14: TASK PERFORMANCE
The Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC) has to be at the root of the development forest.
MHC has emerged over time with its founder Dr. Michael Commons, who has unselfishly shared his work with the world of adult development.
Commons, et al., has since the 80s—emergent from Kholberg’s work on moral perspective—identified stages of development much like Piaget did with child development and building on those shoulders of these dedicated early pioneers of adult development created a mathematically valid model of adult development.
The reason I refer to this model as “task performance” is related to the way in which the performance of a person can be identified by MHC or developmental stage of complexity, of which there are already 15.
However, the jewel in this system is that it can be used to identify the stage of the requirements such that not only tasks can be classified developmentally but so can the performance. It’s a complementary model with Jaques but with greater range in terms of use.
Essentially this model is built on a simple idea, or so we tell you:)
What lower order actions make up the organization and coordination of the next higher order. Those actions are then organised and integrated as the next higher order and so on.
An example is addition and subtraction being used in multiplication and division; each uses the lower order action in the higher order, and so on.
I’ve found this model hardest to learn, but over time it’s invaluable to help us with self-knowledge and self-awareness as both require us to observe how we make and language meaning—from that identify how complex the performance is and how they match up with requirements!
In today’s world we buy complexity because people have taken the time to design and develop systems to make and repair things…we don’t need to know much about a car or a computer in order to use them, and that is what makes a society run and compute without having to share the same complexity that created those systems!
Mike