I’ve named Elliott Jaques’s model of information complexity as LANGUAGING, which is not even a word, so to speak.

It’s very apropos for developmental work and as a developmentalist, I enjoy looking for distinctions in the way we talk.

Jaques, like others in adult development, felt that in order to understand whether people were fit for particular roles, their languaging of their mental models on a variety of important topics was important and could be measured.

While information on this model is pretty lean online, suffice it to say that Jaques identified 4 ways in which a person can language their perspectives:

• declarative
• cumulative
• serial
• parallel

Over time there have been practitioners of this model, but for me, the usefulness of this model in adult development helps us to broadly look at and understand the way we language our thoughts and inferences such as to note differences in how a person makes meaning and through meaning making; how they make sense of what they know… and don’t.

The key from Jaques’s model lies in whether or not someone is as complex as their role.

And it’s not just the performance but the expectations of performance that start us down a different path of inquiry.

This gap between performance and expected performance becomes developmentally rich ground for us in our growth in SK and SA.


Mike R Jay, Developmentalist
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