As we can see in The Transformation Framework diagram (right), leadership with low awareness and low action produces little change—referred to in the diagram as the status quo.
If leaders are capable of engaging in high action, but do so with low awareness, the result on the organization is frequently distress. Conversely, when leaders have high awareness—often with an informed understanding of what the organization actually needs—but are unabl (View Highlight) #✂️

e unable or unwilling to take action, then the organization may experience impotence (formally defined as the inability to take effective action1). (View Highlight) #✂️

The first approach, acquired learning, occurs through training and experience, which imparts new knowledge and skills. Psychologists refer to acquired learning as “horizontal development” because it helps a person increase competence at their current level. (View Highlight) #✂️

There is a second kind of learning that is equally important and, in some ways, more consequential both to the learner and her organization. It is represented by a person’s mental model, or meaning-making system, which is a set of fundamental assumptions, beliefs, and ways of interpreting experience. (View Highlight) #✂️

While acquired learning changes what we know (awareness) and can do (action), adaptive learning changes who we are. It changes our fundamental psychology. When we engage adaptive learning, our assumptions change, and what we believe about the world—and even about ourselves—evolves. (View Highlight) #✂️

Carol Dweck has shown that regardless of the baseline ability nature bestows upon an individual, nurture (attitude and effort) can produce extraordinary gains in his or her effectiveness. (View Highlight) #✂️

Armed with this knowledge, managers can choose to highlight and reward the sustained effort, frequent mistakes, and cooperative teamwork that are the hallmarks of cultures that promote learning. (View Highlight) #✂️

Your beliefs about nature (innate ability) versus nurture (developed ability) produce different attitudes toward the “learning gap” (the difference between your aspirations and your abilities). Philosopher and former MIT professor Fred Kofman refers to these two attitudes as the “Knower” and the “Learner.” (View Highlight) #✂️

Those who approach the learning gap with a knower attitude generally have a closed mind, because they assume they already have the answers and are therefore incapable of any significant improvement. (View Highlight) #✂️

In one particularly intriguing series of studies, Dweck discovered that students’ (and adults’) attitudes toward their own learning can be shifted by as little as a word or sentence of feedback from an authority figure. Over time, students praised for effort took on greater challenges and performed better than their classmates, while those praised for their talent avoided more difficult assignments and performed worse on subsequent testing. (View Highlight) #✂️

On the other hand, those who approach the learning gap with the learner attitude are willing to admit that they don’t know. This awareness and admission of the learning gap allows them to approach situations with an open mind and a sense of ease—even enjoyment—as they learn new ways of understanding and doing things. (View Highlight) #✂️

Admitting one’s weaknesses (learning gaps) actually requires a great deal of confidence. Learners actively seek out and commit to opportunities that expose their gaps with the belief that their abilities are not static, but fluid, and with the confidence that their abilities will increase through effort and practice. (View Highlight) #✂️

attitudes toward learning may vary with different circumstances, learning contexts, and even the feedback they receive in a given learning situation. (View Highlight) #✂️

Leonard warns against what
he calls the “endless peak moments fantasy,” whereby
Learners imagine that they will climb an unbroken
staircase
of
breakthroughs,
“Eureka!”
moments,
and sustained successes in their quest for mastery.
Note how well this aligns with the Knower Mindset
described previously. Absent from this endless peak
moments fantasy is the Learner’s expectation of
inevitable mistakes, failures, and setbacks. (View Highlight) #✂️

The Dabbler begins with great enthusiasm and love of novelty. However, when the initial excitement subsides, the Dabbler drops the activity to find the next new, exciting thing. (View Highlight) #✂️

Without knowing that the endless peak moments fantasy is exactly that, many people hit the inevitable plateau and wrongly assume one of three things: 1. The practice must be flawed in some ways.
2. They themselves lack some essential ability. 3. The goal wasn’t actually the right one in the first place. (View Highlight) #✂️

The Obsessive craves the feeling of growth. In the beginning of any pursuit of a knowledge base or skill, most people make gains quickly, and almost effortlessly. But obviously this is only temporary. When the Obsessive reaches the peak of that initial growth curve, he often becomes frustrated (View Highlight) #✂️

The Hacker gets the hang of things initially but is satisfied with a basic competence and is comfortable resting on that plateau indefinitely (View Highlight) #✂️

Leonard refers
to the fourth orientation as the
The third orientation is the Hacker. The Hacker gets
the hang of things initially but is satisfied with a
basic competence and is comfortable resting on that
plateau indefinitely. Because Hackers aren’t aiming
for mastery, they don’t push themselves to get to
the next level; rather, they just practice enough to
get by. This orientation works well for hobbies that
we only do occasionally or just for pure enjoyment.
If someone plays guitar in a cover band and has
not made any technical progress in years, they’re a
Hacker (in that domain, at least).
mastery approach. A person with this orientation
stays with the practice for an indefinite period of
time. She accepts that the road to expertise is paved
with many high points and many frustrations, as
well as more than a few boring plateaus, but she is
determined to conquer it no matter how hard she
must work or how long it takes. (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson demonstrated that not all practice makes
perfect. Instead, practice simply makes permanent.
Only a specific
kind of practice is capable of
consistently producing top-level performance. (View Highlight) #✂️

“Deliberate practice,” he explains, “develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established. The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers and with how those abilities can best be developed.” 11 (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson strongly emphasizes that it’s not enough to merely mirror the behaviors of the exemplars. It’s important to understand the internal representations behind the behavior. These may include the reasons why the exemplar uses a given approach or technique, along with the attitudes, beliefs, mindsets, and emotions that are intrinsically interconnected with the behavior. (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson’s research of people with advanced skills revealed that even those admired for their expertise (e.g., doctors, stock analysts, and therapists) often get worse, not better, as they gain experience in their professions. In fact, when Ericsson reviewed the objective performance of those three professions, he found that in many cases less-experienced practitioners outperformed the veterans. The only standout exception to this pattern (which underscores the efficacy of deliberate practice) was surgeons. (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson determined that surgery, as a vocation, tends to use deliberate practice as opposed to the standard practices used by non- surgeons. Surgeons benefit from very specific goals paired with immediate feedback. (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson points out that for deliberate practice to be deliberate, it requires the practitioner’s “full attention and conscious actions.” (View Highlight) #✂️

There are five hallmarks of deliberate practice, summarized here and explained in the following section: 1. Set specific goals based on best practices 2. Practice with full attention 3. Push beyond your comfort zone 4. Obtain immediate feedback 5. Seek guidance from expert coaches and mentors (View Highlight) #✂️

Deliberate practice focuses on improving those aspects of performance we cannot yet do well. It takes place beyond the comfort zone of your current abilities, which is generally not that enjoyable. Ericsson found that a rhythm of short, intense practice sessions with maximum effort followed by a rest and recovery period works well. (View Highlight) #✂️

These goals shouldn’t just be goals based on your perspective of what is needed. Rather, these goals should aim to bring you closer to how the experts you are modeling practice the skill. (View Highlight) #✂️

Feedback should be highlighted as a crucial component of any deliberate practice. Of course, not all feedback is equally valuable. Feedback resulting from self-observation can be excellent, assuming you know the best practices of the exemplars you are modeling so that you can gauge if you are using the correct internal representations and actions. (View Highlight) #✂️

Just as a world-class golfer may have a specialized coach for his putting game and another for his driving game, high-performing leaders surround themselves with subject-matter experts who can provide guidance in the development of numerous specific leadership skills that make up an effective leader’s repertoire. (View Highlight) #✂️

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the grandfather of engagement theory, found that when he interviewed professionals across many domains, they described their “love of the game” in consistently reverential language. He coined the term “flow” to describe the effortless “zone” of peak performance that, for many, provides the ultimate reward for the countless hours of drudgery they’ve invested. (View Highlight) #✂️

Their findings, documented in
their best-selling book Stealing Fire, introduced four
common elements of altered states of consciousness,
which they coined as STER: selflessness, timelessness,
effortlessness,
and richness. (View Highlight) #✂️

Over decades of interviews and research,
Csikszentmihalyi catalogued the criteria that
contribute to flow.16
Among these, he introduced
what he called the “challenge–skills equation” (CSE),
which states that in order to remain highly engaged, a
Learner must strike an optimal balance between how
hard it is to do something (challenge) and how good
they are at doing it (skill). (View Highlight) #✂️

A second key to engagement and flow, according
to Csikszentmihalyi,
is what he calls “autotelic“
experience. Translated into everyday language,
autotelic simply means something that provides its
own inherent value or reason for doing it. In other
words, for people to engage in years of practice, the
task had better be enjoyable. (View Highlight) #✂️

Simply put, a person’s winning formula—the thinking and approach that produced an individual’s current level of performance —will eventually become the very formula that holds that person back from going to the next level. (View Highlight) #✂️

Harvard’s Robert Kegan has described the mechanism by which humans can move vertically from one level of development to the next as the “subject-object move.” (View Highlight) #✂️

When a person makes the move to the next level (developing to a higher level of psychological complexity), she becomes objectively aware of those aspects of herself to which she was formerly subject.
To quote Kegan, “The subject of one level becomes the object of the subject of the next level.” (View Highlight) #✂️

Greater objectivity results from witnessing one’s behavior from a third- person perspective (whether on video, via feedback from others, or through reflection), and additional insights come when one actively seeks to take on perspectives outside of oneself. Research shows a reliable correlation between practicing reflection, introspection, and mindfulness, and increasing capacity to perceive a situation more objectively from numerous angles. (View Highlight) #✂️

The Stagen meta-practice of “going upstream” integrates all of these into a powerful method for leaders who want to accelerate their transformational journey. (View Highlight) #✂️

. If you are focusing on the tangible dimension of behaviors and results, you might ask, “What’s the action necessary when the room temperature falls below 68 degrees?” The correct response would be: Turn on the furnace. However, if you focus your inquiry upstream of the behavior—examining the internal representations behind the action—you might ask: “Is 68 degrees the right temperature for this room?” or “What assumptions or beliefs do we hold that cause us to conclude that 68 degrees is the right temperature for this room?” (View Highlight) #✂️

When we
practice
going
upstream, we work
backward, starting at result. We inquire into what
behaviors (actions) are upstream of the result. Next
we explore the thoughts and feelings (the internal
representations) upstream of the behaviors. Finally,
we can even investigate the sense of identity
(conceptions and beliefs about who we are) that lie
further upstream of the thoughts and feelings. (View Highlight) #✂️

As the arrows in the illustration indicate, the overall trajectory of this advanced form of introspective inquiry takes us from what we call “the shallows” (representing the tangible, concrete end result) to what we call “the rapids” (representing the frothy confluence of assumptions, actions, and outside influences) and ultimately to the “deep water” of our sense of identity (including our values, worldview, and most fundamental beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world in which we live and work). (View Highlight) #✂️

Organizational expert Bob Anderson
describes the self at reactivity as being
fused with its surroundings. Anderson
explains, “We call it reactive, because we
are subject to an externalized identity;
outside
influences run our behavior
more than we realize. We are constantly
reacting to circumstances without
realizing it, and thus short-circuit more
creative and effective responses.” (View Highlight) #✂️

As we can see in The Transformation Framework diagram (right), leadership with low awareness and low action produces little change—referred to in the diagram as the status quo.
If leaders are capable of engaging in high action, but do so with low awareness, the result on the organization is frequently distress. Conversely, when leaders have high awareness—often with an informed understanding of what the organization actually needs—but are unabl (View Highlight) #✂️

e unable or unwilling to take action, then the organization may experience impotence (formally defined as the inability to take effective action1). (View Highlight) #✂️

The first approach, acquired learning, occurs through training and experience, which imparts new knowledge and skills. Psychologists refer to acquired learning as “horizontal development” because it helps a person increase competence at their current level. (View Highlight) #✂️

There is a second kind of learning that is equally important and, in some ways, more consequential both to the learner and her organization. It is represented by a person’s mental model, or meaning-making system, which is a set of fundamental assumptions, beliefs, and ways of interpreting experience. (View Highlight) #✂️

While acquired learning changes what we know (awareness) and can do (action), adaptive learning changes who we are. It changes our fundamental psychology. When we engage adaptive learning, our assumptions change, and what we believe about the world—and even about ourselves—evolves. (View Highlight) #✂️

Carol Dweck has shown that regardless of the baseline ability nature bestows upon an individual, nurture (attitude and effort) can produce extraordinary gains in his or her effectiveness. (View Highlight) #✂️

Armed with this knowledge, managers can choose to highlight and reward the sustained effort, frequent mistakes, and cooperative teamwork that are the hallmarks of cultures that promote learning. (View Highlight) #✂️

Your beliefs about nature (innate ability) versus nurture (developed ability) produce different attitudes toward the “learning gap” (the difference between your aspirations and your abilities). Philosopher and former MIT professor Fred Kofman refers to these two attitudes as the “Knower” and the “Learner.” (View Highlight) #✂️

Those who approach the learning gap with a knower attitude generally have a closed mind, because they assume they already have the answers and are therefore incapable of any significant improvement. (View Highlight) #✂️

In one particularly intriguing series of studies, Dweck discovered that students’ (and adults’) attitudes toward their own learning can be shifted by as little as a word or sentence of feedback from an authority figure. Over time, students praised for effort took on greater challenges and performed better than their classmates, while those praised for their talent avoided more difficult assignments and performed worse on subsequent testing. (View Highlight) #✂️

On the other hand, those who approach the learning gap with the learner attitude are willing to admit that they don’t know. This awareness and admission of the learning gap allows them to approach situations with an open mind and a sense of ease—even enjoyment—as they learn new ways of understanding and doing things. (View Highlight) #✂️

Admitting one’s weaknesses (learning gaps) actually requires a great deal of confidence. Learners actively seek out and commit to opportunities that expose their gaps with the belief that their abilities are not static, but fluid, and with the confidence that their abilities will increase through effort and practice. (View Highlight) #✂️

attitudes toward learning may vary with different circumstances, learning contexts, and even the feedback they receive in a given learning situation. (View Highlight) #✂️

Leonard warns against what
he calls the “endless peak moments fantasy,” whereby
Learners imagine that they will climb an unbroken
staircase
of
breakthroughs,
“Eureka!”
moments,
and sustained successes in their quest for mastery.
Note how well this aligns with the Knower Mindset
described previously. Absent from this endless peak
moments fantasy is the Learner’s expectation of
inevitable mistakes, failures, and setbacks. (View Highlight) #✂️

The Dabbler begins with great enthusiasm and love of novelty. However, when the initial excitement subsides, the Dabbler drops the activity to find the next new, exciting thing. (View Highlight) #✂️

Without knowing that the endless peak moments fantasy is exactly that, many people hit the inevitable plateau and wrongly assume one of three things: 1. The practice must be flawed in some ways.
2. They themselves lack some essential ability. 3. The goal wasn’t actually the right one in the first place. (View Highlight) #✂️

The Obsessive craves the feeling of growth. In the beginning of any pursuit of a knowledge base or skill, most people make gains quickly, and almost effortlessly. But obviously this is only temporary. When the Obsessive reaches the peak of that initial growth curve, he often becomes frustrated (View Highlight) #✂️

The Hacker gets the hang of things initially but is satisfied with a basic competence and is comfortable resting on that plateau indefinitely (View Highlight) #✂️

Leonard refers
to the fourth orientation as the
The third orientation is the Hacker. The Hacker gets
the hang of things initially but is satisfied with a
basic competence and is comfortable resting on that
plateau indefinitely. Because Hackers aren’t aiming
for mastery, they don’t push themselves to get to
the next level; rather, they just practice enough to
get by. This orientation works well for hobbies that
we only do occasionally or just for pure enjoyment.
If someone plays guitar in a cover band and has
not made any technical progress in years, they’re a
Hacker (in that domain, at least).
mastery approach. A person with this orientation
stays with the practice for an indefinite period of
time. She accepts that the road to expertise is paved
with many high points and many frustrations, as
well as more than a few boring plateaus, but she is
determined to conquer it no matter how hard she
must work or how long it takes. (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson demonstrated that not all practice makes
perfect. Instead, practice simply makes permanent.
Only a specific
kind of practice is capable of
consistently producing top-level performance. (View Highlight) #✂️

“Deliberate practice,” he explains, “develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established. The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers and with how those abilities can best be developed.” 11 (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson strongly emphasizes that it’s not enough to merely mirror the behaviors of the exemplars. It’s important to understand the internal representations behind the behavior. These may include the reasons why the exemplar uses a given approach or technique, along with the attitudes, beliefs, mindsets, and emotions that are intrinsically interconnected with the behavior. (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson’s research of people with advanced skills revealed that even those admired for their expertise (e.g., doctors, stock analysts, and therapists) often get worse, not better, as they gain experience in their professions. In fact, when Ericsson reviewed the objective performance of those three professions, he found that in many cases less-experienced practitioners outperformed the veterans. The only standout exception to this pattern (which underscores the efficacy of deliberate practice) was surgeons. (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson determined that surgery, as a vocation, tends to use deliberate practice as opposed to the standard practices used by non- surgeons. Surgeons benefit from very specific goals paired with immediate feedback. (View Highlight) #✂️

Ericsson points out that for deliberate practice to be deliberate, it requires the practitioner’s “full attention and conscious actions.” (View Highlight) #✂️

There are five hallmarks of deliberate practice, summarized here and explained in the following section: 1. Set specific goals based on best practices 2. Practice with full attention 3. Push beyond your comfort zone 4. Obtain immediate feedback 5. Seek guidance from expert coaches and mentors (View Highlight) #✂️

Deliberate practice focuses on improving those aspects of performance we cannot yet do well. It takes place beyond the comfort zone of your current abilities, which is generally not that enjoyable. Ericsson found that a rhythm of short, intense practice sessions with maximum effort followed by a rest and recovery period works well. (View Highlight) #✂️

These goals shouldn’t just be goals based on your perspective of what is needed. Rather, these goals should aim to bring you closer to how the experts you are modeling practice the skill. (View Highlight) #✂️

Feedback should be highlighted as a crucial component of any deliberate practice. Of course, not all feedback is equally valuable. Feedback resulting from self-observation can be excellent, assuming you know the best practices of the exemplars you are modeling so that you can gauge if you are using the correct internal representations and actions. (View Highlight) #✂️

Just as a world-class golfer may have a specialized coach for his putting game and another for his driving game, high-performing leaders surround themselves with subject-matter experts who can provide guidance in the development of numerous specific leadership skills that make up an effective leader’s repertoire. (View Highlight) #✂️

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the grandfather of engagement theory, found that when he interviewed professionals across many domains, they described their “love of the game” in consistently reverential language. He coined the term “flow” to describe the effortless “zone” of peak performance that, for many, provides the ultimate reward for the countless hours of drudgery they’ve invested. (View Highlight) #✂️

Their findings, documented in
their best-selling book Stealing Fire, introduced four
common elements of altered states of consciousness,
which they coined as STER: selflessness, timelessness,
effortlessness,
and richness. (View Highlight) #✂️

Over decades of interviews and research,
Csikszentmihalyi catalogued the criteria that
contribute to flow.16
Among these, he introduced
what he called the “challenge–skills equation” (CSE),
which states that in order to remain highly engaged, a
Learner must strike an optimal balance between how
hard it is to do something (challenge) and how good
they are at doing it (skill). (View Highlight) #✂️

A second key to engagement and flow, according
to Csikszentmihalyi,
is what he calls “autotelic“
experience. Translated into everyday language,
autotelic simply means something that provides its
own inherent value or reason for doing it. In other
words, for people to engage in years of practice, the
task had better be enjoyable. (View Highlight) #✂️

Simply put, a person’s winning formula—the thinking and approach that produced an individual’s current level of performance —will eventually become the very formula that holds that person back from going to the next level. (View Highlight) #✂️

Harvard’s Robert Kegan has described the mechanism by which humans can move vertically from one level of development to the next as the “subject-object move.” (View Highlight) #✂️

When a person makes the move to the next level (developing to a higher level of psychological complexity), she becomes objectively aware of those aspects of herself to which she was formerly subject.
To quote Kegan, “The subject of one level becomes the object of the subject of the next level.” (View Highlight) #✂️

Greater objectivity results from witnessing one’s behavior from a third- person perspective (whether on video, via feedback from others, or through reflection), and additional insights come when one actively seeks to take on perspectives outside of oneself. Research shows a reliable correlation between practicing reflection, introspection, and mindfulness, and increasing capacity to perceive a situation more objectively from numerous angles. (View Highlight) #✂️

The Stagen meta-practice of “going upstream” integrates all of these into a powerful method for leaders who want to accelerate their transformational journey. (View Highlight) #✂️

. If you are focusing on the tangible dimension of behaviors and results, you might ask, “What’s the action necessary when the room temperature falls below 68 degrees?” The correct response would be: Turn on the furnace. However, if you focus your inquiry upstream of the behavior—examining the internal representations behind the action—you might ask: “Is 68 degrees the right temperature for this room?” or “What assumptions or beliefs do we hold that cause us to conclude that 68 degrees is the right temperature for this room?” (View Highlight) #✂️

When we
practice
going
upstream, we work
backward, starting at result. We inquire into what
behaviors (actions) are upstream of the result. Next
we explore the thoughts and feelings (the internal
representations) upstream of the behaviors. Finally,
we can even investigate the sense of identity
(conceptions and beliefs about who we are) that lie
further upstream of the thoughts and feelings. (View Highlight) #✂️

As the arrows in the illustration indicate, the overall trajectory of this advanced form of introspective inquiry takes us from what we call “the shallows” (representing the tangible, concrete end result) to what we call “the rapids” (representing the frothy confluence of assumptions, actions, and outside influences) and ultimately to the “deep water” of our sense of identity (including our values, worldview, and most fundamental beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world in which we live and work). (View Highlight) #✂️

Organizational expert Bob Anderson
describes the self at reactivity as being
fused with its surroundings. Anderson
explains, “We call it reactive, because we
are subject to an externalized identity;
outside
influences run our behavior
more than we realize. We are constantly
reacting to circumstances without
realizing it, and thus short-circuit more
creative and effective responses.” (View Highlight) #✂️