Topic · Collaboration and change

Development in organizations

Organizations develop whether anyone plans it or not. Similar patterns keep recurring: conversations get stuck, information arrives distorted, camps form, and conflicts are seen as personal even though they aren't. STAGES provides a lens through which such patterns can be described objectively.

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A grid, not a ladder

STAGES comes from research on the development of perspectives. Terri O'Fallon developed it, building on the ego development research of Jane Loevinger and Susanne Cook-Greuter. Kim Barta turned it into two tools for organizations: a grid for building a sound organizational culture and a diagnostic model for how interactions go wrong, the organizational shadow.

In its original form, STAGES describes a developmental sequence. For working on organizations, only the grid behind it is used here: a few basic features that switch on and off in different combinations. As a lens, they show from which line of view a topic is currently being handled and which one is missing.

This is not about classifying people, teams, or companies. It is about looking more closely before deciding.

The model answers three practical questions: How is a topic currently being thought about and worked on? What does an organization need so that information flows truthfully, accurately, and usefully? And where exactly, between whom, and through which mechanism does something go wrong?

Three lines of view

STAGES describes every perspective through three questions. In organizations, they can be read as lines of view that occur at the same time, often in the same meeting. Each has a strength and a limit.

What is attention directed at?

The model's example: Concrete is a house. Subtle is the assumption that the house is a home. The third level is the awareness that you make such assumptions.

Concrete

The tangible

Machines, rooms, rules, processes, visible behavior

Strength: groundedness, direct verifiability, clear rules. Limit: culture, values, and interactions remain invisible.

Subtle

The abstract

Plans, models, data, values, systems, contexts

Strength: planning, a picture of the future, understanding of systems. Limit: abstraction without direct experience; data props up a fixed opinion.

Assumptions in view

The constructions themselves

Concepts, boundaries, frames of interpretation

Strength: assumptions become visible and negotiable. Limit: explanation replaces contact, yet another meta-level replaces the decision.

Is the I or the we in the foreground?

The second question is social orientation: individual (“it's about me”) or collective (“it's about us,” that is, relationships, groups, systems). Both sides are needed. Personal responsibility, profile, and initiative tend to come from the individual side; coordination, belonging, and shared rules tend to come from the collective side.

How do people learn and work?

The third question concerns the learning process. Four processes repeat:

Process	Core	Strength	Limit
receptive	being open, letting something open up to you	openness, depth, breadth, new viewpoints	too much detail; without boundaries, no “no”
active	showing yourself, shaping, expressing	autonomy, initiative, implementation, completion	control, status, bureaucracy; reality is bent to your own will
reciprocal	give and take, coordinating, “both/and”	balance between individuals and the group, feedback	imbalance: either the I dominates or the group does
interpenetrative	seeing things as interwoven, systems within systems	recognizing interactions, adjusting feedback loops in a targeted way	your own projections are hard to recognize; outdoing others with ever new levels

This table is not a ladder. A purchasing department that carefully takes in offers, a sales team that acts, a meeting that balances, an executive management that brings interactions together: All of this happens at the same time, often in one person on one day. The question is never which process is the right one, but which is missing or overdone in a given situation.

The organizational grid

To build a sound organizational culture, Barta combines the four processes with four domains in which an organization lives: physical (spaces, workplaces, strain), emotional (how moods are shown and received), intellectual (thinking, specialist information, arguments), and social (groups, affiliations, networks). This creates a review grid with 16 fields.

Domains and processes, with an example of one reading
Domain	active	reciprocal
physical
emotional
intellectual	strong: concepts, decisions
social		weak: little real coordination between groups

Example of one reading: strongly active in the intellectual domain, hardly reciprocal in the social domain.

According to Barta, each domain has the same five qualities, for individuals as well as for the collective. This yields cultural qualities such as “social accuracy” or “intellectual honesty.” The guiding questions are an obvious reading:

Quality	Guiding question for the organization
Health	Is the domain sustainable over time?
Freedom	Is there room to maneuver, or is everything regulated?
Honesty	Is what is actually the case being said out loud?
Accuracy	Is what is said and reported correct?
Functionality	Does it serve its purpose?

The processes have qualities of their own as well. For the active process, Barta names an arc of autonomy (“It's my project”), initiative, implementation, completion, and recognition. It shows where an initiative breaks off: Many organizations are strong in initiative and implementation but complete little and recognize hardly anything.

The organizational shadow

In Barta's model, shadow simply means the part of yourself you don't know about. Applied to organizations: patterns that have an effect without being seen. Barta describes them entirely in terms of information, that is, what happens to information that is or isn't true, accurate, and helpful. Five mechanisms can be distinguished:

Direction of flow

Introjection

A party takes in information that is not accurate, true, or helpful.

Projection

A party puts out information that is not accurate, true, or helpful.

Judging by affiliation instead of substance

Collusion

Information is supported because of an alliance, not because of its quality.

Opposition

Contradiction for its own sake, without a substantive reason.

Absence

Isolation

Important, true, and helpful experiences are not shared.

Information comes in four forms, matching the four domains: physical (posture, presence), intellectual, emotional (how something is shown), and social (group affiliations). So a projection doesn't have to be spoken. It can also be conveyed through posture or affiliation.

How misinformation spreads

It is especially important that projection and introjection interlock. One party puts out an unchecked assessment, another adopts it, and it has already moved to another place. From there, it can be passed on.

A puts out an assessment that isn't accurate (projection)
B adopts it unchecked (introjection)
B passes it on to other places

Contained It stays sealed off or is interrupted at a checkpoint.

Spread It travels through the company “like a virus.”

For executive management, this is a core question of information architecture: Where are assessments passed on unchecked, and where are they stopped and checked?

Between whom does the problem lie?

To locate a problem correctly, Barta distinguishes five units between which interaction takes place:

Person

a specific human being

Role of the person

what they embody in the organization

Group

official, such as a department, or unofficial, such as longtime companions

Role of the group

what function a group takes on, officially or unofficially

Perspective

the way a topic is interpreted, as a stable basic orientation or as an orientation in a particular situation

Five times five units create a matrix with 25 fields of interaction: from person to role, from group to group role, from role to perspective, and so on. Each field can be read with each of the five mechanisms. That results in a large but ordered space. Three typical misdirected interventions follow from this:

Wrong target

Person instead of role

The person is addressed even though the problem lies in their role, or vice versa.

Wrong interaction

Two people instead of structure

Something is treated as a conflict between two people even though it lies between a person and a role, a group, or a group role.

Wrong mechanism

Mistaken mechanism

Collusion is taken for opposition, or isolation for projection, and the intervention misses accordingly.

According to Kim Barta, many conflicts have nothing to do with the people involved. Taking that seriously means looking for causes first in roles, groups, and the flow of information, and only then in individuals.

The way of working in three steps

The model is designed as a way of working, not as a test. It can be applied to an organization in three steps:

Keep the units apart. Who or what is involved? Is someone speaking as a person or from their role? Is the group official or unofficial? Is a stable viewpoint at work, or one that comes from the current situation?
Go through the mechanisms. What inaccurate information is taken in, what is put out and passed on? Where is information supported because of an alliance, where is it contradicted without a substantive reason? What experiences are not shared? Does misinformation stay contained, or does it spread?
Shape the organization against the shadow. Which mechanism does the most damage in which interaction? Which quality is missing in which domain, such as emotional honesty or social accuracy? Which process needs to be strengthened so that information is once again checked, shared, and taken in according to its substantive quality?

Where the lens applies in everyday work

What you see	What may lie behind it	Where to start
“Those two just can't work together.”	Two roles with conflicting mandates collide.	Structure and responsibilities, not a conversation about personalities
In the decision meeting, support or rejection follows camp lines.	Collusion and opposition: judging by affiliation instead of substance	Decision rules that make the substantive quality of information visible
An assessment of a customer or a site is adopted everywhere.	The chain of projection and adoption	Checkpoints in the flow of information
Lessons from one project don't reach the next.	Isolation	Information architecture: who shares what, and when
Lots of initiative, little completion, no recognition	The arc of action breaks off.	Explicitly plan for completion and recognition
A change targets the content, but the problem lies in the process.	for example, a lack of reciprocity between headquarters and sites	Asking which content, which domain, and which process a change needs to target

Limits

It is a model. It organizes observations but replaces neither expert review nor responsibility for decisions.
No labels, no ranking. Turning it into attributions (“we're an X organization,” “that department isn't there yet”) transforms an observation tool into a ranking and produces exactly the projections the model describes.
Perspective doesn't explain everything. It is one of five units, on equal footing with person, role, group, and group role. Hastily attributing a problem to “different viewpoints” is itself a misdirected intervention aimed at the wrong target.
The model provides grids, not ready-made answers. Applying it to a specific organization is work, not a matter of reading things off. It makes sense to start with the few fields in which a problem actually shows up.
The model is presented here in outline. Detailed definitions of the qualities, case examples, and completed fields of the grid are missing; some terms are used inconsistently.
Emotional and physical information is part of the model but is treated here only as information: as part of what is conveyed and understood in an organization, not as a subject for personal work.

In this reading, development doesn't mean reaching a higher stage. It means shaping domains and processes so that information flows truthfully, accurately, and helpfully, so that individuals and the group stay in balance, and so that initiatives are carried from beginning to completion.

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