Last updated: 25 Oct 07
The 9 'Action Logics'
(A rough guide)
* Also see Levels of Ego Development/Action Logics

This is an outline of the stages of increasing complexity in individual adult growth that has been developed in the work of Prof Jane Loevinger, Prof Bill Torbert (pictured right), Dr Susanne Cook-Greuter and David Rooke.

To assess your own personal stage pattern, you take a Sentence Completion Test, as originally devised by Loevinger and further developed by others.

Each person's 'action logic' is : “an overall strategy that so thoroughly informs our experience that we cannot see it”. Also described briefly are Torbert's organisational – rather than individual – action logics/stages.

1. Action Logic: Impulsive (Spiral Dynamics: Beige values)
Emergence of ego: Children saying “no!”; and statements like “I want” and “mine”. Other people are a source of need gratification. "Good people give to me, means ones don’t".
Cannot understand ego level sentence completion test questions like: “crime and delinquency could be halted if…”.
Confused and overwhelmed by adult life.

Bill Torbert’s approach is unique as he has also tried to apply a constructive-developmental approach to organisations (which parallels the stages of individual development).

Organisational stage: Conception
Dreams, mythic visions and informal conversations about creating a new organisation.

Note: The theoretical and empirical basis for organisational Action Logics (ALs) is - at this time - “much more modest” than for individual ALs.

2. Opportunist (Spiral Dynamics: Purple/Red) (Susanne Cook-Greuter's term: Self-defensive)
Focuses on immediate concrete needs and opportunities. "What you see is what you get".

It seeks short term advantage for self; exercises unilateral power, not mutual. “What I can get away with”. Very short time horizons. Blame is externalised. Critical feedback is rejected. But it can be courageous, can cut to the chase, open up unstructured sales territories.

Dark side: distrustful, deceptive, manipulative to gain short-term wins; it views rules as a loss of freedom; it has a ‘take no hostages’ attitude to conflict. Hobbesian.
To foster further development you may have to take a rather heartless-looking ‘tough love’ approach with opportunists.
4 per cent (in a survey of 4510 professionals).

Organisational stage: Investments
‘Champions’ commit to creating the new organisation; there’s early relationship-building amongst future stakeholders. Peer networks and parent institutions make spiritual, structural and financial commitments to nurture the organisation.

3. Diplomat (Jane Loevinger: Conformist) (Spiral Dynamics: Blue)
Risk-averse, committed to routines. Socially expected behaviour. Seeks conformity, belonging and loyalty: pleasant low stress relationships. Provides social glue. Not good at making decisions. One week to three-month time horizon. Fears breaking rules and any sort of conflict. Can end up creating conflict by trying to avoid it.

Negative feedback is loss of face, loss of status. In an organisaiton led by a diplomat, subordinates will feel a sense of stagnation and disillusion.

To develop, Diplomats need real-time projects in small teams.
11 per cent.

Organisational stage: Incorporation
Products or services are actually produced. Tasks and roles delineated. Persistence in the face of threat.

4 Expert/technician (Spiral Dynamics: Blue)
Interested in problem-solving. Seeks expertise within a consistent framework or logic - perhaps a ‘vocation’. They identify strongly with what they know and what they are perfecting. Seeks efficiency, and decisions based on ‘incontrovertible facts’. Dogmatic.
Strives for continuous improvement. Six month to one year time horizon to accomplish particular projects. Willing to receive feedback from masters of the craft, though rarely from peers.

Shadow side: not good team players, may fall victim to self-generated stress.
37 per cent.

Organisational stage: Experiments
Alternative strategies and structures tested, and rapidly reformed - it is truly experimenting, taking disciplined stabs in the dark, rather than trying one or two preconceived alternatives.

5 Achiever (Spiral Dynamics: Orange)
Passionate about accomplishing goals. Seeks effectiveness and results through application of strategies, plans and actions. Works towards given goals, breaking the rules if necessary. Feels like an initiator, but more likely to take on given goals than self-create and question the larger goals (ie single- rather than double-loop changes).

Sets high standards for self and others and feels guilt if it is failing to meet own standards. Appreciates complexity/systems. Seeks feedback, and mutuality, not hierarchy. One to three year time horizon, juggling shorter time horizons creatively.

Blind to their own shadow and to the subjectivity behind objectivity. Feedback had better fit their AL, or it will be ignored.
30 per cent.

Organisational stage: Systematic productivity
Single structure/strategy institutionalised – focused on systematic procedures for accomplishing the pre-defined task. Reality seen as win/lose.

6 Individualist (Spiral Dynamics: Green)
Increasingly focuses on the self and experience of the moment, not goals; enjoys being appreciated for own uniqueness.

Understands the self to be one player in complex game and sees systems perspectives. Curious about their own power and its use. Increasingly questions assumptions – possibly leading to ‘life’ experiments. Possibly something of a maverick, may have an oppositional stance, relishing one’s unconventionality. Disinclined to judge.

Often these are people who have left inside jobs for roles in small consulting firms, where their primary job is listening deeply into others' worlds in order to facilitate transformational changes.
Dark side: feelings of something unravelling, possible decision paralysis – as they have not yet developed post-relativistic principles; notices own shadow.
Is this where Spiral Dynamics' 'Mean Green Meme' or Ken Wilber's 'Boomeritis' can thrive?

11 per cent.
Organisational stage: Social Network
Strategic or mission-focused alliances among a portfolio of organisations.

7 Strategist (Susanne Cook-Greuter: Autonomous) (Spiral Dynamics: Yellow)
Enjoys the complexity inherent in people’s differing worldviews and capabilities – sees world as a dynamic of interrelated processes and relationships. Willing to let others make their own mistakes.

Alive to the moment but holds long time frames. It has self-awareness in action. Seeks to harness diversity. Guided by principles, sees big picture. Plays many roles. Aware of the paradox that what one sees depends on one’s AL. The central question it asks is: ‘what action is timely now, for whom?’

Strategists truly lead, whatever their organisational rank or role.
Tempted by the dark side of power. Impatient with others’ slow development and “unwillingness” to grow.
5 per cent.

Organisational stage: Collaborative Inquiry
Explicit, shared reflection about the corporate mission. Interactive development of self-amending structures to match dream to mission. Open interpersonal relations, with disclosure, support and confrontation of apparent value differences.

8 Alchemist/Magician/Witch/Clown (Susanne Cook-Greuter: Construct or Ego-aware*) (Spiral Dynamics: Turquoise)
Focus is on the transformation of society, organisation and the self. Seeks the common good. Enjoys the interplay of purposes, actions and results. Is illusive, chameleon-like and maybe powerful. Possibly saddened by the inevitability of paradox in human affairs.

Pays attention to the automatic judgement habit in language – feels trapped by ‘expecting’, ‘thinking’, ‘defending’, ‘fearing’. But fails to relinquish these habits.

They reject the self-importance and self-centredness of Individualists and their subtle need for self-affirmation.

Will build their own organisations or work alone – often as catalysts or transformers, succeeding when they’ve made themselves dispensable.

Few Magicians or later ALs “choose to be company men and women”, says Susanne Cook-Greuter. She says Torbert's research at this higher post-conventional stage of development, with some dozen business leaders, is not as wide as hers with 100s from all walks of life.
Less than 2%.

Organisational stage: Foundational Community of Inquiry
Structure fails, spirit sustains wider community.

(*Though Susanne Cook-Greuter has mentioned that the latest data emerging in the results of people’s Sentence Completion Test assessments shows Construct-Aware and Ego-Aware as two distinct stages. If anyone can illuminate this development for me, please get in touch.)

9 Ironist (Susanne Cook-Greuter: Unitive) (Turquoise)
The last stage detectable by filling in a Sentence Completion Test – which one can only reach by letting go of any ideal of how one wishes to be.

Witnessing the flux of unfiltered experience. Tolerant. Fully empathetic. Not interfering. Be with whatever is. Trust in the intrinsic value and processes of life. The ability to abstain from automatically trying to explain everything. Beginning of ego-transcendence/transpersonal levels.
Less than 1%.

Organisational stage: Liberating disciplines
Widens members’ awareness of incongruities among mission/strategy/operations/outcomes and skill at generating organisational learning.

Copyright © 2007 Matthew Kalman