Cook-Greuter & Associates

     Cook-Greuter and Associates is a consulting company dedicated to supporting life-long learning towards greater personal and professional effectiveness, integration and wisdom. Research shows that the level of personal maturity and self-awareness are positively correlated to the kind of life one creates with others at home, at work, and in the community.

Cook-Greuter's vision is to promote leading-edge, dynamic and developmentally-informed practices for professional training, leadership development, and individual positive transformation. We are committed to fostering learning through a mindful, integral and compassionate approach in order to create shared excellence as well as joy in work, play and living.

Principal

      Dr. Cook-Greuter, the principal of Cook-Greuter & Associates, is a founding member of Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute (I-I), a think tank in Denver, Colorado. Susanne is a contributor to the Psychology, Psychotherapy, and Business Practice Branches of I-I.  She has a doctorate from Harvard University and is an internationally known authority on Mature Adult Development. She has co-authored two books with Mel Miller on Adult development, creativity and spirituality. Her thesis, Postautonomous Ego Development, is a landmark study in the characteristics and assessment of highly developed and influential individuals and leaders.

The Integral Orienting Model

At Cook-Greuter & Associates we use the integral, all-quadrant (AQAL) framework of Ken Wilber as our overarching model for working with individual clients and client companies. The AQAL model is simple, elegant, comprehensive, and productive. It serves as a fundamental lens on human experience and can be applied to all areas of the human enterprise. For interested readers we provide a link to An Introduction to AQAL by Ken Wilber and a A Brief Summary of AQAL in Slides.

In its simplest form the AQAL model covers two dimensions of reality: the invisible and the visible. It describes (a) our individual and shared believes, values, preferences, and self-stories which are “invisible,” and (b) the exterior visible manifestations of life which can be observed and measured. The AQAL model can be used as a simple, quick heuristic to get a perspective on any given issue. It can also be used for the most complex, in-depth analysis at any level of abstraction imaginable. In a consulting context, the AQAL framework can be part of several phases of a project: inquiry and diagnosis, program planning, intervention, and outcome assessment.

Within the multi-faceted AQAL framework, our unique expertise and track record is in the upper left quadrant. The Upper Left deals with people’s inner life and how they make sense of reality. However, all quadrants are taken into consideration as all contribute to what arises in consciousness.

We offer The Leadership Maturity Framework (LMF) as our contribution to understanding how adult human beings are similar and different from each other. As a development framework, the LMF is based on Cook-Greuter’s research in Adult Ego Development, Mature Meaning Making and Wisdom and on William Torbert’s theory of Personal and Organizational Transformation. It is also known as the Leadership Development Framework (LDF).

Overall, the LMF offers a subtle and comprehensive stage model for understanding how people and groups make different sense of their roles, opportunities and conflict situations depending on their level of development. It provides a proven and practical approach to designing development plans and supporting team effectiveness.

We use the term “action logics” as well as “stage of development” to describe the different world views adults commonly use. Each action logic is a coherent and internally consistent belief system that describes how its proponents are likely to think, feel, and behave in various life situations. The LMF describes nine action logics of increasing complexity, each one more effective, insightful, and integrated than the previous one. Each action logic also has its own strength and vulnerabilities. In light of the emerging interest in spiritual and ethical dimensions of leadership, the LMF makes the most subtle and explicit distinctions at the high-end of the personal developmental spiral and includes ego-transcendent perspectives. For a summary of the nine action logics, click here.

Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter is the driving force for creating the sophisticated developmental assessment tool behind the LMF. It is now called the SCTi-MAP, but is also known as The Leadership Development Profile (LDP). Cook-Greuter spent twenty years of dedicated research in expanding and refining the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT) to better assess individuals with complex, later- stage world views. With over 7000 profiles in the Cook-Greuter data base alone, the SCTi-MAP is currently the most rigorously validated, reliable and advanced assessment tool in developmental psychology. It is easy to administer or to take, as well as time- and cost-effective for the rich qualitative and quantitative information it produces. Click here for details.

When we know someone’s action logic profile, we have a dynamic picture of them that often explains as much or more of their behavior than personality type and intelligence alone. In addition, one’s action logic also predicts the constraints of what one is likely able to understand, pay attention to and cope with.

As Kegan (1994) observed in his seminal book In over our Heads most adults are not actually developmentally ready for most of the intervention work that is commonly offered in the helping professions. Thus, the SCTi-MAP identifies where the most leverage exists for positive transformation so that resources and support can be optimally targeted to the capability and capacity of the individual client, team or organizational change effort.

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