I was born in Minnesota at mid-century, in the middle of America to middle class parents as the middle child. I’m accustomed to being in the middle of things…

That was a very powerful experience of feeling like you could take a stand against a dominant discourse, a dominant social arrangement. You could feel part of a gathering counter-consensus that would actually move the nature of a great nation’s dispositions in another direction. It was a very heady experience. ..

We have not yet learned how to collaborate in deep ways that would actually take advantage of the differing kinds of gifts and capacities that people have….

I went to Dartmouth College, a rather conservative, New England, Ivy League college… There was a time at the very beginning of the antiwar movement when on Wednesdays, all around the United States, there would be a certain place you would go and bear witness to your opposition to what the country was doing…

This is the kind of developmental context that pushes you beyond the third order in my theory, the order of consciousness in which you’re kind of identified with the given arrangements and you take them as real. The move beyond the third order is when you pierce that veil and are able to step back from and look at the givenness of your culture, of your family, of its values. Not necessarily to reject them, but to be in a position for the first time to decide about them…

I wanted to bring these things together and create a richer developmental psychology that was both powerfully descriptive from the outside, but also powerfully descriptive from the inside–the internal experience of being a growing person and thinking about the context and support of development….

I would have experiences of reading Piaget or the more philosophical side–I remember Paul Tillich, the theologian–where I actually felt that I was inhabiting the text, where I could feel like I knew where he was going to go next. I knew in a way that was astonishing to me how connected I was to the inner rhythms–and I realized that I understood it from the inside out in a way that I could tell other people didn’t.

The feeling of creating something out of nothing really started 25 years ago. That was my Big Bang. That started the intellectual universe for me. How many times does the sun have to get created? But it’s still glowing and things are still growing as a result….

That’s a miraculous counterprocess in the universe, the process by which things can actually become more complex and contain more energy, become more ordered. That’s really what development is about.

There’s a tremendous power in the move from the third to the fourth order. In the history of humankind, it’s only been in the last little blip of human history that so many persons have been able to even pierce beyond the third order. They are actually able to stand back from their own cultural surroundings and look at the nature of these arrangements and make decisions about whether this is what it’s going to mean to them to be a member of this tribe or to live their life in this way…

Very few people move beyond the fourth order, but when they do, it’s very rare to see anything like that before people are in their forties or older...

The deepest natures of self are unchanging. They have to do with seeking to make our inner and outer experience cohere...

I think the big blind spot is that we have not had a sufficiently deep appreciation for the ways in which meaning-making capacities involve, most of the time, continuous manufacturings of non-change. It’s almost like a reverse engineering of the Buddhist idea of each moment we’re creating anew…

Is meaning-making coming from each of us as individuals or is there some way in which it’s drawing on the life force itself?

Robert Kegan focuses on the dynamic development of the human self and the coping process through which the human self and consciousness evolve in stages. The underlying pattern is that each developmental stage is based on conscious reflection on a taken-for-granted structure of knowing (see table below). Thus, in a person’s progression through the various stages the structures of the subject (structures of knowing) in one stage become the object (content of knowing) in the following stage, and so on.

Three themes emerged from the interview. One is the wonder of development. Kegan talks about development as the "miraculous counterprocess in the universe, the process by which things can actually become more complex and contain more energy, become more ordered." A second theme was the intertwined relationship between the individual self and groups or the collective. Because science tends to look either at individuals (in cognitive psychology) or at groups (in group dynamics), it can miss what maybe is most important: how intertwined are the roots of individual and collective transformation. A third theme was the forces of non-change that occur in all developmental systems: "It’s almost like a reverse engineering of the Buddhist idea of each moment we’re creating anew.… Individuals have these inner contradictions and continuously manufacture non-change." Organizations also have inner contradictions that likewise continuously manufacture non-change. Kegan’s work makes us aware of these forces and of how they operate within our own minds (see R. Kegan and L. L. Lahey: How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation, Jossey-Bass, 2000).

Source: Adapted from Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads (Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 314-15.