2.4 The Rules of Development-part 3
(NOTE: If you are new to my site, it helps to read the posts in order. They are listed under the Contents tab here.)
Here are Cook-Greuter’s last four rules:
As development unfolds, autonomy, freedom, tolerance for difference and ambiguity, as well as flexibility, reflection and skill in interacting with the environment increase, while defenses decrease.
If development is happening, this is its inevitable direction. There is no guarantee of growth, but if growth occurs, it manifests in this unfolding, with increasing tolerance and flexibility. At the same time, one of the great comforts of development is that we slowly become less defensive and are able to let go of some of that stress.
A person who has reached a later stage can understand earlier world views, but a person at an earlier stage cannot understand later ones.
This is one of the most consequential rules and I will come back to it often. The 3rd grader can handle 1st and 2nd grade arithmetic easily, but can barely make sense of what the 4th graders are doing. This principle of development often triggers resentment in adults. Once we reach “maturity,” we get the basic rights of adulthood: driving, drinking alcohol, voting, serving in the military. These rights lead us to assume that we will do these activities responsibly, but that often requires further maturation or development.
Development occurs through the interplay between person and environment, not just by one or the other. It is a potential and can be encouraged and facilitated by appropriate support and challenge.
We learn to ride a bike through the interplay of our desire, our practice, gravity, motion, the bike and our teacher. There is a tricky tension of support, instruction, demonstration and knowing when to shut up and let go that leads to the moment of successful balance. Parents, teachers, and supervisors have to continually calibrate the unique level of support that leads to growth.
The depth, complexity, and scope of what people notice can expand throughout life. Yet no matter how evolved we become, our knowledge and understanding is always partial and incomplete.
Our partial and incomplete knowledge continually comes into contact with the partial and incomplete knowledge of others. If we come to understand and accept this, when we are able to say you and I both have access to partial and incomplete truth about the world, we can stop fighting and start learning together. Ideally, we can help fill in each other’s gaps, essentially sharing our part of the truth to make more complete pictures. As this process matures, we see that maturity means eventually moving from independence to interdependence.
It seems to me like these rules are kind of detached. Without knowing much about development models, I’m not sure what the rules mean.
Well, we did preview Spiral Dynamics levels in post 2.1, but I should say this has been a dilemma for me, which do I present first, a development model or the rules that help it make sense? Now that you have seen the Rules, we will move into a more detailed review of Spiral. As is the case with several Integral concepts, the sequence of learning them is tricky and I’ve found that circling back through them a few times leads to better understanding of both the levels and rules of development.
To help you, you can use the next newsletter, 2.5, as a quick reference tool for the rules.