Why Vertical Development Matters
Most leadership and organisational development work focuses on horizontal growth — adding skills, competencies, roles, scale, new functions. But that is often not enough — because many of the challenges organisations face are paradigmatic: complexity, paradox, change, unpredictability.
To meet these, one must grow upwards — not just wider. Vertical development refers to growing one’s capacity to make sense of greater complexity, to shift one’s internal frame, to “see more,” rather than merely do more.
An Alive Organisation is one that nurtures vertical development, not just horizontal scaling. Because to live from new beliefs (Safe, Enticing, Alive), we need new meaning-making capacities.
Thus: Vertical Development is not a side project or “nice to have” — it is foundational.
What Is Ego / Meaning-Making / Vertical Development
Consider this: when you face a change, what happens first is not in the external world, but in the internal world — how you interpret, filter, integrate, resist.
That internal architecture is the ego — your meaning-making machine. It shapes how you see yourself, others, events, systems.
Cook-Greuter’s Ego Development Theory (EDT) (as summarized in the Sloww article) frames ego as the structure that interprets and narrates experience, constantly seeking coherence and resisting dissonance. Sloww
EDT posits that adults evolve through distinct stages of meaning-making: each stage brings new capacities in cognition, emotion, worldview, identity. Sloww
Three interwoven dimensions characterize this growth:
Doing — what one does, the goals and purposes held
Being — the felt interior life, emotional awareness
Thinking — cognitive complexity, how one reasons about self and world Sloww
As one develops, the relationship among doing, being, and thinking becomes more fluid, integrated, and aware of its own constructions. Cook-Greuter emphasizes that growth is “transcend & include”: later stages include the insights of prior stages, even as they transform them. One cannot skip stages; the path is developmental and cumulative.
Stages of Ego Development
Here is a high-level overview of the stages from conventional to postconventional (as per Cook-Greuter) — useful to map how leaders / systems differ in their interpretive capacities.
Each stage is both a vantage point and a boundary: one can see more but at the same time still constrained by the shape of that stage.
As Cook-Greuter notes: “Later stages include and transcend the previous ones.” Sloww
Why Ego Development Matters in Organisational Life
If an organisation wants to evolve — not just in structure but in meaning — its leaders and people must shift their meaning-making level, not merely their behaviors.
Here are ways ego development shows up (or fails to) in organisations:
Complexity Thresholds
At certain scales or in certain environments, early-stage meaning makers “max out” — they cannot hold enough context, paradox, or ambiguity. The organisation then hits a ceiling (often around middle management) until some shift upward occurs.Sense-Making & Strategy
Strategy is not just choice of product or market — it’s a narrative about the future. How one makes sense of trends, disruption, identity, paradox depends on one’s ego stage.Leadership & Authority
At lower stages, leadership is about directing, commanding, control. At higher ones, leadership becomes facilitation, enabling sense-making, holding tensions.Conflict, Feedback & Learning
Lower stages interpret feedback as threat, blame, or failure. Higher stages lean into conflict as raw material for meaning, integrate dissonance, remodel.Culture & Change
Culture itself is a collective meaning system. To shift culture, you must shift the predominant meaning-making frames; tools alone won’t do it.Alignment of Pillars
The four pillars (Whole Being, Value Co-Creation, Alive Purpose, Metamorphic Structure) require capacities that emerge only in later stages. For example: to design metamorphic structure, one must see the organisation as a living system — a posture more natural to Strategist or Construct-Aware frames.
The Path of Development: Challenges & Invitations
Growth in ego/vertical development is seldom comfortable. It involves confronting blindspots, dissolving identity anchors, tolerating uncertainty.
Here are key dynamics and practices to support development toward aliveness:
Key Dynamics / Challenges
Identity destabilization: One must relinquish old stories about self, authority, role.
Paradox and tension: The new lens reveals tensions previously unseen; learning to live in tensions is essential.
Not-knowing / humility: Advanced stages require ego to relax the need for certainty.
Loneliness / isolation: As one moves beyond mainstream frames, fewer peers share the same perspective.
Cultivating the Path
Some ways to cultivate the Vertical Development path:
Reflective practice: journaling, contemplative practices, dialogue across stages
Stretch assignments / mirrors: roles or challenges beyond current capacity
Mentoring / developmental coaching: guiding someone in holding the tension of growth
Peer communities across stages: enabling vertical dialogue
Feedback loops & developmental containers: spaces that allow safe disruption
Importantly, the organisation itself must act as a developmental container — not just for transactions, but for growth. In an Alive Organisation, structural and cultural scaffolding support vertical development: developmental conversations, reflective spaces, rotating roles, feedback-rich norms, practice rituals.
Integrating Beliefs, Development, and Aliveness
Let us return to primal beliefs and the pillars (Chapter 1.1) . The journey of ego development is neither separate from those nor supplementary — rather, it is the engine by which an organisation’s beliefs translate into evolving capacity.
A system that believes in Safety but lacks meaning-making capacity may overemphasize control.
A group that aspires to Aliveness but stays in lower ego stages will struggle with paradox, change, and emergence.
To live the pillars of aliveness — Whole Being, Value Co-Creation, Alive Purpose, Metamorphic Structure — one must shift meaning-making level to host them.
Thus, vertical development is not optional — it is essential infrastructure.
The Evolutionary Maturity of Organisations
Every organisation carries an invisible “center of gravity” — the average altitude of its collective meaning-making. As individuals evolve through stages of ego development, so do the systems they create. When seen through this vertical lens, organisations are not simply large or small, successful or struggling; they are expressions of collective maturity. They embody distinct ways of seeing the world, relating to power, and responding to complexity.
From this perspective we can distinguish four broad stages of organisational evolution — Opportunistic, Conformistic, Achiever, and Autonomous.
Each one has its own strengths, limitations, and developmental tasks. Each one once represented a breakthrough, and yet each becomes a limitation when the world’s complexity surpasses its logic.
1. The Opportunistic Organisation — Survival as Strategy
This is the earliest, most instinctual form of organisation. Its organising principle is power and fear.
The Opportunistic Organisation mirrors the Impulsive or Egocentric stage of human development. Its culture is dominated by command, dominance, and reaction.
Here, the world is perceived as dangerous, resources as scarce, and others as threats or tools. Trust is minimal; control is everything. Decision-making is centralised in a single leader or a small circle of authority. Success depends on the leader’s ability to impose order through fear, charisma, or sheer energy. Innovation occurs by accident, not design.
Such organisations can be brutally efficient in crisis — swift, decisive, unhesitating — but they cannot sustain growth or trust. They live in short cycles: conquest, consolidation, collapse.
They answer the primal question “Is the world safe?” with a resounding “No.”
2. The Conformistic Organisation — Safety through Order
As societies stabilise, the next stage emerges: the Conformistic Organisation.
Its defining belief is that safety can be achieved through rules, structure, and belonging.
If the Opportunistic world is dangerous, the Conformistic world seeks refuge in discipline. It mirrors the Conformist / Diplomat ego stage — a morality of duty and loyalty.
Power becomes institutional rather than personal. Hierarchy, procedure, and ritual replace raw authority. Employees are rewarded for obedience and punished for deviation.
This stage gave birth to the great bureaucracies of the industrial age — civil services, armies, large corporates. Its gifts are stability, predictability, and identity; its shadows are rigidity, suppression, and stagnation.
Innovation is tolerated only when sanctioned by authority. Belonging is strong, but individuality weak.
The collective answers the primal question “Is the world safe?” with “It is, as long as you follow the rules.”
3. The Achiever Organisation — Efficiency and Growth
When structure becomes too suffocating, a new energy breaks through — achievement. The Achiever Organisation arises with the modern age of markets and meritocracy.
It corresponds to the Self-Determining / Achiever ego stage — autonomous, rational, goal-oriented. Here the world is no longer a battlefield or a bureaucracy; it is a machine to optimise.
The guiding belief: “The world rewards competence.”
Such organisations excel in planning, performance management, innovation, and accountability. They replace loyalty with ambition, obedience with results. They build cultures of measurement, merit, and mastery.
Yet with their brilliance comes a subtle blindness: they value what can be counted more than what truly counts. They struggle with ambiguity, emotion, and interconnectedness. People become “human capital”; purpose becomes a slogan.
The Achiever stage transformed the twentieth century — yet the twenty-first now stretches beyond its reach. As complexity multiplies, efficiency alone no longer guarantees adaptability.
4. The Autonomous Organisation — Aliveness as System
Beyond achievement lies the next evolutionary threshold — the Autonomous Organisation. It reflects the Strategist / Autonomous stage of ego development — capable of holding paradox, systems thinking, and self-reflection.
The Autonomous Organisation perceives the world as alive, interdependent, and co-creative. It sees markets not as zero-sum arenas but as ecosystems. Leadership shifts from control to stewardship; power becomes “power with” rather than “power over.”
Structure becomes fluid — metamorphic rather than fixed. Teams self-organise around purpose; hierarchies emerge and dissolve with context. Learning and adaptation happen continuously.
At this level, culture is consciously cultivated. Feedback, reflection, and coaching become the infrastructure of growth. People are invited to bring their Whole Being, not just their functional role.
The Autonomous Organisation answers the primal question “Is the world alive?” with “Yes — and we are part of its unfolding.”
Its purpose is no longer mere profit, but prosperity shared with the wider system — people, planet, society.
The Dynamics Between Stages
No stage is inherently better; each serves its time and context.
In war or crisis, Opportunistic energy can save lives.
In regulation or safety-critical industries, Conformistic discipline prevents chaos.
In competitive markets, Achiever efficiency drives progress.
In complex, adaptive environments, Autonomous consciousness sustains innovation and meaning.
Evolution is cyclical: organisations often fallback under pressure to earlier logics — “two steps ahead, one step back.” True maturity lies not in avoiding regression but in becoming aware of it.
Every organisation contains echoes of all stages, like growth rings in a tree. The task of leadership is not to shame the lower but to integrate them — to bring survival, order, performance, and purpose into a coherent living system.
The Call Toward Aliveness
The Autonomous stage is not the end but the beginning of a new epoch — one where organisations sense and evolve like organisms. When this consciousness takes root, the enterprise ceases to be a fortress or a machine and becomes a living participant in the evolution of life itself.
Such organisations hold within them the capacity to serve the world rather than merely survive in it — to contribute to the larger unfolding of humanity and planet.
That is the promise of evolutionary maturity. That is the horizon of the Alive Organisations.
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