ROBERT KEGAN: My name is Bob Kegan.
And I am a faculty member at Harvard University's Graduate
School of Education.
And I'm also a part of a little group called Minds
at Work, which is a home for developing and delivering
the immunity to change approach.
LISA LAHEY: I'm Lisa Lahey.
And I am affiliated with Harvard Graduate School of Education
as well as a cofounder of the organization Minds at Work.
ROBERT KEGAN: The immunity to change process
came originally from the research that I began in the 1980s,
and which many, many people helped me with.
And that research was an exploration of the possibility
of continued psychological growth and development in adulthood.
LISA LAHEY: Bob Kegan's original work, his theory,
and research established that adults can in fact grow.
ROBERT KEGAN: That for a significant proportion
of people, further development is possible.
LISA LAHEY: Their minds can become able to understand things
with greater complexity, fascinating and terrific.
ROBERT KEGAN: What we uncovered is that qualitative developments for the mind
have to do with moving aspects of our thinking and feeling from a place
where we are run by them, or, as we say, more formally,
where we are subject to them, to a place where we can look at them
and be in relationship to them, where they are object for us.
It was actually Lisa Lahey who first kind of raised the question,
are these developments just something we have
to hope for, we can only study them as they occur?
LISA LAHEY: And the next question, to me was,
is there anything that we can do that can help support or facilitate
that development?
ROBERT KEGAN: Is it possible to design relationships and contexts
and curricula that will make a rich enough environment that you might
be able to facilitate people making this kind of move?
How might we deliberately support people to expand their own mindsets?
And that was the question that really gave rise to the whole immunity
to change approach.
LISA LAHEY: The immunity to change approach was one of the ways
that we developed, a tool we developed to, in fact, support adult development.
ROBERT KEGAN: There are so many favorite stories about immunity to change,
it would be hard to really pick just one of them.
LISA LAHEY: My favorite immunity to change story, or, I might say,
the most important one to me is the story of my own use of the process.
ROBERT KEGAN: One that comes immediately to mind
is an opportunity I had to do immunity to change work
in a program with a group of Palestinians, Israelis, and Germans.
And the program was intentionally trying to improve relationships
between young professionals, young leaders in each of these three
different regions and especially to work on improved relationships
between Israelis and Palestinians and between Germans and Jews.
LISA LAHEY: And the goal that I took on was about how to feel more at ease
and comfortable speaking with large groups of people.
And what happened, in the mapping process,
as I discovered in the assumption column,
that I had a whole set of assumptions that basically amounted to me
not being my own person if I was going to be an effective speaker.
Like I had assumptions that I had to be funny, that I had to tell stories.
ROBERT KEGAN: And this was a kind of opportunity.
We later learned that not only did none of these people know each other,
we learned from many of them-- and these were very sophisticated people
in their 30s and 40s-- but the Palestinians and Israelis, for example,
said that they had never in their lives had
any sustained conversation with their counterparts.
LISA LAHEY: What makes that story so important to me is not
only was it further demonstration, to me, that the process does work.
And I knew that.
I knew that even from my own experience, because I
had plenty of times gone through it.
But this particular goal took me to much deeper waters.
And I felt, from the inside of the whole experience coming out
on the other side, just enormous liberation.
And it was an amazing experience to me.
And so I feel like that helped me to better understand
what is like for people who do take on these hard goals,
goals that feel like it's going to take a lot of courage
to actually work on them.
ROBERT KEGAN: And what we did in the program was
divide them into trios, where there was one Palestinian, one Israeli, and one
German in each of these trios.
And there they were, spending the day together, not
discussing Mideast politics or the Holocaust.
They were just talking with each other about their own growing
edge, about their own improvement goals that they had not
been able to accomplish, and they were being of help to each other.
And it turned out to be just a very, very, very powerful
and unexpected context for these people to connect with each other.
LISA LAHEY: I liked that I got to have that experience myself
and better be able to accompany people as they
engaged in that kind of hard work.
The follow-up work meant, for me, exploring
and coming to be able to embrace that I had a different style
and feeling much more comfort in my own voice
and having a lot more fun in the process of doing that work.
So I felt engaged.
And the people who I was speaking with felt engaged.
It was just a wonderful place to have gotten to.
ROBERT KEGAN: And it was an extraordinarily moving experience.
It's moving to me just to kind of recall it.
LISA LAHEY: There are so many sources of gratification
for me in working with the immunity to change process.
One of them is having the privilege of watching people develop,
of watching people meet their own aspirations
and seeing them make progress towards their goals, goals
that have been very important to them and, for some people, goals
that they have tried to make headway on before and have not been able to
and now see themselves able to accomplish that.
It is very satisfying to see that.
ROBERT KEGAN: I can't say I knew that this
was going to be the case when we began this work.
But having been in it now for, I guess, 25 years and stepping back from it,
I can see that the three things that have mattered to me most
are all kind of brought together and pursued through this approach.
The three things are, first of all, the extraordinary privilege
and the exhilaration of actually helping people to develop psychologically,
to become a bigger and better version of themselves,
for people who not just to be intellectually
stimulated by our research findings and the conceptual idea
that development is possible in the adult years,
but for them to actually experience their own continuing unfolding.
LISA LAHEY: As people begin to discover what's happening
is really changes inside of them, because they are working more
at this mindset level not just a goal level.
And when you work at the mindset level, what happens
is people end up discovering that they are
able to be a fuller sell in lots of different situations
and meeting other goals as well.
ROBERT KEGAN: The second big passion is what, in the work context,
would be called performance enhancement, the ability of a leader
to become a much more collaborative leader or for somebody at work
to be a braver communicator and push back harder.
But it's really the more concrete realm of helping people actually
be able to do things that they were formerly unable to do.
And that can be in the work context, but it can also
be in one's family relationships, in one's community involvement,
in one's social connections.
LISA LAHEY: Another big source of satisfaction
for me has to do with the process that people engage in
before they come to understand the immunity to change process.
It's often a very self-tortured one.
ROBERT KEGAN: The kind of pain that people experience out
of their own frustration or resignation about their inability
to accomplish things that they hope for, the ways that we
tend to beat ourselves up and deprecate ourselves
for not being able to accomplish some particular thing.
The immunity to change approach, given that it's
built on this developmental theory, that it's
aimed very concretely at specific kinds of improvement goals,
and that has been able to help people bring about the kinds of changes that
lead them to feel quite differently about themselves, brings all three
of these passions together.
LISA LAHEY: And I also speak personally, as I say this,
but I know, from talking and hearing from lots of people,
that very often, when we want to make progress on some really important goal
and we're not, we are understandably critical of ourselves.
And then we go through a whole next level of then
we're critical about ourselves for being critical about ourselves.
And all of this energy going into basically feeling badly
about ourselves.
And it is a very satisfying thing for me to see people understand
that, basically, they have set themselves up not to succeed,
not because they did it on purpose.
They just didn't know any differently.
And the power of the default model and what
happens when people really internalize, oh, there
is a whole other way I can do this.
And people can then conclude things like, you know,
I'm not that weak person I thought I was, I'm not that little nebbish.
And that is also very opening for them.
And that takes me immediately to this other source
of just deep gratification, which is watching people basically liberate
themselves, liberate themselves from these internal chains that
keep them very limited and self-tortured.
And the freedom that comes from the liberation and what people do with it
is quite extraordinary.
And I know this will sound really corny.
But the love that follows from people succeeding with this work
is extraordinary.
The greater self-love they experience and the more love
and generosity that they offer others is very, very satisfying.