🌱 What the Heck is Adult Development? A Summary of Dimitri Glazkov’s Presentation 🔗

Everyone knows that children grow. From object permanence to magical thinking, it is easy to observe how a child’s sense-making abilities rapidly evolve—their growth is not just physical. But a much more exciting claim is that adults aren’t fully formed once they reach physical maturity, either. Rather, we continue to grow and develop our sense-making abilities throughout our entire lives.

This is the realm of Adult Development Theory (ADT), pioneered by developmental psychologists including Robert Kegan, Susanne Cook-Greuter, and Jennifer Garvey Berger. Below is a synthesized summary of the core concepts and stages of this continuous journey, based on Dimitri Glazkov’s publicly published illustrated primer, What the heck is Adult Development?.

📑 Table of Contents 🔗

🏗️ Part I: The Setup — 2 ½ Big Ideas 🔗

To understand Adult Development Theory, we first need to establish three foundational ideas (or two and a half, since the last is a follow-up to the second).

🧠 1. We Construct Our Reality 🔗

Your reality—including yourself within it—is constructed by you. Unlike “objective reality,” constructed reality is literally what we make of it through our unique experiences and concepts.

• Organizing Concepts: Our minds constantly acquire, merge, split, and regroup concepts.
• Vertical vs. Horizontal Learning: “Horizontal” learning is informational—acquiring new concepts. “Vertical” learning is transformational—changing how we acquire and organize concepts.
• The Subject-Object Shift: Vertical growth requires turning inward. We take a concept we previously identified as “us” (e.g., “I am angry” – subject) and turn it into something we can observe (e.g., “I feel anger” – object).

🪜 2. Vertical Development Happens in Stages 🔗

Our growth is not a smooth, linear line; it happens in spurts, following a punctuated equilibrium pattern of plateaus and transitions.

• The Hero’s Journey: Each transition mirrors Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. A new “me” emerges, which requires a painful “death” of the old, familiar self.
• Immunity to Change: Venturing into the abyss is uncomfortable. This explains why we naturally resist leaving the stage we are currently on.
• A Personal Copernican Shift: When we finally transition, new horizons open up. The world feels larger and full of possibilities—until we reach the limits of that new stage, and the journey beckons again.

🌳 2 ½. Stages Include and Transcend 🔗

Like the rings of a tree, each later stage includes the earlier ones. You cannot skip a stage, and you do not discard the previous ones; you transcend them.

• Multiplicity: All earlier stages remain accessible. When we drop down to a previous stage intentionally to match a situation, we are flexing. When it happens unintentionally under stress, it’s called a fallback.
• The “Lands Unknown”: Earlier stages are easy to recognize because we’ve lived them. However, looking at stages above our current level often feels fuzzy, nonsensical, or impractical.

🧭 Part II: The Stages of Adult Development 🔗

We begin life in early childhood completely subject to our impulses. Through play and time, our concept of “Self” emerges, bringing us to the first stage of adult development.

🛡️ 1. The Self-Sovereign Stage (The Opportunist) 🔗

At this stage, you recognize your “Self” as separate from others, but you are still heavily embedded in your own needs and desires. You are your needs. It is a primal stage that people often fall back into during times of severe crisis.

• The Mindset: Right is what benefits me. Power is coercion (hard power). Feedback is seen as an attack.
• The Gifts: Incredible gut instinct and survival skills. Highly effective in chaotic situations like emergencies, disasters, or war zones.
• The Curses: No capacity for empathy or perspective-taking. Leans into chaos and creates toxic environments.
• The Challenge: Understanding the impact of one’s actions on how others feel.
• The Scaffolding (How we grow past it): Broad societal norms, K-12 education, and religion push us to see that “I am” is part of “we.”

🤝 2. The Socialized Stage (The Diplomat) 🔗

Reached by the vast majority of adults (>90%), this stage is characterized by a sudden awareness of others’ perspectives. You embed yourself in your relationships—you are your relationships. Belonging is an existential need.

• The Mindset: Right is what my group believes. Power is charm (soft power). Feedback is a painful loss of face.
• The Gifts: Empathy, goodwill, teamwork, and reliability. This is society’s glue.
• The Curses: Avoids conflict, masks true feelings to keep peace, and gets easily stuck when faced with conflicting perspectives.
• The Challenge: Developing a unique voice, inner strength, and learning that dissent is not catastrophic.
• The Scaffolding: Higher education and the ideals of democracy.

Liminal Stage: The Expert An in-between transition from Socialized to Self-Authored. You have established “what you do” but haven’t separated it from “us.” You make significant contributions in your area of expertise but struggle with perfectionism, delegation, and a dogmatic need for approval.

🏆 3. The Self-Authored Stage (The Achiever) 🔗

Reached by a minority of adults (<40%), this stage represents a dramatic breakthrough. You realize you don’t cease to exist if you disagree with the group. You construct your own ideology and systems. (This stage is highly idealized by Western corporate culture).

• The Mindset: Right is what I learned. Power is producing valuable outcomes. Feedback is fearlessly sought and offered.
• The Gifts: Contagious drive, values others’ perspectives, directs teams toward mutual objectives, and plans for the future.
• The Curses: High burnout risk, exceptionally hard on oneself and others, and treats complex, unsolvable challenges as merely “complicated” problems to be fixed.
• The Challenge: Quieting the need to over-achieve; learning how to stop “doing” and start “being.”
• The Scaffolding: Executive coaching, postgraduate education, and intentional self-work methods.

Liminal Stage: Redefining An in-between transition from Self-Authored to Self-Transforming. You start seeing true complexity and realize some things aren’t solvable. You appreciate systemic interplay but can get lost in reflection, struggling to bring closure or provide firm leadership.

🦋 4. The Self-Transforming Stage (The Actualizer) 🔗

Reached by very few (~1%), this stage is reached through the realization that your “Self-made Self” is just one possibility. You are no longer beholden to a single identity or ideology and can fluidly move across diverse ways of thinking.

• The Mindset: Right is a journey. Power is action inquiry. Feedback is absolutely necessary to function.
• The Gifts: Highly effective at leading transformational change, values conflict as inevitable, and comfortably holds opposing ideas.
• The Curses: Can appear overly complex, impractical, or even like a different person depending on the context. Firmly believes everyone should strive to grow (which can be exhausting to others).
• The Challenge: Balancing immense confidence with true humbleness; gaining deep awareness of one’s “shadow” self.
• The Scaffolding: Comes entirely from within through intense self-awareness and intention.

🌌 5. Beyond Self-Transforming: The Unitive Stage (The Alchemist) 🔗

Does the journey continue past Self-Transforming? Studies suggest yes, though individuals at this stage are exceptionally rare. They embrace paradoxes and non-dualism, holding spiritual, ecological, social, and ethical awareness simultaneously.

• The Mindset: Right is this (and every) moment. Power is mutual transformation. Feedback is just an interesting source of perspective to play with.
• The Gifts: Deeply wise paradigm disruptors who see deep interconnections and patterns that others cannot.
• The Curses: Their worldview is incredibly difficult for others to understand. They often appear odd or reclusive, gravitating toward their solitary inner world.

📊 Part III: Stage Comparison Matrix 🔗

Use this quick reference to understand the core mechanics of the primary adult development stages.

🔬 The ADT Lab: You 🔗

Development isn’t just theory; it’s a mirror. As you read through these stages:

• Which stages feel familiar to you?
• Where does the text start feeling weird or fuzzy?
• What are your fallback habits when you are stressed?
• Where are you on your personal Hero’s Journey right now?

For the Achievers out there: your “extra credit” assignment is to spend time noticing these ADT stages in your daily life. Observe how you show up, how others respond, and see how this new framework shifts your perspective on the people around you. Have fun!

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