An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them,

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What if a company did everything within its power to create the conditions for individuals to overcome their own internal barriers to change, to take stock of and transcend their own blind spots, and to see errors and weaknesses as prime opportunities for personal growth? What would it look like to “do work” in a way that enabled organizations and

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In contrast, feedback in a DDO is considered incomplete or superficial unless it penetrates (“probes,” in Bridgewater language) beneath behavior to the assumptions and mind-sets that underlie it. Admitting people’s interior life into the realm of what can be improved, acted on, and managed is what makes a DDO’s culture truly developmental—namely, t

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Notice how evergreen or developmentally universal this kind of feedback is, whether we’re talking about someone at the limits of the socialized mind presented with the opportunity to evaluate, rather than be defined by, the feedback; or someone at the limits of the self-authoring mind having the opportunity now to use the feedback to upend the suff

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