Every half a year or so my thoughts about Kegan stages change and I have to write a new post. Yesterday this happened again.
The previous posts were:
Right now I don't recommend any of them, but if you find something useful in them please let me know.
Here's my current thinking about Kegan stages. As usual, I will talk about stages 3–5. I also think my description of stage 5 as "making plans" is novel.
I think that the stages are simultaneously:
These are going to be correlated, but not equivalent. This is the answer to "do stages exist?" — the "what you use your identify for" part is probably more of a one-or-the-other type of thing, the "sets of skills" part can be an arbitrary mix.
Skills: your skills probably include "tracking what people think about you", "fulfilling others' spoken or unspoken expectations", "knowing what you are allowed to expect/demand from others", "using relationships for your benefit", "presenting yourself selectively to other people in order to make a good impression", "presenting yourself consistently".
A person without these skills is a child.
Other people expect you to use those skills when they interact with you. Kegan gives examples in In Over Our Heads:
[Matty's mother] wants to feel that she and her husband can retire from the Parent Police and start relating to their growing-up son as a trustworthy, self-regulating member of a common team. She wants him to "behave," but she wants him to do so out of his feelings for members of the family of which he sees he is a part. So perhaps the "something" Matty's parents want from him is more than behavior; it is about feeling a certain way. They want him to feel differently about them, about his willingness to put his own needs ahead of his agreements, about his responsibility to his family.
[...] Some people want Matty to be employable. Now, what does this mean? When we look into it, it is always less that they want him to know specific content or skills he can bring into the workforce ("Nah, we can teach him all that when we hire him") and much more that they want him to be someone they can count on, someone who shows up on time, someone who can get along with others, someone who can develop some loyalty to the company, someone it is worth putting in the time and money to train because when he makes a commitment he will keep it.
Adaptations to the world: I have written more about this in The Kegan adaptations. People want you to care about what they think, because it's easier than having to use carrot-and-stick all the time. However, they will also care about what you think — thus relationships and status become powerful, and you gain an incentive to use them.
It is tempting to see stage 3 as "person is overly influenced by the group and is unreliable when something else comes up", and therefore "stage 3 is bad and you should overcome it as soon as possible". However, at its best stage 3 is about being a good member of a community. When everybody in a small community is at stage 3, nobody is insecure, there are no psychopaths, and there is no big project with a looming deadline, the community will probably do very well.
When people come in contact with the idea of Kegan stages, they sometimes think "I'm at stage 4/5 so I'm alright". Maybe, but I don't think you are necessarily alright. Your stage 3 skills might be underdeveloped:
There are many obstacles on the way to developing stage 3 skills. One of them is "if people around you are hysterical, you might not want to be in a relationship with them in the first place because they will dominate". Another is "if you don't need anything from anybody, you wouldn't need to develop relationships with them either".
If you've only seen bad examples of stage 3, examples where people were hurt or dominated because they were in relationships, you might feel like "I will never change for others". I think this had been my situation when I was growing up. It was a rejection of stage 3 — I still cared a lot about how people felt about me, but I wouldn't ever do anything to make them feel better. Saying "sorry" was impossible. In fact, asking personal questions (which is a part of relationship-building) was impossible too; I was just telling friends everything that was going on in my head, and hoping that they would feel like I was awesome. If not — welp, there's nothing else to be done.
Identity: in stage 3 situations, people's treatment of you largely depends on a) the relationships you have with them, and b) what kind of person you present yourself as.
This means that you will spend a lot of time deciding on these two points. Your identity is the stuff you "know" about yourself in order to decide how to act. If your actions largely depend on your relationships and how you want to present yourself, the things to know about yourself will be:
If you don't need to actually ever accomplish anything, you might not even have to go further than that.
Skills: your skills probably include "recognizing formal authority", "creating rules that will be good for you/others or will achieve certain goals", "keeping track of the rules that others have explicitly instituted", "figuring out which relationships would be beneficial for you/others and how the existing relationships should be changed", "noticing and evaluating the effects of different rules/values".
A person without these skills is not an independent agent, but rather a gear in a community.
Adaptations to the world: other people, once again, expect you to use those skills when they interact with you. I mentioned that "I feel bad about what you did" (dealing with stage 3) is easier than "I will punish you for what you did" (dealing with stage 2). Well, you know what's even easier? Saying "you must not this again". You don't have to go through this whole feeling-bad rigamarole.
If you agree to recognize formal authority, you are much easier to manage as an employee. If others recognize formal authority, they are much easier to manage when you are the boss. This whole authority thing is super convenient for large groups of people who aren't all in personal relationships with each other.
Another area where this shows up is "places that demand specific behavior". If you are on a plane, it's much easier for stewards to talk to you from the position of authority than from the position of "I'll shush you if you misbehave". Same if you are interacting with a bureaucracy. Same if you are on a road. Same if you are in a foreign country.
You might want other people to respect your demands regarding boundaries and relationships. The simplest example: if you are a teenager, learning to navigate relationships is genuinely more useful than the test you have tomorrow; so maybe you should have this fight with your girlfriend. To hell with sleep. If you are an adult, however, you might want to be able to say "let's postpone this, I need to be well-rested for tomorrow".
Finally, there are things about you that you aren't willing to do differently, or duties you aren't willing to perform, etc. In this case you want to know about them and notify others about them in advance, and you want others to do the same.
Identity: in stage 4 situations, people's behavior around you largely depends on a) the formal role you have, and b) what you and the other person have explicitly requested from each other or told each other.
Once again, your identity is "what do I need to know about myself?". When surrounded by stage 4 people, you have the magical power to actually get what you are asking for. If you say "X is unacceptable" and don't punish X, people won't listen to you the next time and you will lose this valuable power; so you have to remember that you said "X is unacceptable", and this way it becomes a part of your identity.
In other words: you have an incentive to define who you are ("self-authoring") because other people have agreed to take your self-definition seriously. Defining yourself is useful. Dealing with people who haven't defined themselves is hard.
I will talk about what I suspect stage 5 to be. Wild speculation ahead.
If stage 4 was an adaptation to large groups of people who don't have personal relationships with each other, stage 5 might be an adaptation to large time intervals.
Some stage 4 people have noticed: "Shucks, everybody changes". If you want to stick with someone for a long time (marriage; joining a company as a senior executive; ???), it's not enough to know what you currently are and what the other person currently is — they are going to change. They are going to change.
This means that knowing someone's self-definition is not enough to decide how to behave around them!
In the short term it is enough — you can pretend the situation is static. But it is not enough in the long term. You also need to predict their trajectory, and you need to figure out how to influence their trajectory so that the situation remains good for both of you.
I suspect that at stage 5, your identity — the things about yourself that other stage 5 people will base their behavior on — consists of "what is my potential?" and "what do I want to achieve in life?" and "what about me is likely/unlikely to change?".
It's not that you have realized "oh, rigid rules are bunk, time to embrace the paradox". There are still lots of people who base their behavior on whatever rules/values/etc you use and display. You still have to interact with them. You still need to track this stuff.
However, now that there are people who will judge you based on where you're going, you have to become conscious of "oh, I'm actually going somewhere" and keep track of that as well. This is what leads to "embracing the paradox" — you can't take your rules too seriously anymore, they'll change anyway.
And then the question is: how do you signal to people "I will keep fighting for human rights" or "I will eventually learn how not to procrastinate" or "I want to have a family in the future" or whatever? Those are not promises you can give. "I will fire anyone who does X" is a promise one can fulfill; "I will remain passionate about Y in ten years" isn't.
My guess is that the main strategy is — look for things you definitely have, rather than ones you definitely don't have. This sounds cryptic again, sorry. Here's an example.
Someone is running a human rights organization, and you are considering joining it. Here's what they tell you:
Human rights violations are horrible and unacceptable. I will never stop fighting for human rights.
My feelings about this are: how do you know? Maybe you only care about them because you want to have meaning in your life, and once you find another source of meaning you will happily drop the fight. Or maybe it's just a nice job to you — it's a non-profit but you are still getting a salary, after all.
Now, let's say they tell you this instead:
I have firsthand witnessed horrible human rights violations. I understand deeply why some of them occurred, and I have experience that I think most other people don't have. I think I can genuinely shift the needle, at least in my country, if I keep fighting for another ten years.
If I trust their self-report (i.e. that they are not plainly bullshitting), it sounds better than the first version. Their actions seem to come from what they have (a particular life experience), not from what they decided. "Ten years" is better than "forever", too — more realistic.
"I contain multitudes" is nice, but I think "I have plans" is a better formulation of stage 5. People make plans; people acknowledge that in general they aren't reliable components of those plans; and then others can join them based on how good the plan is, not based on "this is who I am!" which is actually "this is who I decided to be".
So, this is my final guess for now. At stage 5, people present their life experiences to each other and say:
I have shown you as much as I could, and now we both are equally uncertain. Knowing all this, do you still want to do this thing together?