protect
their sense of worthiness in the face of a situation
they cannot predict and control. Yet both options
follow from a positioning that is inappropriate to
the complexities of the situation and will likely to
lead to organizational failure.
Similarly, followers who hold the visionary
leader narrative and Performance Mindset will look
at the leader through these lens and potentially
respond in one of two ways. One is to expect the
leader to become a better visionary or be considered
a failure. Regardless of the complexity, uncertainty
or ambiguity of the situation the leader is expected
to demonstrate visionary leadership qualities or
risk losing their followership. The second way is
to deny the situation: “This is all cyclical.” “This
too will pass.” “Next quarter will be different.”
Consequently, there is the potential for both
leaders and followers operating from the visionary
concern is not so much whether there is enough
uncertainty and anxiety to motivate change, but
whether or not leaders and organizational members
are overwhelmed with too much complexity,
uncertainty, and associated anxiety thus leading to
defensive reactions and calls for a visionary leader
to provide magical answers. Let’s consider this
question by recapping and extending our discussion
of leadership models and mindsets in today’s
organizational world.
Anxiety and contemporary organizational change.
The visionary leader narrative calls for
individuals worthy of leadership to be able to assess
situations, envision desired outcomes, plan how to
achieve them, and manage implementation efforts.
Followers also know this narrative and expect
individuals worthy of leadership to be able to fulfill
this role. So in addition to any anxiety created
through trying to cope with the complexities of
today’s organizations, leaders and members must
also confront the anxiety that may arise when a
leader does not meet those expectations. Further,
the greater the organizational uncertainty, the
greater the expectations and desire for decisive,
visionary action. To not fulfill that role implies the
leader is unworthy and a failure.
Leaders who buy in to the visionary
leader narrative and Performance Mindset will
face situations where they are unable to plan and
54 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
when attempts to plan and control change fail, a
new leadership narrative will lessen anxiety by
explaining what is actually being experienced and
why. The leader may not be able to control change,
but people will have more certainty about what is
needed and the roles and processes that are more
likely to lead to innovation and true transformation.
Organizational members will understand why
the leader is not providing a vision, why a more
emergent approach is likely to be more effective,
and what they and their leaders need to do to enact
their parts of the unfolding story.
What name becomes attached to this new
leadership narrative is anyone’s guess. However,
even with an accepted leadership narrative that
helps us to understand the kinds of actions leaders
and followers must take in a VUCA world, the
challenges posed by complexity, ambiguity, and
uncertainty can produce anxiety in leaders that
reduces their ability to lead from a Dialogic Mindset.
We turn now to considering two additional qualities
that are likely required for leadership in a VUCA
world that we think need to be included when we
think about leadership development that supports
this new narrative of leadership.
Self-Differentiation
The theories and practices that have evolved
in family systems therapy may offer some valuable
insights into what may be involved in developing
leader narrative to tacitly collude in denying the
seriousness, urgency, and potential impact of
uncertain circumstances in order to reduce their
anxiety to manageable levels. The way out of
this trap, however, is not to better develop leaders
capable of embodying the visionary narrative, but
to recognize that a different leadership narrative
and actions are more effective in the face of the
complex, adaptive challenges in a multi-cultural,
multi-dimensional world.
Anxiety and the new leadership narrative.
Many contemporary strategic and leadership
models that acknowledge complexity attempt to find
ways to simplify to an extent that the Performance
Mindset can still apply. The Dialogic Mindset,
however, does not see simplification as the solution
to managing complexity. Instead it helps us to
understand why the complexity of some situations
in today’s organizations exceeds the ability and
capacity of anyone to plan, manage, and control
change. In the face of that complexity, it also offers
an alternative approach that holds off on committing
to any course of action while seeking new ideas
and possibilities to address pressing concerns.
In essence, it explains the need to adopt less of a
planning and engineering approach to change in
favor of one that relies more on inquiry open to new
possibilities and the endorsement of desirable, yet
unplanned outcomes. Instead of increasing anxiety
55Bushe and Marshak
that everyone creates their own experience, they do
not take responsibility for others’ experience and do
not hold others responsible for their own experience.
As a result, they are able to create climates of
high engagement where people are willing to tell
each other the truth of their experience (Bushe &
O’Malley, 2013)—all qualities needed for dialogic
inquiry and learning.
Leaders operating with less self-
differentiation will tend to manage their own and
others’ anxiety through one of two basic ways: 1)
They can dismiss or otherwise disconnect from
others so that they don’t think about what those
others are experiencing and what impact they
might be having on them, and express no curiosity
about others’ experience. As a result, they have
little ability or interest in inquiry-based forms
of leadership. 2) Alternatively, they can try to
change other people’s experience to be more in
line with their own thinking, often unaware that
the motivation to do so may come from a desire to
reduce any discomfort they feel when confronted
by unwelcomed comments from others. Whether
knowingly or unwittingly, they let their followers
know what the “approved” thoughts, feelings, and
wants are, reducing the likelihood that people will
be willing to openly share with the leader any part of
their experience that might make the leader anxious.
Instead of inquiry and putting things “on the table,”
leaders who can have a “non-anxious presence”
(Friedman, 1985) since a central focus of these
theories is on the production, consequences, and
regulation of anxiety in social groups (Kerr &
Bowen, 1988). The concept of self-differentiation,
developed by Murray Bowen (1978), refers to the
ability to be an individual while staying in emotional
contact with others and is particularly useful in
understanding the requirements and challenges
of leading inquiry and learning in organizations
(Bushe, 2009; Short, 1991).
Benefits of self-differentiation
The concept assumes that the more
differentiated a person, the more they can cooperate,
look out for themselves and others, and operate
rationally in stressful as well as calm situations
without losing their own interests and identity while
trying to meet or fulfill others’ needs and ambitions
(Kerr & Bowen, 1988). According to Bushe (2009),
leaders operating in self-differentiated ways know
what their experience is, are able and willing to
describe it to their followers, and are curious about
the experience of others. They know what they think,
feel, and want and can act on that with or without
the approval of others. Yet they also want to know
what the experience of their followers are, and are
open and curious to hearing what others think, feel
and want, and stay connected without becoming
emotionally hijacked. Operating on the assumption
56 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
Secondly, creating a space in which
something new can emerge requires leaders who are
not only able to engage others, but are able to bring
very diverse parties and perspectives into the mix
in a way that is generative rather than conflictual.
Because a self-differentiated leader does not need
to censor unorthodox points of view or contrary
opinions to sustain their own emotional calm, they
can hold and model a space in which contrary views
can be expressed. This is critical, as the generative
potential of emergent change processes depend, to
a great extent, on the creativity and innovation that
comes from including people and ideas who have,
in the past, been left out or marginalized (Holman,
2010).
Ego Development
Besides self-differentiation, are there any
other personal qualities needed for a leader to
successfully operate from a Dialogic Mindset?
One possibility comes from Constructivist
Developmental Theory (Loevinger, 1976), which
identifies a sequence of cognitive frameworks people
go through in developing ever-increasing cognitive
complexity and self-awareness. This model of
ego development helps to explain the underlying
psychological processes that may help distinguish
leaders who can operate from a Dialogic Mindset
from those who can’t as well as the developmental
journey required to get there. Similar models with
important topics will remain undiscussed (Marshak,
2006). While they may appear caring and claim
they want authentic engagement, such leaders make
it impossible to create the climates of clarity and
safety required for real inquiry (Friedman, 1985)
Self-differentiated leadership.
Leading in a way that engages the real
complexity of a situation without grasping at
simplistic solutions to maintain illusions of
knowledge and control requires self-differentiated
leaders for a number of reasons. First, it requires
leaders who are able to sustain connections without
feeling responsible for other people’s fears even
as anxiety increases. As discussed earlier, one of
the reasons the visionary leadership narrative is so
dominant is that believing that there is someone
who knows what to do and will lead us to salvation
decreases our anxiety in ambiguous situations.
For a leader to acknowledge that he or she doesn’t
know, and that no one can really know what will
work until we try something and see what happens,
is not reassuring and can be interpreted as a failure
of (visionary) leadership. Consequently, a leader
with poor self-differentiation will either be swept
up in the emotional appeal to do something, or back
off even further and become distant and unavailable.
Either approach will only increase the anxiety in the
system or lead to collective denial of the very real
and complex challenges facing the organization.
57Bushe and Marshak
the next stage but can’t really operate from it (i.e.,
able to talk the talk but not walk the walk). Table 2
shows the percentages of adults at each stage of ego
development from four different studies.
Stages of ego development and the dialogic
mindset.
As the first three studies (primarily from
North American samples) show, around 80% of
adults in random samples score no higher than
the “conventional stages.” Yet a wide range of
leadership theorists working with this model agree
that conventional stages of ego development are
not well-suited to leading in a VUCA world; rather,
a VUCA world requires leaders operating at the
later, “post-conventional” stages (cf., Cowie, 2012;
Laloux, 2014; Torbert, 2004). For example, Torbert
different labels have been applied to issues of
leadership and organization in a number of different
ways (Beck & Cowen, 2005; Cowie, 2013; Laloux,
2014; Torbert, 2004).
Briefly, there are between seven and nine
stages of development identified through hundreds
of rigorous studies using the sentence completion
test (Hy & Loevinger, 1996) and its variants
(Cook-Greuter, 2010). Each stage is nested in
the previous—that is, the cognitive abilities and
frameworks developed at early stages are required
for development to later stages, so that no stage can
be skipped. Those at later stages can use the mental
processes of earlier stages but those at earlier stages
cannot use those of later stages. It is generally
believed that people can understand the logic of
Table 2. Percentages of Adults at Different Stages of Ego Development
21
2 Unpublished study of Certified Consultants International (CCI) members, a body set up by NTL to certify T-group and OD consultants that no longer exists.
2)
58 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
piece of data to support that comes from study four in
Table 2, which shows the stages of ego development
of 37 OD consultants whose theory and practice
had been vetted by a rigorous peer-review process
and could be considered leading exemplars of the
profession. We don’t think it is coincidence that
65% of them scored at post-conventional stages of
ego-development. Instead we think many of them
are people who developed to later stages, became
disenchanted with the kinds of organizing processes
and cultures associated with the Performance
Mindset, and left to become consultants in order to
create the kinds of organizations they’d like to be
members of.
Clearly the importance of ego development
to the ability to lead from a dialogic mindset is a
fertile area for future research. For us, however, it
is a topic of informed speculation describing what is
needed to successfully lead in a world of complexity
and ambiguity and from a dialogic mindset that
involves more than a recipe for a different set of
actions, but rather a different way of being that
runs counter to conventional wisdom. In short, we
suggest that for leaders to be successful in a world of
uncertainty and ambiguity they will need to develop
beyond conventional ways of thinking, acting, and
being.
Challenges for Leader Development
Describing what leaders of the future will
(2004, p.108) describes the “action logic” of leaders
at the autonomous stage as placing “high value on
timely action inquiry, mutuality and autonomy;
attentive…to unique historical moments, inter-
weaves short-term goal-orientedness with longer-
term developmental process-orientedness; aware of
paradox that what one sees depends on one’s action-
logic; creative at conflict resolution.”
According to Cowie (2012, p.33-35) leaders
at this stage “give up certainty for curiosity because
‘not knowing’ is now a state which does not threaten
my sense of who I am. Embrace complexity,
paradox, ambiguity, uncertainty and flux because I
now know that reality is not defined by my wishes,
hopes, fears, anxieties, theories and beliefs, or those
of my cultural group…Challenge business as usual
and find creative solutions to problems because I am
not invested in the preservation of my organisation
as-it-is as the venue in which I affirm my identity…
Advance an international rather than a merely
multi-national position because I now understand
the meaning of a globalized (i.e. an interrelated and
interdependent) world.”
The match between higher stages of ego
development described above and a Dialogic
Mindset that embodies the new leadership narrative
we describe in this paper suggest this model might
help explain a lot of variance in the success and
failure of transformational change initiatives. One
59Bushe and Marshak
differentiation of trainees. There is some guidance
in family systems therapy, but it focuses on working
on one’s self within one’s family of origin and
current family (Titelman, 2014). This is important
work, but to what extent an organization can expect
or require that of its employees is problematic.
Methods to increase self-differentiation in
organizationally acceptable contexts and ways are
needed. Currently, to our knowledge, there are
limited studies or programs to build upon. One
example is Bushe’s Clear Leadership (n.d.) program
that focuses on increasing the self-differentiation of
leaders to increase their capacity to “lead learning”
in organizations, but there is little written on the
pedagogical processes used in this program or
research about its effectiveness in increasing self-
differentiation. O’Neill (2007) offers some ideas
on coaching for increased self-differentiation that
could be incorporated in leadership development
activities. For example, based on the assumption
that self-differentiation is a balance of being able
to state one’s position while staying connected to
others, she provides simple anchoring mechanisms
to help leaders know when they are being too rigid
in their positions and not connected, or too vague in
their positions and not connected, and some simple
actions to get back into balance.
Challenges for supporting greater ego
development in leaders of the future.
need to be able to be and do is one thing. Helping
leaders of the present and future develop those
ways of being, thinking, and doing is another. This
is especially true with psychological and identity
dimensions.
Challenges in learning to cope with anxiety
Of the three areas we identify for leadership
development to support a new narrative of
leadership, processes for learning anxiety reduction,
or “self-soothing,” are the most developed as they
have been the focus of counseling and therapy for
many decades. Leadership development programs
might benefit from incorporating insights from
at least two streams of practical research. One is
somatic psychotherapy, also referred to as body-
oriented psychotherapy, which works with breathing
and muscles to access awareness of and release
sources of anxiety (Macnaughton, 2004). The other
is mindfulness (Siegel, 2011), a process rooted
in Buddhist meditation practices now receiving
widespread attention because neuroscientists have
found it effectively reduces stress and anxiety
(Tang, Hölzel, & Posner, 2015)
Challenges in developing increased self-
differentiation in leaders of the future.
Based on this discussion, leadership
development programs concerned with creating
leaders for a VUCA world would benefit from
considering how they can increase the self-
60 Organization Development Journal l Spring 2016
leaders into higher stages of ego development that
can be provided by organizations is something the
leadership, coaching, and organization development
fields need to learn more about.
Closing Summary
To summarize, in this paper, we argue that
the dominant “visionary leader” narrative makes it
difficult for leaders to enact the kinds of leadership
behaviors and processes required in complex, multi-
cultural organizations within uncertain and rapidly
changing environments. These organizations are
filled with paradoxical, wicked, adaptive challenges
to which no one can know the solution because any
solution will have to meet local contingencies and
constraints which, themselves, are in a constant
state of change. Based on our research into
Dialogic Organization Development, we offer seven
assumptions held by leaders who are able to guide
their organizations and successfully take on adaptive
challenges. We note how this “Dialogic Mindset” is
at odds with the dominant “Performance Mindset”
prevalent in business organizations and argue that
a new narrative of leadership is required to support
leaders in utilizing the kinds of leadership styles
and behaviors known to result in transformational
change. We conclude by identifying three areas
for leadership development activities to support
individuals to enact the assumptions of the Dialogic
Mindset and the processes of Dialogic OD:
What little is known about how people
develop beyond the conventional stages of ego
development, tends to describe the impact of traumatic
events (e.g. divorce, getting fired, losing a child) that
cause reconsideration of societal injunctions about
roles and achievements. There have been attempts
to create leadership development programs to
increase ego development, perhaps most famously
the MBA at Boston College under Bill Torbert’s
leadership (Torbert, 1987), and increasing interest
in how to develop adults beyond conventional
stages of development (Esbjörn-Hargens, Reams,
& Gunnlaugson, 2010; Pfaffenberger, Marko,
& Combs, 2011), but not much proven success.
One study suggests processes that increase post-
conventional ego-development may only have
potency at mid-life (Lilgendahl, Helson & John,
2013). Nonetheless, any leadership development
program that hopes to have significant impact on
the ability of individuals to lead organizations in a
VUCA world will have to consider the role of ego
development, either as a prerequisite for inclusion
or as developmental goals to work toward. It
does appear that people who develop into the
post-conventional stages of ego development are
interested in their own psychological development,
and activities that would commonly be described
as “personal growth” (Cowie, 2012; Pfaffenberger,
2013; Scott, 2009). Ways of supporting more
61Bushe and Marshak
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