 Good afternoon. There's the mic. You didn't even know it wasn't on, did you? Theater. Good afternoon. Thank you, that one person. It's okay, it's after lunch. What are you going to get out of this year at the Naval War College? You can probably already tell that we want your answer to that question to be more than just JPME or a master's degree. We've been pretty transparent about that. Professor Anderson and Dean Klein spoke this morning about the fact that the Naval War College is able to deliver a master's degree in just ten months, and that we can do that because we're able to illuminate and draw upon your vast experience and knowledge. And that was the good news. So all of that leadership knowledge and experience that you have will be put to good use here, and it will significantly contribute to that education. There was some other news, I'll call it other news, and the other news that Professor Anderson shared with you was that as you move forward in your career, you will be less and less able to rely on that thing you're an expert in. You will do less and less of the stuff that you're already really good at. And so all of that vast leadership and knowledge and experience is important, but there's more to be done or rather more to be developed. So generally when we speak about personal development, professional development or leader development, what we're talking about is filling the cup. You're the cup. So we're talking about filling the cup with tools, skills, knowledge, competencies. We're talking about filling the cup and providing you with a toolkit for you as a leader so that you can do the things that you need to do. It's enhancing your expert knowledge. It's enhancing your competency. And so you've had a ton of this throughout the course of your career, and that's a good thing, and you'll continue to have more of that, including here and beyond. Your cup will always continue to be filled with more and more tools, skills, competencies, knowledge, information. But what happens when the cup gets full? And yet there's still a ton of information and a lot of other stuff coming in at rapid speed and complexity. It doesn't stop. We've established this. So now you're in constant reactive mode. You're putting out fires. You can't really get out from under it. It just keeps coming in and your cup is churning. So that churn makes it really challenging to cope with this massive amount of information, skills, tools, knowledge. It's great that you have it all and it helps, but what you're able to do with it can be challenged when there's such a churn going on in the cup, when there's all this complexity occurring around you as well. And so that is when what you need to do is expand the size of the cup. So what I just described is what we call horizontal development. And that's filling the cup with tools, skills, knowledge, information, competencies, and it's very important. But if what you want to do is expand the size of the cup so that you have an increased capacity for what you do with the tools, skills, knowledge, and competencies, that's what we call vertical development. And vertical development is about expanding the size of your cup so that your capacity for what you do with all of your knowledge and skill, your capacity for coping with the high level of complexity in the environment, and your capacity for handling and processing all of those inputs that are going into the cup and aren't going to stop, now it is enhanced. So vertical development. Horizontal development is, again, very important and it's enhancing your capacity, your competence, your expert knowledge. So you have tools, skills, knowledge. Information is going into the cup. And what this gives you the ability to do is very effectively solve technical problems. When we talk about technical problems, we're talking about problems that are relatively straightforward. Now they may be very hard problems and they may be very complicated, but they're relatively straightforward in that they have identifiable boundaries, identifiable variables, known or desired end states, we know what we're trying to accomplish, and so there's some level of clarity there. But these are the things that fall into the category of the less and less that Professor Anderson talked about. What falls into the category of the more and more is a different type of problem, a type of problem that is not quite as predictable or known. So that's the type of problem for which we want vertical development, vertical development, which is about increasing your capacity for what you do with all those tools. So you can do more with what you have, you can process all of the information and the inputs, and you can make sense of the complexity. This allows you to accurately understand and address complex adaptive challenges. And I intentionally use understand and address as opposed to the word solve, which I used for the technical. So complex adaptive challenges are much more complex. They're difficult to identify, they may be boundaryless, they're unpredictable in the way they behave, they're like complex living systems where we don't really know what the end state is going to be, and we don't know what happens if we push over here what comes out over there. So much less predictable, and more and more these are the nature of the types of problems that you'll face as leaders, and the more senior you are, the more problems that come across your desk are complex adaptive challenges and not technical problems. So this horizontal development is very helpful in addressing technical problems, and it's very helpful in informing you, in filling the cup. And it's what we usually get in training, so if you think about the difference between horizontal and vertical, training is about increasing competencies, and so training allows for horizontal development. But what it doesn't necessarily allow for is your ability to increase the capacity for what you do with all of that stuff that fills the cup, for everything that you receive, the knowledge, skills, tools, information, inputs. And that, again, is when you need vertical development. So vertical development is what education is meant to be getting after, or at least education at its best. I'm sure you've all seen examples of education where it's simply horizontal, and that is one aspect of education. There are elements of education where you're being informed, with tools, skills, knowledge, information, et cetera. But education at its best is going to do both. It's also going to expand the size of the cup so that you're able to do more with all of that, and so that's what we'll be working towards this year, and that's what we're asking to be the answer to our question of what will you get out of this year at the Naval War College. You'll get an ability to enhance the capacity that you have for all of the inputs that are coming in, so education at its best. And we need both, so this is, it's an either or because I put it on the left side and right side of the screen, but it's not an either or dichotomy in that one is good and one is bad, or that you at some point in your life finish with the horizontal development, okay, I'm done with that now, and I'm only going to focus on vertical. It's not the case, but it is the case that the later you go in your career and in life in general, more and more of the vertical will be required as that leadership cup is full. And so education at its best will draw upon both and they really feed each other. And the reason for this is that the context and environment that you face as leaders is more and more complex. It's characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, what we call the VUCA environment. So this is the context that you're dealing with. And in this context, there's emergence which means we don't really know what's going to come about, so that idea when you have a complex adaptive challenge and you poke on one end and you're not really sure what's going to come out over here, because you couldn't necessarily predict it. And there are so many different variables and factors that you're not able to get clear on that. So this environment, the VUCA environment, it's characterized by emergence, it's characterized by these complex adaptive challenges, much more so than technical problems. It's characterized by constant rapid change. And so you spent the last three days talking and thinking about this and you're going to spend the next 10 months talking and thinking about this, the nature of this environment, the constant rapid change, the technology, the evolution, and the fact that it goes faster and faster. It's also characterized by what some of our speakers talked about this morning, which are people challenges. And I would put to you that those are by far the least predictable of all challenges and that you can almost guarantee that in any complex system that you're dealing with, even if you start out with what seems like only technical problems, you add the people ingredient and the more of that ingredient you add, the more those problems turn into complex adaptive challenges, because hey, we're unpredictable. So this is why, as you go later in your career, you're less and less able to rely on that expert knowledge that you already have. And you're more and more going to be facing things that you are not an expert in. And I'm not judging you here and I'm not saying I know everything about you. I don't know anything about you yet, but I do know that you're not an expert in these challenges and the way I know that is because no one is, because they are unprecedented and that's the environment. So no one is an expert in these challenges and this is why vertical development and enhancing your capacity for dealing with all of this is going to be ever more important as you move forward. And it's why we want to help you take advantage of this educational opportunity in this 10 months to do just that. So in terms of human development, the way that we develop throughout our entire year, entire lives, several decades ago, we believed that people developed cognitively on roughly the same timeline that we developed physically, which would mean that you grow from an infant and then maybe around 18 or 20 years old, you stopped growing physically and that you also stopped developing cognitively. You would plateau at a certain point. And you're done. You're fully cooked. We now know that's not true. Psychology, neuroscience and a wide variety of other disciplines have shown us that that's not true. In fact, you can continue developing cognitively up until any age. You do not necessarily have to plateau and we're just now finding through neuroscience that you don't even necessarily have to cognitively decline the way we've previously thought. So Sudoku puzzles have been the hot thing. I won't be covering any of those in this presentation, but that is one way. We're going to talk about a lot of other ways to ensure continued cognitive development over time. So we now know that it's not true that you necessarily plateau. And what we also know about our adult cognitive development is that in the same way we could describe childhood development in stages. We talk about infants and toddlers, adolescents, teens. We talk about what they can and can't do at given stages. What capacities they have or do not have yet. We can also talk about adult development in that same way. And there are specific discrete stages that we can talk about. So I'm going to talk to you about these stages today. I'm going to present a model that has five stages. And in this, the first two stages are what we characterize as childhood stages and I won't spend much time, but I'll touch on those. And then the next three are what we characterize as the adult stages. So those of you who have young children will recognize the first two. The first stage is what we call the impulsive mind. So at this stage, we're talking about babies, toddlers. There's an impulsivity. Children at this age are not very able to distinguish objects and people in the environment from themselves. So when you're holding a baby and they grab at your necklace or your glasses, that impulsivity and that inability to distinguish the difference. And so because of this, the world is rather magical to children at this age. When you play peek-a-boo with a small child, the reason that game is fun, at least for the child, if not for both of you, is because the world is magical. So it's almost like you've actually disappeared from their view. And then suddenly, thank goodness, you've magically reappeared. And so that's the impulsive mind. Another example of this is, and actually my colleague Dr. Johnson will talk about this in her session next, when you're very small and you're first learning to walk, you're not as able to get your balance, right? And so part of that are that our younger children don't have as good a balance. But another part of it is if I can't distinguish objects from the environment or myself from the objects in the environment, then I can't really distinguish my foot and where it goes. And so that also causes trouble with walking early on. Once I get to the point where I distinguish, I can become better at walking. Interestingly, my shoes are an identical color to the carpet on this stage. So today I'm in the impulsive mind trying to walk around and talk to you at the same time. We'll see how that goes. So the next stage, slightly older children, adolescents, is what's called the self-sovereign mind. So in the self-sovereign mind, we are now able to distinguish ourselves from the rest of our environment or other people or objects. So we become somewhat self-focused and we gain our own perspective. Now at this stage, we're able to get our needs met. We know how to get our needs met and other people are either facilitators or obstacles to those needs. So show of hands, children who might be somewhere in this phase right now. Does anyone have these children? Yeah. So you know what this looks like. So when you have children at this age, they are able to follow rules, but they do so out of what we call a self-interest. So they would like to avoid punishment, certainly, and they'd like to gain reward. So if we have a rule in our household that we don't take cookies from the jar without asking, then our children can follow that. We can teach them that rule and they follow it. But they do so out of that self-interest to either avoid punishment or gain reward. And they know, of course, that mom has eyes in the back of her head. So what we want as parents, what the victory is is when we would move our children out of this stage and get them to a point where they follow that rule not just so that they don't get punished, but because it's the right thing to do. Where the child might say something along the lines of, in this household, we don't steal cookies, that's not who we are. So that would be the victory for parents, is being able to move our children out of this phase. And for those of you who have children that are closer to the adolescent preteen teen years, you know that this takes a very long time. Children do not go to bed one night after their bedtime story in one phase and you say, please wake up the next morning in the next phase. And then they wake up the next morning in that next stage. It doesn't work like that. It does take a very long time and actually a very small percentage of adults don't ever fully progress past this stage. You may have met some of these adults, but not here at the Naval War College. And if you think about it, the attitude towards whether I steal the cookie or not or the attitude of self-interest and that I would follow rules sort of because it helps me or not. That's something that when a 10-year-old does it, yes, we're trying to get them to another stage, but we tolerate that. Obviously, if there's something that a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old is doing, we generally have a problem with that. About 10 percent of adults do stay at the self-sovereign form of mind and never fully progress. They may partially progress, but never fully to the next stage. And the next stage is what we call the socialized form of mind. So in the socialized form of mind, we now would follow the rules because they align with our identity. Because when you reach this stage, the first stage truly in adulthood, membership in groups becomes very important to you. So your identity is provided to you by your social surround, by important others in your life and important groups that you belong to as a member, that you identify with, that it makes up who you are as a person. And so because of this, when you reach this socialized mind phase, you become a good team player, a good citizen, a good soldier, a good sailor. You follow the rules now not to avoid punishment because that's what we do. This is who we are. And so socialization, of course, is a major goal of any membership group that wants to have you as a member. Now, when I say membership group, I don't necessarily only mean the ones that you would formally join and have a piece of paper saying you're a member. It's any kind of group that you identify with. So from childhood on, this could be your family, your religious institution, your educational institution, your national citizenship. This could become your professional military identity. This could become another occupation that you're in. So any group that you identify with and that brings you your identity are the groups that are important to us at this phase. And maintaining harmony with those groups and the important others within them and having a sense of belonging is very, very important to us. And so this is good. This is considered, again, the victory of getting us into adulthood. When we're at this stage, we're able to become productive, functioning members of society. We're effective adults. There was a period of time in society many years ago where this was about all we really needed out of almost all of our adults in the world. If you think about the industrial revolution, all I need is for you to be able to follow the rules and I'm going to set the systems in place and I'm going to give you this membership in my factory or whatever it may be. And that's what you identify with. And so now you behave in the way I want you to behave. So there's a victory here, but there's also a limitation. So at this stage, because I am so fortified by my identity that is given to me by my belonging to that membership group, that's where I get my views, values, beliefs, opinions, and standards. So the membership group or multiple groups in most cases that I'm a part of have a set of views and those views are my own. They are one in the same. There's no difference. And so that gives me a really strong identity. I know who I am and what I believe in. I'm able to act and behave in that way. And it's a very comfortable, stable feeling. But when I find myself in a situation where one or more of my membership groups conflict, now I have a problem, because if there's a view here with this group and a view here with this group, but they don't align with each other, that's going to become threatening to my identity. It's going to start tearing me apart because I identify so strongly with both. And so at this stage, we're not as able to negotiate that conflict or tension between a conflicting view and we have to figure out what we might do. And so there might be two different ways that we would handle this. One way, if we were to stay in the socialized mind and not progress progress beyond it, which about 45 percent of adults do, is that we would compartmentalize. When I'm over with this group, I have this view and I don't really think about or acknowledge that one. And when I'm over with this group, I align with this view and I don't really think about or acknowledge that one. And so I kind of just put my head down and compartmentalize and find a way to cope with the fact that there's not alignment in my life. And of course, all of us are a part of more than one membership group. There's more than one place from which we draw our identity and our views, values, beliefs and opinions throughout our lives. So unless you go join a cult and live on a mountain somewhere and all you have to do is follow that one cult leader's set of rules, all adults face this conflict, but not all adults necessarily deal with it by moving to a different stage and having a different way of thinking about it. So those who stay in this stage compartmentalize. Those who progress to the next stage find a different way to negotiate that conflict. They come up with an internal set of standards, an internal, self-generated set of views, values, beliefs and opinions where I have decided for myself, who I am, what I believe, what makes up the core of my identity. And so when I'm in this phase, which is called the self-authoring mind, self-authoring because it's like I've written or authored my own book and it's the best book ever written, my own views, values, beliefs or opinions, but you never thought you'd come to the war college and hear a professor say that. So at this stage, I now can negotiate if there's a conflict between two or more of my membership groups because I have some internal set of standards where I figure out what is right. And so the resolution to that conflict might be that I align more with this group so I kind of stick here, maybe it's that I align more with this group or maybe that I come up with my own different view that's not the same as others but it comes from an internal place and it allows me to handle that conflict. And so now my identity is strong because of that. I know who I am and what I believe. So an example of this type of situation is if I have a religious identity and that religious identity tells me that murder under any circumstances is wrong or a sin. But I also have a professional military identity and in that identity, there are situations in which I may have to be involved to some extent in taking life. So now there's a conflict between the views and if I've reached the self-authoring stage, I have some sort of internal guidance system that's going to tell me what to do, that's going to guide me in dealing with that lack of alignment between the two groups. And while I may align with one or the other or come up with my own, what I do need to do as I negotiate through that tension is come up with a resolution. So even though at the self-authoring stage, my ability to do this allows me to be very effective. And as you can imagine, effective as a leader, there is still a limitation here. And it's that incredibly strong desire to seek some resolution. Because whether I go with this group or that group or create my own, I must have a view and answer. I must resolve the tension in some way because if I don't resolve that tension, it becomes very uncomfortable to me. Because the identity that I've self-generated tells me who I am. It provides a strong, stable, solid core of a person and I live by that. I know what to do. I know how to navigate my world. But when that becomes threatened because I find myself in a situation that doesn't have a clear view or doesn't have one right answer, when I can't get to a clear resolution, that threatens my identity. Now that's the thing that feels like it's going to tear me apart. So at this stage, ambiguity is not comfortable. So at this stage, I could either stay at the self-authoring stage, not progress beyond it, by once again sort of digging my hand head into the sand and holding even firmer to that identity. Right? So if the world around me is causing this tension and this inability for me to figure out what's going on, I just hold on even tighter to that identity and I ignore the rest. I shut it out. So there's a stubbornness here and it's a stubbornness for a very good reason which is wanting to hold on to who you are and what you believe in. But it's also a limitation because when you find yourselves in situations characterized by ambiguity, where a lack of clear resolution isn't necessarily possible, it limits your options. It narrows your scope. This is where we get assumptions and biases that limit us in our ability to handle the complex environment. So about 35% of adults reach the self-authoring place and stay there. They plateau and do not progress beyond it. So between the two, socialized and self-authoring, most adults are at these two stages or somewhere in between. It's also possible to be between two stages where there would be parts of me or aspects of situations in my life where I still think with my previous system and then there are other parts of me or other aspects or situations in my life where I'm thinking with my later system and so I would be in between the two. But the limitation of either socialized or self-authoring is that incredibly strong need and desire for one single truth, one answer, one right way. This doesn't work in any situation where there's too much ambiguity to get to that point. And so whether it's from the socialized mind coming from a place where it's external and I'm looking to my external environment or my membership groups to tell me what that one single truth is or whether in a self-authoring mind I'm looking to my internal guidance to tell me what that one single truth is. Either way, I want a single truth and when I have it my identity feels strong, I know who I am, what I believe and it's a very comfortable, stable place to be. So I like that comfortable feeling and I dislike anything that degrades my certainty or sureness because that's an uncomfortable feeling. So I can either dig my head into the stand and stay in these places where I have to fight hard to keep that identity and the complex world around me is swirling around and trying to take it away. Or potentially I can progress to a later system, a more complex way of viewing things. So the last adult system in this model is called the self-transforming mind. So at the self-transforming mind I'm better able to deal with that ambiguity. I'm comfortable with a lack of clear resolution. I'm okay with the idea of paradox that there might be either no right answer or multiple right answers or multiple realities. And the reason I can be more okay with this at the self-transforming mind is because at the self-transforming mind I view myself differently. I'm no longer so strongly tied to and embedded within that one solid identity. I now view myself as continually evolving in progress, in process. And I want to view myself that way. I want to be that way. I think it's a good thing to continually evolve if I'm at the self-transforming mind. I'm continually trying to transform myself to enhance my capacity to handle ambiguity and complexity. And so at this phase I'm not only able to operate in that ambiguity and be comfortable, there's also more of a universality to my thinking. So I can look across multiple seemingly disparate or even conflicting threads of information and ideas. And I can see patterns or themes or trends, patterns that other people might not be able to see but my ability to look across, to look at things from multiple different perspectives. And the reason I have this ability is because I'm not so firmly wedded to that one identity that would narrow my scope, that would force me to hone in on one set of views, values, beliefs, opinions and standards. I now have a more open system, a broadened scope so that I'm able to take multiple perspectives except the idea of multiple rights or realities and operate in an environment that doesn't always give me that clear resolution. I can operate in the ambiguity. So the way these stages are depicted here is as a slope, right, going up and to the right. And there are flat parts of the slope and that's where an individual is in one stage and then there are diagonal parts of the slope in between where I'd be in between two stages eventually progressing all the way to the next. And it is accurate to depict this as a slope because moving up and to the right on that slope, sorry that's my right, moving up and to the right on that slope indicates an enhanced capacity, an increased complexity in your mind and in your way of thinking and a broadened scope. However, the upward slope is actually also a little bit deceiving because it implies this linear progression. It basically implies that I leave one stage behind, I graduate and I move on from it entirely and it's gone. And that's not really true. It would also be accurate to depict these stages as concentric circles. Circles that aren't even really stages at all but that are enhancing capacities, that are systems, mental systems growing larger, increased capacity over time. And each concentric circle is within the next, meaning when I progress to a new stage, I still hold within me the previous stage. I still hold within me a capacity to at times think with that previous system, to understand my world with that previous system and to make meaning with it. So I'll give you an example of this. Let's say that I currently have increased the cup to the self-authoring level. So if I'm firmly at self-authoring, I may sometimes find myself in a situation where it's more appropriate for me to use my socialized mind. So let's say I find myself in one of my important membership groups because just because I moved out of the socialized mind at some point and came into self-authoring, it doesn't mean I quit all my membership groups. I didn't hand in my resignation. It just means that my identity isn't as forged by those because it's now internal. So I find myself in one of these membership groups where I have some important membership role to fulfill. And I have something that I need to do. And in order to do that, I'd be better aligned with the situation if I thought with my socialized form of mind. Because perhaps that form of mind better allows me to understand my own role, align myself with the group. Maybe it better allows me to foster teamwork, trust, cohesion, belongingness within the group. And so I would use my socialized form of mind. I'm sure most of you can identify with that in your leadership roles. I'm also at times able to access my self-sovereign form of mind. And so are you. In fact, the last time in your adult life that you accessed your self-sovereign mind may have been just recently. When from the inside of your vehicle, you yelled and cursed at a New England driver who cut you off. Who couldn't even hear you, by the way. Because the reactivity of road rage would be self-sovereign thinking. Or you might have even seen a glimpse at some point of an earlier self. Take that awful week where everything went wrong. You were completely overwhelmed, burnt out, fed up, exhausted. And then you stubbed your toe. Really, really hard. And you had a full-on meltdown. Understandable. That might have been a glimpse of your impulsive mind. So we always hold within us these capacities that we can return to. But the idea is to enhance the size of the cup so that we have the most amount of options available to us for the way that we think and make meaning and make sense of our world. So this is something that we will highlight this year at the Naval War College. We'll talk about what it's like to progress along these stages, but more importantly than whether you progress along these stages or where you currently are or where you're going to be next on this continuum, it's more important that you focus on vertical development from the sense that it enhances your capacity to deal with all of the complexity. That's really our focus. And so this horizontal vertical development is something that you'll experience here. But the way in which you approach your education is very much up to you, of course. And so you could choose to approach your education here at the Naval War College or anywhere that you find yourself in an opportunity to learn with a mind towards only horizontal development. You could choose that. And it would be about taking in information skills, tools, knowledge. And you would potentially come away with an enhanced toolkit. You would have more. Or you could choose to approach your education from vertical development. Vertical development that will give you a broadened scope so that you can see complex issues, complex systems, and complex environments more wholly. Give you a more robust picture of what you're looking at. Vertical development that will give you the opportunity not just to see multiple perspectives, not just to say, I understand you have a perspective that's different from my own. And I appreciate that and I respect that. But to actually take on multiple different perspectives, fold it into your own thinking. Step into that for a moment so that you can really see the system in a larger way. When you find yourselves in situations where you need this ability to look at a complex situation or a complex adaptive challenge through multiple different lenses, this vertical development is what allows you to do that. And the more you can broaden your scope, the more lenses you'll have available to you. And when you have more lenses available to you, you have more options for what you can see. And that allows you to be more flexible, agile, adaptive. How many times have you already heard all of those words this week? Upwards of 10, maybe 20? It allows you to be more flexible, adaptive, and agile. Because the purpose of development, vertical development in particular, is not to reach a certain plateau, find alignment with your environment and your surroundings, and then stay there and hunker down. It might be tempting because it's very comfortable when you find that alignment. You're able to live up to the responsibilities and needs around you very effectively when your level of internal complexity aligns with the external level of complexity in the environment. So it may be a very comfortable place to be, but it doesn't necessarily afford you these opportunities to have more options. So that when you find yourself in a wide variety of different situations that are at a wide variety of different levels of complexity, and by the way, constantly changing in how complex each situation is, this ability to access multiple different ways of thinking, essentially to move up and down or along that continuum at will, that's what allows you to be more flexible and adaptive. So the agility piece is only going to be afforded to you if you figured out a way to access all of these ways of thinking. And it's not that you have to stay in one all the time. We're not saying that just because self-transforming happens to be at the top of my slide, that you should go there and stay there. Because not every situation or context that you find yourself in calls for that way of thinking. But when you do find yourself in one of those situations, which we contend you will more and more as you become more senior, having the agility to access that way of thinking in that moment. And then in the next moment, the agility to access a different way of thinking, to operate with a different version of yourself to meet the demands of that environment. Because the complexity of the environment you're in does drive your mental complexity. But it's somewhat up to you whether you allow it to do so. So again, this is the environment that you face. And your coursework this year will focus on this context. And you'll be given a wide variety of examples, and you already have been, of this level of complexity. So what we urge you to do is to approach your coursework with a mind towards vertical development. Approach the complex adaptive challenges that are presented to you now and in the future in your leadership role with a broad end scope, with an attempt to look at multiple different perspectives, with an attempt to look through multiple different lenses so that you can be flexible, adaptive, and agile. So this is what we offer you the opportunity to do. And you'll see those opportunities throughout the year. You'll see ways that you can voluntarily engage with your coursework to do more than just horizontal development, to do more than just fill the cup. You'll have opportunities to look at models, theories, concepts, frameworks, and grapple with them. And we urge you to do so. We don't present to you a tool or an idea or a concept because we think it's the one best way. This is not the end all be all, do this and everything will be good. We present it to you because we're trying to provide that opportunity for you to grapple with it so that you can analyze it, assess it, argue with it, disagree with it, disagree with us. So that you have an opportunity to build a relationship to that concept and in doing so leverage it to make your own thinking more complex, to engage your own cognitive capacity to do more, not only with the wide variety of ideas presented here, but with the challenges that you'll face going forward. And so this is how we urge you to approach your coursework. When information is presented, think of it as more than just something else I have to learn and memorize, another tool in the toolkit, something to write a paper on. Think of it as an opportunity that you can leverage to enhance your own vertical development. In particular, in your leadership in the profession of arms course this year, we'll present ideas to you. And they'll be ideas that we think are relevant to leadership. But we are not presenting them to you because it's our opinion of the one single truth, the right answer, the one best way. We're presenting them to you so that you can do something with it to leverage your own capacity. So leadership in the profession of arms is not a leadership skills course. We won't give you a bunch of leadership models that you should follow in this exact way. It's not a leadership history course. We won't cover case studies of great leaders or bad leaders. We won't give you some specific model that you should emulate and follow and become this leader. As Professor Anderson mentioned this morning, instead, we will help you think about who you are as a leader, what your reputation as a leader, what others' perceptions are of you, and then grapple with that. And so take this opportunity to engage the vertical development piece. Because as I said, you could choose to approach education just from a horizontal development perspective. And that would be up to you. But you would be missing out on the tremendous opportunity here. And then your answer to the question really would be, all I got out of this year at the Naval War College was JPME or a master's degree. Not that there's anything wrong with those things. But these are the things that are going to allow you to grapple with that level of complexity in the environment. Because even though environmental complexity is the thing that drives our mental complexity, we don't just have to wait for the environment to force us into it. Sometimes it is the environment and the things around us that show us the limits of our current way of thinking that show us that our current system isn't quite well aligned or isn't gonna work here or isn't gonna be enough to grapple with this complexity. And the environment does push us into it. And also to some extent, moving along this continuum is a natural byproduct of aging, maturing, interacting more with our environment, being exposed more. But we can also proactively, intentionally enhance our own mental complexity. And so that's what we're talking about doing this year. And so as you engage with the ideas and topics that we present to you, we urge you to question yourself and to question the ideas. We urge you to think differently than you normally think. We urge you to attempt to ask different questions than the type that you normally ask. And as you're exposed to more self-awareness curriculum, you'll start to get an idea of how is that way that I normally think? And what are those questions that I normally ask? And then we'll offer you the opportunity to try it a little differently. So we encourage you to engage with the curriculum by thinking differently, asking different questions. When you're presented with an idea or a concept or a complex adaptive challenge or something about the complex context that you're going into, work to view the situation from multiple different perspectives. And not just see the different perspectives, but take the different perspectives. Engage with them in a way to expand your own mind. Allow the ability for these ideas to transform you. Which of course requires you to abandon your very natural preference for one right answer. And it allows you to have an open enough system in your mind to not be overly tied to and embedded within that very strong identity, that hard fought and hard won identity that you have developed very successfully over many years and that has allowed you to be effective up until this point. So we're asking you to create a more open system in order to engage this. So you step outside of your current framework and you view the system more broadly. So these are the opportunities that you have this year. And in the next session, Dr. Johnson will talk about these opportunities more specifically. She'll illuminate ways of thinking about and approaching your own existing thinking preferences to influence your decision making. So approach your coursework this way. Lean towards vertical development and make more out of what you'll get out of this year at the Naval War College. What questions do you have? There's a mic coming down. Good afternoon. My name is Lieutenant Commander Garcia. I have a quick question about the relative breakdown that you described at those different stages. First kind of question is what do you attribute? What do you attribute those levels? Like why does 35% make it to the self-authoring stage? Whereas 45% and then kind of a second question is do you see, what role do you see like social media contributing to that? Or if there is any play in that? Great question. So this idea that, as I said in the beginning, you can continue to advance. There's no hard rule that you have to stop advancing. This isn't predetermined. And yet, as you know, there are plateaus and there are percentages at each. And people do not progress past them for their entire life. And so part of what I attribute that to is the comfort level. So when I reach a plateau, if I'm at a plateau, and let's say it's socialized, and I have an entire life system set up around me, my surroundings, my lifestyle, my job, the complexity of the environment that I operate in every day. If that complexity aligns with my internal complexity, if my socialized mind allows me to operate really effectively, meet all the demands and requirements upon me, that's a very comfortable and stable feeling. I know who I am, I know what I believe in, I know what I need to do, I know how to behave. And there's relatively little conflict in tension assuming that my environment stays that way. Now a lot of people in this world have an environment that stays this way. And that's why I gave the example of much earlier in society, society was built in a way that that was really okay. It was a victory that society got its people to not behave as self-sovereign individual entities and instead to behave in a socialized way. And so there's very good reasons to plateau and there's nothing wrong with any one system. No one system is better than another, it's just a different level of capacity. So comfort in a system and having alignment with my environment is the number one thing that I attribute to plateauing and staying in one place, which can be fine. The second thing that I attribute to staying in one place is fear. So any move from one stage to the next inherently involves me having to question my own identity. It involves me having to let go of things that I've held on very tightly to and that have allowed me to operate effectively and know who I am. This is the victory of adulthood. I know who I am, what I believe in, what I want, what to do. That kind of feels like I'm done, right? I've made it. So it's incredibly challenging to the self, even destructive to the self. The level of discomfort involved in glimpsing a new way of thinking, for some of us shuts us right back in. And again, there are some people who have lives that are set up in a way that that can still work and they don't necessarily have to progress. No one in this room or the satellite rooms or watching this on a video later are those people. And then the social media was the second question, loaded question. I am a millennial. I do hate social media. So I'll give you those two data points before I answer. So I think that, and I talk about this frequently with students here, with my coworkers, one piece of the social media world is that I now am much more able to put myself in a bubble and stay there. So I figure out what are my membership groups? What are my views, values, beliefs and opinions? Who am I, what do I wanna be? And whereas in an earlier time, there was one news network and everyone sat down at a certain time at night in front of the one television or the one radio or one newspaper or one whatever came before that. I am a millennial after all. I don't know what came before the newspaper. But we all sat down in front of that one thing and there was one source. And so while we still might have been different people with different religions and beliefs and ideologies, there was a single source. And to some extent, we all had to live in the same reality and admit that there were certain realities that we were all living in and exposed to. In the social media world, I don't have to do that anymore. And not just social media, but even having a million different channels on televisions. I can watch the exact kind of news I wanna watch. I can listen to the exact kind of podcast I wanna watch. I can read what I wanna read. I can make sure that I only see the posts and the tweets and the whatever else is from the people who say the things that I like. Or I might choose to intentionally see the people that I don't like so I can argue against them. But even that, even when I am allowing myself to be exposed to someone I disagree with, I'm doing it in a way to strengthen my own argument, right? So I'm listening to refute not to understand. And I do that because that makes me feel even better about that identity. And I don't say that in a selfish way. Like all I'm trying to do is feel good about myself, but it's really fortifying. It's really comfortable and stable. So I can now use social media and the wide variety of networks and everything else available to me to find a plateau and stay there even more strongly than what I could do if I didn't have all of those options available to me. Does that answer your question? Hi first thanks, great presentation. Really appreciate it. Kevin James, two-parter. What happened to the other 5%? Yeah. And... And in seriousness though, would you say that there is some combination kind of following up on your last comment of nature and nurture here that perhaps just like maybe I'm not built to be a distance athlete or a power lifter that some folks are just kind of predisposed to be more towards one of these certain areas? Thanks. Yeah, both good questions. And I thought about the other 5% and whether to clarify it on the slide or not. And I knew I would get the question. So thank you, Kevin. The other 5% based on the research studies that have been done are either unmeasurable, which I would argue is sometimes a product of research error but more often a product of abnormal psychology. Or they are perhaps adults with developmental disabilities who are actually in this bottom tail. Or maybe a select few, I don't know, Gandhi, Dalai Lama are higher than we're currently able to measure. There's nothing that says the self-transforming mind is the highest possible capacity. That's why there's still an arrow at the top. There might be beyond that. So those extra 5 could be anywhere. The other question, nature versus nurture. As a true adult developmental psychologist, my answer to that would be that there is no one barring developmental disability who doesn't have within them the capacity to potentially continue to progress indefinitely. That being said, IQ or things that are within us by nature do not directly correlate with this but they would certainly contribute. It would potentially be easier for me to progress from one stage to the next if I had a higher IQ or certain other ingrained attributes that helped me. On nurture, I think nurture has a huge amount to do with it. So certainly when I talk about the childhood stages, sometimes when I share this I talk about, okay, if I said to all of you three-year-old, what would be the picture in your mind? If I said to all of you 10-year-old, what's the picture, 16-year-old? What can they do? What can't they do? What are their capacities? And we might disagree a little but for the most part we're gonna agree and we're gonna have a pretty similar picture. But then when I say to you 25-year-old, 35-year-old, 45-year-old, our pictures are gonna get more and more dissimilar because nurture is a big part of it, the environment that you're exposed to. And so roughly three-year-olds, and I know there's a lot of different factors, socioeconomic, cultural, et cetera, et cetera, but roughly three-year-olds have someone and some structure overtop of their life guiding them. So to some extent we all kind of know what three-year-olds can and can't do. The older I get on that continuum, the more disparate our experiences become. Nurture, so whether that's nurture in the traditional sense of in my household, in my family, nurture in terms of me and my disposition towards learning and developing and growing. Am I nurturing myself? Am I leaning towards vertical development? Or nurture just the environment that's coming at me and asking me to do more and be more. Those are the things that have the greatest impact and they become much more different. So when I'm 35 and you're 35, we're now more separate from each other. And at 45 and 45 or 55 and 55, potentially because our life becomes more diverse, we get even more separate from each other. So it's a major factor, but it's a factor in multiple pieces. And I would say the most important part because it's what I'm up here saying today is the you part of it. Does that answer your question? Okay. Do I still have time? Yeah. Hello, Lieutenant Matthew Hite, U.S. Navy. I have a two part question. First, how do you see the development continuum that you highlighted overlap with Eastern cultures? Because it seems that the continuum could be limited or completely different by the type of society and culture that one lives in. A society that focused on the we over the I. That's my favorite question. Thank you. And the second part is how does the continuum overlap with human nature as well as the environments that do not have the social construct or security structure that may allow for the facilitation of this development? Okay. I'll probably ask you to ask the second one again because I got so excited about the first one. So, research that has been conducted in a wide variety of different countries and cultures, including individualists and collectivists, has shown that these percentages are relatively stable. And so that would imply my scientific answer is that it doesn't have an impact. However, my personal answer is that it does. And what I notice in particular, now you can take this five-stage model, you can take five or six other adult developmental stage models that are out there, you can take the chakras if anyone's done yoga or meditation, you can take energy levels if anyone's done whatever tradition that comes from, you can take things from Buddhism and Taoism and a wide variety of different traditions and they all have levels, right? And there's always levels at the top. You can even take Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There's always levels at the top. And what I notice about those levels is that the wording and the description of how people think and what they value and what this is like at these higher levels tends to remind me a lot of what Eastern philosophy seems to value and emphasize. And what Western philosophy, at least for a long time, was devaluing and deemphasizing. I think we're kind of maybe seeing the limits of that now and some folks in our society are shifting to be more open to those ideologies. But to some extent, it was something that we would classify as more an Eastern way of thinking, what we see at the higher levels, universality of thinking, things like that. And so what I personally believe is that, well, there's not necessarily something culturally that determines if I'm embedded within a different society or culture that I'm going to progress either faster or higher than someone else. But I do think that I'm exposed to more of the ideas, concepts, and values, and I may be being pushed there more so by my environment. So I question this when it comes to our current adversaries. And when we talk about speed, agility of thinking, we talk about you as the human weapons system being the advantage that you're gonna have when you no longer have numbers or technology as the advantage, I think about it. I'm not gonna definitively say what that means, but it might mean something. Second question, will you ask that again for me? The human nature aspect of it, because for human nature, seems that you're able to evolve past the certain points in the development when the security structure allows you to do so. But if you struck away rules, society, those kind of norms, how does that fit into the continuum? Yeah, so the social structure around you, I personally believe that it is human nature to want to fulfill our potential, to want to live up to our highest capacity, to want to contribute to the greater good. So I believe that it is human nature to continue to progress indefinitely. The social structure around us certainly can have a big impact on that. Now in some ways, the social structure around us can benefit us if it's affording us educational opportunities, if it's affording us opportunities to be exposed to a wide variety of perspectives, diversity, et cetera, more opportunities to engage with more world and more complexity than presumably that system is set up in a way that would foster and promote this kind of development. Now it can also hinder us. One way in which it might hinder us is if we get into a system in which our role in that system, they want us to be at a certain point, right? And so if I own the factory and you're all working in it, do I want you to be self-transforming? So the system can also consciously hinder and work against that human nature to move up and to the right because it may want you there and it may set up a bunch of rules, practices, policies and procedures that intentionally keep you there and deny you the opportunities to develop. In this idea of a system where all of that is stripped away, okay, so what if we're now in a world where the system has broken down and there aren't all of these rules and policies and procedures? So then I would be lacking all of the opportunities to develop but I might also be lacking, that's okay if I could say like, I might also be lacking the things that would constrain me to not develop. I think that there's conventional wisdom that would say that if we're in a lawless society, we'll return back to animalistic instinct. We'll fight for ourselves and our own identity but there have been multiple iterations of societies for thousands and thousands of years that go through this cycle where there is a period of time of collapse and after collapse we're in a place where we are probably looking more self-sovereign, right? That's stage two, more out for yourself, animalistic instinct kind of behaviors but then we always come together communally because that's part of the human nature to exist together socially because we have better survival opportunities that way and so we always tend to move into the socialized and then we get to a point where there's a limit to that because there's so much complexity and we move up and we move up and so there's actually multiple examples throughout history where we've done this collapse. So I think that initially having a total lack of social structure would probably pull us back but also within that human nature there's a drive to move back up. Does that answer your question? Ty, good? Thank you very much. Thank you.