Audit your goals: skill gap or sense-making gap?
Sort your development goals into what more knowledge would fix and what a different way of seeing would fix.
Why it works
Petrie defines horizontal development as more information, skills and competencies, and vertical development as more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking, and recommends checking whether an organization is over-focused on the first. Applied to one person, the audit separates goals that a course would solve from goals where you already know what to do and still cannot do it — a sign the limit is in how you make sense of the situation.
How to do it
- List your current development goals, or the three situations at work you handle worst.
- For each, ask: "If someone gave me the perfect checklist, would this be solved?"
- Mark yes as horizontal and plan the learning. Mark no as vertical.
- For each vertical item, write the belief or reaction that takes over in that situation, and bring it to one of the other practices on this page.
Evidence
The horizontal–vertical distinction and the recommendation to check the balance between them are from Petrie (2015). Using it as a personal goal audit is an application of his program-level advice, and it has not been tested as an intervention. (mechanistic)
Petrie notes that several experts he interviewed saw horizontal and vertical as two sides of the same coin that often develop together; the sort is a thinking aid, not a clean division.
Sources
Common mistake
Labeling every hard goal "vertical" because it sounds deeper. Plenty of struggles are plain skill gaps, and treating them as identity work wastes time a course would save.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Vertical Development Practices: How Adults Grow, Not Just Add Skills
- Seek a heat experience on purpose
Take on a first-time challenge where results matter and your current way of thinking is not enough.
- Put yourself where perspectives collide
Spend real time with people whose worldviews, training and stakes differ from yours, and listen past their content to their values.
- 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.
- Map what keeps you from changing
Take one change you genuinely want, find the hidden commitment working against it, and test the assumption underneath.
- Work at your edge with support, then without it
Notice that you can think at a more complex level with help than alone, and use that gap as the place to grow.
- Use a developmental assessment for insight, never for ranking
If you take a stage assessment, choose a rigorous one, debrief it with a trained practitioner, and keep it away from decisions about people’s worth.
- Choose months of challenge with support over one-off events
Pick development that runs over months and combines real challenge with reflection, not a two-day event.
Related concepts
- Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
Moving from being run by your assumptions to being able to examine them
- Self-Authorship: Moving From the Socialized to the Self-Authored Mind
Kegan’s stages, subject-object moves, and authoring your own life
- Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
Distinguishing adaptive challenges from technical problems — and leading accordingly
- Terri O’Fallon’s STAGES Model, Made Practical
Twelve stages built from three repeating questions, and how to work with the one you are in
- Zone of Proximal Development: Learning at Your Real Edge
Targeting the gap between what you can do alone and what you can do with guidance
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