Strategist (Transforming)

Reflexive systems leadership: treats own role, frame and actions as part of the system being changed, and invites mutual inquiry and feedback on them.

How it sounds

We need to change the system of incentives, and I need to change how I lead within it.

I've asked the team to show me where my own habits are blocking the change I'm asking of them.

Signs in writing

• leader includes self as part of the problem or system
• invites others to question the vision and the leader's assumptions
• holds competing goods and timescales together
• action inquiry: acting, testing and revising in real time

Staying healthy at this stage

• find work that allows systemic influence
• keep relationships where you can be fully known

Growth edge

• notice the limits of maps and theories, including your own
• practice presence without an agenda
• see the ego's need for coherence as a construction

How to be heard at this stage

• show the larger pattern and time horizon
• invite co-inquiry
• acknowledge complexity honestly

The same altitude in other models

Mapped by altitude, not measured: models track different lines.

• Strategist Cook-Greuter
• Autonomous Loevinger
• Metasystematic Commons
• Conjunctive Fowler
• Self-authoring → Self-transforming Kegan
• Integrative / Systemic Spiral Dynamics
• Universal ethical principles Kohlberg
• Teal Wilber

Stage descriptions are paraphrased summaries for orientation, written for Worldview Lens; they are not the official scoring manuals. Example sentences were written to illustrate each stage.