I have spent most of my life in the classroom, on one side of the podium or the other. I’m most at home when playing in the space of research, facilitation and practice in the company of others willing to co-create and push up against the edges of the learning environment. My research and writing endeavors focus on individuals navigating what it means to be human…and the growing and shedding inherent in that process. Most recently, I was full-time faculty teaching in an organizational leadership graduate program. In my past professional life, I was an administrator in and consultant to nonprofit organizations primarily in the fields of healthcare and higher education, working in the space of leadership and team development, strategic planning, and various aspects of nonprofit governance and fund development. In this professional life, I’ve just written a book on fallback in human development (Fallbook ;-)) and I accompany folks as they come into relationship with the fullness of themselves — both the bigness and the smallness. My husband and I live in Southern California with our two children who serve as the biggest reflection of my own fluid development.
That’s the short of it. And if you’re a short-of-it kind of person, you can stop here. But if, like me, you happen to be more of a long-of-it type, feel free to keep reading.
It was during my doctoral program that I first encountered adult development theory. I was taken by this framework that seemed to allow me to map my life’s journey to that point and create a roadmap for where I may go in the future. It all seemed to make so much sense. Except one little thing. My path of development had not always been as onward and upward as the theory seemed to depict. There were many times over the course of my history, many moments in a day when I would encounter myself not showing up with the full set of capacities and options that my developmental “center-of-gravity” would indicate were available. So, I set out to discover where this phenomenon of fallback fit within the theory.
My discovery began when I spent a summer in an Action Research Methods seminar class with Bill Torbert, one of the pioneers of adult development theory, practicing 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person feedback, and single-, double-, and triple-loop learning, all under the umbrella of action inquiry. During that time, I pummeled him with endless questions as I sought to understand his theory and undertook my maiden exploration of fallback in the context of that course.
David McCallum found the first empirical evidence of fallback noting its occurrence in 18 individuals whose developmental assessments placed them all along the developmental continuum. With the benefit of David’s initial forays into understanding fallback, and later my own, I realized that there was so much we didn’t know, including about how to even frame fallback as a “thing” so that people could understand what we were asking…so that we would even know what to ask. Through my dissertation research, I set out to fence the field of fallback.
Bill Torbert, who had introduced me to David McCallum, also introduced me to Bob Kegan, Suzanne Cook-Greuter, Jennifer Garvey Berger, and Chuck Palus. I referred to these six – with Bill included – as the “key thinkers,” the dream team who comprised my research participants. Over the course of six months, I engaged in 32 hours of interviews with these pioneers and thought leaders in the fields of adult and leadership development, plumbing the depths of the theories that they had developed and practiced to unearth the nuances of development, including its fluidity.
I had set out to tidy up the frayed edges of a theory that seemed to have glanced over this one little thing which is actually a really big thing – our inevitable experience of not consistently moving forward, onward and upward in our development. In the process, I ended up unraveling the edges further, with many more questions than I had answers. And, I emerged with something that seemed far more important than a tidy theory or definition – a deep appreciation for the complexity of the theories and phenomenon I had studied, their still in-development-ness, and ours, as humans as we come to know a self that is far more messy and shadowy than we like to admit.
I had much opportunity to dive deeply into Torbert’s theory and practice throughout my doctoral program – through the Action Research Methods course, through editing his 1991 book, The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry, for republication, and through my dissertation research. I “knew” Kegan’s and Cook-Greuter’s frameworks intellectually having studied them for my literature review and later through my one-on-one fallback research with these elders in the adult development field.
The chance to test my intellectual understanding of Kegan’s theory in practice came through my role as a Teaching Fellow in his Adult Development course offered through Harvard University’s Programs in Professional Education. During this course, I taught students how to locate the meaning-making in others’ stories as they analyzed Subject-Object Interviews, guided them through the Immunity to Change process, and accompanied them as they pushed at their own subject/object edges in the process.
Later, as a university professor in an organizational leadership graduate program, I had the opportunity to explicitly shepherd both the theoretical and personal discovery of development and fallback of hundreds of individuals through the course I redesigned and taught on worldview and adult development. Residing at the core of my pedagogical approach, whether in the classroom or out, has always been an intentional merging of theory and practice. Through this course, students were invited to try on constructive developmental theories, walk around in them, notice where they felt tight and constricting and where the fabric flowed gently around the contours of self.
As I accompanied my students in their discovery, I was regularly reminded of the incredible messiness and complexity of what it is to be human as we sprint, stumble, collapse, crawl, pull ourselves upright, and falter again through development and life. And I discovered compassion — deep compassion for those willing to step into the shadows to claim the fullness of self.
My present endeavors seek to extend the concepts and experiences that I study, teach, and write about outside of the halls of academia and into the lives of all people trying to navigate the tricky business of showing up in alignment with their intentions in the many contexts of their world. Having solidly situated fallback in the context of developmental theory, I have turned to illuminating the lived experience of fallback. In my newly released book, Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating Fallback in Embrace of the Fullness of You (which I affectionately refer to as Fallbook), I reveal both the despair and ecstasy that accompany a knowing of the fullness of one’s self through the stories of four individuals and their experiences of fallback. This longitudinal study (which was actually never intended to be a longitudinal study) allows us, the readers, to find the fullness of ourselves in the journey of development, in the experience of being human.
Through my research, coaching and workshop offerings, I accompany individuals through their discovery of self using the analogy of theater to set the stage for the historical and unfolding story. I serve as documentarian, bringing to light the lesser known, lesser loved, and occasionally forgotten roles and scenes that make up one’s full ensemble and storyline. I do this with compassion, care and acceptance, as someone who is in the ongoing process of my own autobiographical documentary discovery. I also do this with sound theory, experience, and skill, as someone who has both learned my craft at the feet of the pioneers of this field and as a pioneer myself having articulated the theory of fallback through years of research and practice.