European Society for Research in Adult Development

03/09/2026

In our next CAD salon we will return to explore the concept and use of Leadershipmaturity.ai 's maturity indicators and growth levers. Going beyond assessment, Lily Truong and her colleagues Bettina Geiken and Pamela Potts will facilitate a discussion on how insight can be translated into practical action. This is a must attend Salon for all those working to support adult development.
Date : September 17th at 19:00 CEST
Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88533925341?pwd=GFgon03iRc6ZES37Wf...
Meeting ID: 885 3392 5341
Passcode: 632457
Lily writes: With the discovery of the ten Maturity Indicators and recommended Growth Levers, we hope to offer invitations for targeted coaching engagement. Maturity Indicators describe distinct dimensions of how a person thinks, feels, relates and makes meaning, while Growth Levers are the capacities most likely to be catalytic for that particular client: an approach we compare to precision medicine for leadership growth.
This Salon continues a thread from Tamas Madl's earlier session, The Hidden Structure of Adult Development: How AI Can Map and Catalyze Vertical Growth, and follows it to where practitioners actually live: what happens after the assessment. A developmental stage score — derived from responses to a Sentence Completion Test (SCTi-MAP) — offers a rough map of how a person makes meaning of themselves and their world at a particular moment. But it's just that: a snapshot. The score alone rarely tells a coach what to do and what to focus on during debrief and coaching with the client and what is alive for the client at this point in time
In practice, developmental coaching draws on several things at once: stage characteristics as described across various developmental frameworks; the modalities and tools the coach has trained in; and the tailored recommendations within the report itself — which vary with the provider's deliverable package, the scorer's read of the patterns in the responses, and the scorer's own training background and focus.

14/07/2026

We are having one more CAD Salon before the summer break.

“What does a good dialectical integration between human and AI coaching/supervision look like?”

Date : Tuesday July 28th at 7pm CEST (European Summertime)

Zoom link for this session:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87049156665?pwd=9qTjPUdCssYx1CXyZUbaqgpjAf02zZ.1

Meeting ID: 870 4915 6665

Passcode: 060832

Kindly note: this is different to the usual link.

In this Salon, we will introduce you to Mentri.coach – an intelligent workspace for coaches, and give a short live demonstration where Nick will coach Ursula Clidière as she reflects on her current research project, examining the Need–Press questionnaire at the intersection of developmental coaching, therapy, and other forms of psychological support. Ursula's project explores whether patterns within the Need–Press Inventory may offer useful indicators of the pressures and psychological demands that influence developmental work, including circumstances in which coaching may be sufficient and those in which parallel or additional psychological support may be relevant.

After the demonstration, we plan to have a live debate about the pro’s, con’s and ethical issues involved in using AI in coaching and supervision.

Mentri is the work of Andrés Fossas and Charles McInerney, among others. Andrés is Mentri’s CEO and a psychologist specialising in culture and leadership assessment for over a decade. A student of Robert Kegan's adult development theory at Harvard, Andres has also supported people in some of the most demanding settings — including as a prison chaplain and crisis befriender.

Charles is an anthropologist, systems thinker, and researcher with a background in organisational culture, psychology, and people development, consulting internationally across Hong Kong, Amsterdam, and the UK. At Mentri, Charles leads product vision, design, and research in the field — shaping where AI can meaningfully support the coaching relationship, and where clear lines should be drawn around what should remain human.

More details at https://mentri.coach/

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21/06/2026

Our next CAD Salon will be presented by John Kesler who will introduce us to Integral Polarity Practice. This promises to be a truly fascinating session where we will explore the bi-polar characteristics of human nature and how these can be integrated.

Date : Thursday July 9th at 7pm CET.

Zoom link for this session:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83343389020?pwd=vSaOAgpwK017Z0tD2c...

Meeting ID: 833 4338 9020
Passcode: 661568

Kindly note: this is different to the usual link.

John Kesler developed and has been sharing integral polarity practice (IPP) for about 25 years. IPP is a spiritually based character and virtue practice that supports one in living from Wholeness through the full spectrum of human development. IPP concentrates on 21 universal polarities, 9 of which we are born with and 12 of which track primary polar tensions that emerge at each of 12 stages of human development. Nevertheless, in learning how to work with these 21 universal polarities one learns how to work with the endless polarities that we encounter. Particularly in the past 10 years or so, IPP has been applied in depth to practical applications in life and relationships, in organizations and in leadership. John is sharing applications IPP in this context in many ways including through the NGO he chairs, YOUnify, and as the designated facilitator of the global Flourishing Network sponsored by Harvard University, comprised of about 1,000 scholars, researchers, and practitioners.

You can find out more about John's work at https://theippinstitute.com/

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26/05/2026

ESRAD Summer Symposium 2026 – Program Available and Registration Open

We are pleased to share the program for the ESRAD Summer Symposium 2026:
Global Transitions to and During Adulthood
18 June 2026 · Online
The symposium will bring together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from different countries to discuss the transition to adulthood and major life transitions across adulthood from an international perspective. Particular attention will be devoted to the role of cultural, social, economic, and policy contexts in shaping experiences such as leaving education, entering employment, forming relationships, parenthood, migration, caregiving, and retirement.

The full program is available on the ESRAD website at the following link: https://www.europeadultdevelopment.org/summer-symposium-2026.html
Registration is now open! Please register using the following link: ESRAD Summer Symposium: Global Transitions To and During Adulthood Tickets, Thursday, June 18 • 10 AM - 4:30 PM GMT+1 | Eventbrite
We look forward to welcoming you online.
ESRAD Executive Board

ESRAD is pleased to announce its Summer Symposium 2026 , dedicated to the theme Global Transitions to and During Adulthood . The event will take place on 18 June 2026 , from 10:00 to 17:30 CEST...

02/05/2026

European Society for Research in Adult Development
Save the Date | ESRAD Summer Symposium 2026

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to save the date for the ESRAD Summer Symposium 2026, which will take place on 18 June 2026, from 10:00 to 17:30 CEST (09:00–17:30 BST).

The symposium, titled Global Transitions to and During Adulthood, will bring together international scholars to discuss key developmental processes across diverse cultural contexts.

The programme will feature keynote contributions from Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Amber Thalmeyer, and Deeya Mitra, along with a special screening of the documentary Namibia Up, offering a unique perspective on emerging adulthood in Africa.

Further details, including the full programme and registration information, will be shared in the coming weeks on the ESRAD website: https://www.europeadultdevelopment.org/summer-symposium-2026.html

In the meantime, we warmly encourage you to join ESRAD to receive updates on this and future initiatives. Membership is free

We look forward to welcoming you.

Best regards,
ESRAD Executive Board

ESRAD is pleased to announce its Summer Symposium 2026 , dedicated to the theme Global Transitions to and During Adulthood . The event will take place on 18 June 2026 , from 10:00 to 17:30 CEST...

30/04/2026

Next CAD Salon: Grainne McAnallen - Can Yoga Nidra support and accelerate the evolution to higher states of consciousness and pave the way for the dialectical re-organisation of thinking?

Tuesday May 12th at 1900 CET

Zoom link:


Yoga Nidra or Yogic Sleep is often misunderstood as simply being a form of relaxation, yet the intention behind the practice is to accelerate the shift to higher states of consciousness and potentially more developed dialectical thinking.

The Yogis appreciated that humans went beyond their conscious mind every night when they went to sleep. To explore this phenomenon, they evolved a practice of body, breath and awareness techniques to trigger the falling asleep reflex in the body.

Once triggered, the body catches the wave of the sleep cycle and guides the practitioner through all the states that exist between the waking state and the deep sleep state. The hardest part of the practice is staying awake as the body guides you to brainwave states where you would normally be asleep. However, over time you effectively train your brain to stay conscious at lower brainwave frequencies and so gain a felt sense of these states of consciousness in your body, integrating being asleep and awake. Experiencing this felt sense makes such states more accessible inside and outside of the practice, creating a bridge and accelerating the evolution to higher states of consciousness.

The Session

The focus of the session is experiential. There will be a guided experience from the I AM Yoga Nidra school of Yoga Nidra. All participants are encouraged to come with a question, personal or professional, and we will explore the extent to which the practice of Yoga Nidra shifts your thinking on the question that you bring.

During the Yoga Nidra practice, we will incorporate two exercises specifically designed to cycle through different states of consciousness, one at the beginning and one towards the end, to increase the chances of experiencing this phenomenon.

If you would like to practice in advance of the session, some of Grainne’s recordings can be found here.

Yoga Nidra can be practiced lying down or sitting in a chair. The most important thing is to be comfortable and to feel stable so that you can relax and let go during the practice. It is also recommended to have a blanket or additional covering, as your body temperature may drop, just as it does in sleep.

About Grainne

Grainne (Grawn-ye) McAnallen is a student of experiential practices that work at the level of the body and the mind simultaneously and so support and accelerate personal development. She describes Yoga Nidra as “profoundly simple and simply profound”, an accessible practice that continues to transform her understanding of human potential.

Grainne has a background in the corporate world, and worked as an analyst and portfolio manager in the hedge fund business from 1995 to 2006. During this period, she became curious about the inner state of money managers and how this impacted on their investment and business decisions. This motivated her to retrain as a coach and she currently focuses on helping people to develop their Human Intelligence Edge, an intelligence largely dormant, that she believes will become the competitive advantage in the AI era.

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29/04/2026

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/esrad_esrad-adultdevelopment-emergingadulthood-activity-7455312670972440577-Xx76?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAAAFU4LMBFFLR7zkB_j0CcuwrbmIr52KcbGg

Save the date! ESRAD Summer Symposium 2026 will take place on 18 June (10:00–17:30 CEST). This year’s theme is Global Transitions to and During Adulthood. The program will feature talks by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Amber Thalameyer, and Deeya Mitra, as well as a screening of "Namibia Up". More deta...

07/04/2026

In our CAD Salon this month we will return to the practical application of dialectical thinking in work with clients. Nick Shannon and Ursula Clidière will speak on Dialectical Practice in Coaching and Supervision: Dialogue, Contradiction, and Co-Development

Tuesday April 28th at 1900 CET.
Zoom link:

https://zoom.us/j/4078847969?pwd=K1ZxbWxEdi9aaXdJdGJKaTVuTEk0QT09

Starting by outlining the dialectical principles underpinning their practice, Ursula and Nick will speak about their experience of working with clients using a dialectically oriented approach. First, Nick will relate how he worked with an individual client struggling to come to terms with the unwritten requirements for gaining promotion within his organization. Ursula, who supervised Nick’s coaching during this period, will then share supervisory reflections arising both from the client’s responses and from Nick’s approach.

Throughout the session, participants will be invited to comment on what they notice in the work and how they think Nick might move forward with his client in future sessions.

Switching to the organizational level, Ursula will then share how she worked with a fintech organization to surface and explore how it might best navigate a series of tensions shaping the reality of its business. Together, we will examine the dialectical moves involved and look at the use of dialectical tools and frameworks when working with the tensions at a more
individual division/department level.

Ursula Clidière has a dual background in pharmaceutical engineering and industrial-organizational psychology. She specializes in adult development, governance, and organizational culture. Her work integrates adult development theory with leadership practice, coaching, and coach supervision in complex and regulated environments, with a focus on the life sciences. She is an accredited executive coach and coach supervisor (AC; EMCC).

Nick Shannon is a chartered coaching psychologist and associate fellow of the British Psychological Society. Commencing his career in 1979, he has broad-based business experience. He spent the first 10 years working as a trader in precious metals, commodities, financial futures, and other derivatives. Later, he led the growth of a highly successful foreign
exchange business. Convinced that the most fascinating and challenging issues in business were those arising from the management (and sometimes mismanagement) of people, he has for the last 30 years consulted to organizations seeking to develop the strength of their leadership and management.

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17/03/2026

This month's salon of CAD will be presented by Thomas Jordan who will speak on Using generative AI to scaffold perspective-related skills in managing complex issues

Thursday March 19th at 1900 CET. Zoom link:
https://zoom.us/j/4078847969?pwd=K1ZxbWxEdi9aaXdJdGJKaTVuTEk0QT09

Thomas will report on a series of experiments and ongoing projects on how generative AI can be used to scaffold perspective awareness, and, more importantly, to integrate contributions from very dissimilar perspectives in developing strategies for wicked problems and other complex challenges.

In this context, the particular meaning assigned to “perspectives” encapsulates (but is not limited to) durable systems of meaning-making composed of assumptions, values, convictions about causality, conceptual frameworks, and worldviews. "Perspective awareness” means the cognitive ability to take one’s own and others’ perspectives as objects of awareness and reflection. Well developed perspective awareness is indicated by actively seeking out and making use of the contrasting effect of different (and sometimes incommensurable) perspectives to elucidate complex issues and develop more integrative approaches when solving problems and realizing visions.

Thomas will describe several projects where he has used AIs to expand his own perspective awareness as well as to draw on diverse perspectives to generate more integrative strategies and text. Examples include:
– Contextualizing the Inner Development Guide framework
– Creating a master template comprehensively describing the meaning-making patterns of 19 diverse “social ontologies”, i.e. basic assumptions about what a society is and about what change mechanisms can be used to influence societal development.
– Co-authoring a book on right-wing populism with the LLM Claude, starting out from adult development theory, but incorporating multiple other perspectives.

After the presentation, participants will be invited to share their own experiences, questions and concerns.

Thomas Jordan spent almost 40 years as a senior lecturer and associate professor at Gothenburg university, but is now an independent educator and consultant. He holds a PhD in economic geography, but left that field in the late 1990s in order to specialize in the fields of adult development, conflict management and methods for managing complex societal issues. He was the lead analyst in developing the first version of the framework Inner Development Goals, which is to a considerable extent grounded in adult development frameworks.

You can see some of Thomas’ work at http://thomasjordan.se and https://chatbotar.thomasjordan.se

***
CAD - Center for Applied Dialectics in conjunction with the European Society for Research in Adult Development Special Interest Group in Dialectical Thinking
www.applied-dialectics.org

Manifesto There is a fascinating emerging body of knowledge in the field of adult development. Notably, the insights around cognitive development are not f...

16/03/2026

Join our Online event on "Complexity Leadership"
When:
Wednesday, Apr 15 from 10 am to 11 am CEST

It is free, but you have to register via the link below (by clicking on the picture of the webinar below)

Overview:
What does it mean to lead in increasing complexity, and does place shape how that complexity is experienced?

This interactive session presents findings from original research undertaken by Aiden M. A. Thornton, PhD, and commissioned by Tasmanian Leaders, which examines the challenges and opportunities of leading in a geographically isolated yet tightly interconnected Australian state. Drawing on qualitative data from an in-person Complexity Leadership Lab and quantitative findings from a cross-sector leadership skills survey, the research examines different conceptions of complexity and the diverse domains in which it is experienced, including intrapersonal, interpersonal, systemic, and foundational dimensions.

link:

What does it mean to lead in increasing complexity, and does place shape how that complexity is experienced?