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HOW THE WAY WE TALK CAN CHANGE THE WAY WE WORK: SEVEN LANGUAGES FOR TRANSFORMATION by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. 241pp. $24.95.
"We are deeply grateful to the thousands of people who have participated in the learning sessions that have led to this book." So begins the telling acknowledgment of a publication written by two influential researchers, educators, and consultants in the field of adult transformational learning. After many years of working with individuals and organizations worldwide to promote long-lasting change, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey now bring these learning sessions to the reader in a volume intended to support personal and professional development.
How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work is an interactive learning experience that takes the reader through a series of exercises that the authors call "technologies." These technologies, which are grounded in the readers' own experiences, elucidate how the "forms of speaking we have available to us regulate the forms of thinking, feeling, and meaning-making to which we have access, which in turn constrain how we see the world and act in it" (p. 7). To counter those constraints, Kegan and Lahey introduce seven new languages and demonstrate how those languages can be used to create more constructive experiences in the workplace.
The first part of the book examines how we subconsciously keep ourselves from reaching our personal and professional change goals. "If we want deeper understanding of the...