Featured News and Resources
Feelings about Assumptions and Assumptions about Feelings
The mindset reflected in an Immunity to Change is not simply a cognitive phenomenon. It is also an emotional phenomenon. We created our Big Assumptions to manage our anxiety, to protect ourselves from dangerous dread named in our Worry Boxes. When we test our Big Assumptions, we are in part exploring whether they are ever unnecessarily protecting us.
Minds at Work’s 2021 programs: registration open now!
We are excited to announce our 2021 offerings – all online! Our programs emphasize facilitation skills and tools. To better accommodate members of our global community, all of these offerings will be held online with varied start and end times.
You might want to check out the just-published My Antelope Loves Cantaloupe, a young children’s picture-book by our co-founder, Bob Kegan! It’s “an ear-worm of affectionate silliness.” Bob wrote it for his grandchildren. You can get it direct from the publisher or on Amazon.
September Newsletter: Octopuses and SOIs
As coaches, we often try to connect deeply with others. Our ability to establish these types of connections with others depends on two things. We must understand the other person well enough, and we must care about them enough. One of the most useful tools we have at our disposal is the ability to listen through the lens of developmental theory and to ask questions like those in a Subject-Object Interview (SOI).
Immunity to Change Extra! Fall 2020 Scholarship Opportunities
Are you ready to sharpen your coaching and facilitating skills? Are you looking to take ITC into your work with teams? Join us online this fall in the Facilitator’s Workshop and Using ITC with Teams Day to hone your skills in support individual and collective change for your clients and organization.
At the simplest level, DDO is “open learning”.
Robert Kegan sat down (virtually) with the 36Kr team in China to discuss “How to break the rigid opposition between the organization and the individual and fully mobilize the vitality of the members is an unchanging puzzle for the organization no matter the past, present or future.”
Transforming an International Leadership Advisory Firm with Immunity to Change
We recently caught up with one of our Certified Coaches, Yasushi Maruyama, Tokyo Office Leader and Executive Committee Member of Egon Zehnder, to learn how they have been using Immunity to Change and what impact it has had.
The Further Reaches of Adult Development
In 2013 Robert Kegan looked at WHY we are living longer and if it is really possible to grow beyond the psychological independence of the “self-authoring mind,” so often seen as the zenith of adult development?
Over the last few weeks, images of outrage over the devastating deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black Americans have flooded news reports around the world. It has become clear that the only way White Americans can begin to grasp what we see on our streets is by accompanying it with a long look in the mirror.
New Online Coach Development Programs
Even though we often associate it with world-ending calamities, the Greek word apocalypse actually refers to that which uncovers or reveals, and by that definition, the continuing global scale and colossal impact of the COVID-19 crisis certainly qualifies. It may be that this has been an apocalyptic time for you – that you are recognizing previously unseen depths or shallows in your own ability to move through our current predicament with equanimity.
Challenging the Big Assumptions that limit how I respond to the pandemic
Dr. Deborah Helsing, Co-Director of Minds at Work, found her sense of calm challenged enough by the COVID-19 crisis that she created an Immunity Map to help her identify unhelpful, limiting Big Assumptions that could be contributing to her distress. Deb then created and conducted two simple tests of those same Assumptions, which allowed her to uncover a more beneficial mindset for living through this time.
What is this crisis teaching us about leadership?
We still don’t know what the full impact of the coronavirus will be, but even now it is revealing both treasures and wrecks. We all recognize gold in the courage, generosity, imagination and clarity that characterize leadership in settings small and global, and then watch – sometimes literally in horror — as heads of governments display a dangerous inability to navigate wisely, or even at all.
Evolve Magazine Interview with Dr. Robert Kegan
“When democratic processes lead to the election of people who have a more authoritarian or autocratic orientation, then we see that a constitution is only as good as the people’s ability to actually understand it.”
New Online Coach Development Programs
We have revamped and expanded our program offerings to meet ITC facilitators’ and coaches’ needs to learn and deepen their knowledge with Immunity to Change. We are excited to announce four new online offerings: Online Facilitator’s Workshop, ITC Mapmaking for 1:1 Coaching, Advanced Test Design, and Using ITC with Teams Day – Online.
Staying connected to ourselves and to others in a time of crisis
“All of this starts with awareness, noticing our feelings, our reactions. That is what makes it possible for us to have a relationship to those feelings. By contrast, when we are unaware of our feelings, they are in charge.”
The transformative potentials in our current crisis
“The virus has the potential to show us even more deeply that we are first of all members of one single vulnerable species just trying to make its way on one single fragile planet. The more that we come to experience that, the bigger is the transformative potential–that these systems, valuable though they may be, are just constructions.”
What is our potential for transformation?
As the coronavirus continues to challenge both personal and professional “business as usual” and reveal opportunities for development on both an individual and a world-wide scale.
We all find ourselves in a mammoth moment of disruption that will require an equal measure of new adaptive capacity: We don’t know exactly how things will change but we can be confident that they will change a great deal. We will all need to change too, and all our experience tells us the very best way to face challenges is together.
We know that willpower is rarely enough to bring about a long-hoped-for improvement, and participants in our programs learn to use the Immunity Map exercise to uncover the invisible internal system that short-circuits our commitment to change. Then we identify the powerful Big Assumptions that keep us chained to disappointment.
Robert Kegan interviews Ray Dalio
How would you describe the ways people actually experience their first months in the company, and why do you think they have the kinds of difficulties they do? Why do you tape every meeting and make them available to everyone there? Can you explain this thing called the “dot collector”? How do you protect yourself from your own biases?
Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization
Listen to this interview with Bob Kegan, as he explores why companies still struggle to create an environment that fosters human potential.
Listen to this interview with Lisa Lahey as she explains there are three forces of nature that can impact our ability to develop, grow and transcend the status quo.
Seeing & Overcoming The Immunity To Change
A full presentation from Lisa Lahey on how Immunity to Change can help you navigate change and complexity!
In this in-depth interview with Rebel Wisdom, Bob talks about his theory of adult development. If you haven’t watched it yet, you’re in for a treat.
Bob Kegan receives Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award
Bob joined a select group including past Nobel Prize recipients, Pope Francis, and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones when Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards recognized him with its Lifetime Achievement Award earlier this year!
