Make sense of it with a guide, not alone

Set aside regular reflection time with a coach or mentor who understands developmental stages, so a disruption turns into a new way of seeing.

Pourquoi ça marche

Petrie’s third condition, elevated sensemaking, is where a person integrates a heat experience and new perspectives into a larger worldview that, with time, stabilizes. He names three ingredients: time for reflection, a map of the stages, and a guide who knows the terrain. A coach or mentor helps a person see the beliefs and mental maps they are subject to — the ones they cannot see from inside — which is difficult to do alone.

Comment faire

1. Book a recurring reflection slot, weekly or fortnightly, and protect it like a meeting.
2. Bring one live challenge and one moment where your usual way of seeing failed.
3. Ask your coach or mentor: "What am I assuming here that I am treating as simply true?"
4. Try on the next-stage view deliberately, as Bill Joiner does in Petrie’s account: compare how someone at your current way of thinking and someone one step further would each approach the same challenge.
5. End by writing what you can now see that you could not see before.

Données probantes

Petrie (2015) calls elevated sensemaking the most neglected of the three conditions and recommends that a third of leadership development time go to structured reflection; he describes coaching with a vertical lens and late-stage mentors as tools for it. Garvey Berger (2012) devotes chapters to finding a person’s growth edge and to coaching at it. These are practitioner recommendations, not tested outcomes. (anecdotal)

The "one third of time" figure is Petrie’s recommendation, not a research finding. The quality of the guide matters, and there is no standard credential for coaching "with a vertical lens."

Sources

• Petrie, N. (2015). The How-To of Vertical Leadership Development–Part 2: 30 Experts, 3 Conditions, and 15 Approaches. Center for Creative Leadership white paper.
• Garvey Berger, J. (2012). Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World. Stanford Business Books.

Erreur fréquente

Using reflection to tell the story of what happened rather than to examine the assumptions that shaped it. A tidy narrative of a hard month can leave the underlying frame exactly where it was.