What Is Your Growth Geometry? (Part 3)
The Information Plane: What Reaches You, and When
Self-awareness is usually discussed as a personal quality. It is can be more usefully treated as an information system with three properties.
Coverage — what you can see at all. We may intend to be decisive and be experienced as dismissive. We may intend to be supportive while quietly avoiding accountability. We may consider ourselves flexible while others experience inconsistency. We may believe we are committed to growth while systematically avoiding the situations that would stretch us. The gap between intent and impact is not a flaw of character; it is a coverage gap.
Latency — how long between the behavior and your knowledge of it. An annual review has a twelve-month latency, which is why it changes almost nothing. By the time the signal arrives, the behavior has been reinforced hundreds of times and the causal thread is gone.
Fidelity — whether what reaches you is accurate or has been softened on the way. Senior people generally have excellent coverage of results and terrible fidelity on behavior, because the incentive to soften rises with the listener’s rank.
Three sources of information fill these gaps, and they are not interchangeable:
Internal: What am I thinking, feeling, wanting, and avoiding?
External: How is my behavior affecting other people and this situation? How do I show up to others?
Situational: What does this particular moment require of me? What is the context?
The third is the one most often missing, and the most consequential. A behavior that is productive in one setting is ineffective in another. Growth is not simply strengthening your preferred behaviors. It is widening the range of conditions you can respond to well.
That range is a defining characteristic of the Agile Growth Leader: the capacity to recognize what is actually happening, hold competing tensions, and respond with clarity rather than habit.
The Seam: Turning Information Into Movement
Awareness alone guarantees nothing…. A person can understand a pattern in detail and continue repeating it indefinitely. Insight becomes developmental only when it changes a choice.
This is the Seam, and crossing it requires something more specific than intention. I want to become a better leader is sincere and useless — too broad to guide any behavior. Deliberate intent is what makes growth observable:
In my next team meeting, I will ask two questions before offering my opinion.
When I receive difficult feedback, I will pause and summarize what I heard before responding.
I will reserve thirty minutes each Friday to review one decision and identify what I would repeat or change.
I will apply one idea from this program within seven days and ask someone to observe the result.
Note what each of these does: it shortens latency. The Friday review turns a twelve-month feedback cycle into a seven-day one. Asking someone to observe the result converts a private guess into external data. These are not merely good habits — they are Information Plane interventions that make the Human Plane tractable.
A working process, organized as five questions:
Notice. What pattern, reaction, result, or piece of feedback deserves attention?
Accept. Can I acknowledge what is true without becoming defensive or turning it into a verdict?
Choose. What response would better serve my purpose, relationships, and responsibilities?
Act. What specific behavior will I practice, and when?
Review. What happened? What should I repeat, stop, or adjust?
Acceptance supplies the psychological stability that honest reflection requires. Improvement supplies direction. Learning expands the options, doing tests them, awareness produces the information, and deliberate intent converts information into movement.
The Shape Itself: Curves, Plateaus, and Dips
Growth curves are S-shaped, and the S has three regions — as Whitney Johnson describes it, a slow and disorienting launch, a steep and exhilarating middle, and a flattening at mastery where the same effort produces steadily less.
Two consequences follow, and both are practical.
Plateaus come in two kinds, and they need opposite responses.
A consolidation plateau is where a new behavior is becoming automatic. You are learning to stay calm in conflict, listen without immediately solving, delegate without taking the work back, or speak candidly while preserving trust. Early attempts feel awkward and produce inconsistent results. This is not failure. It is a capability that has not yet become natural, and the response is patience and repetition.
A structural plateau is different and has a mechanism. Systems thinkers call it limits to growth: the loop that got you here — effort producing results producing more effort — has run into a constraint you have not named. More effort now feeds a loop that is already bounded. The response is not patience. It is to find the constraint. Working harder on a structural plateau is the single most common waste of developmental energy.
The diagnostic question is simple: if I doubled my effort at exactly what I am doing, would anything change? If yes, keep going. If no, you are looking for a constraint, not a plateau.
Dips are a real shape, not a failure. When people leave a familiar approach for a new one, performance typically declines before it improves. The old behavior was automatic; the new one requires conscious effort. Anyone who abandons a change during the dip will conclude, wrongly and permanently, that the change did not work.
And you are never on one curve. You are a portfolio of them — early on one, mid-climb on another, flattening on a third. Feeling simultaneously incompetent and expert is not confusion. It is an accurate reading of a portfolio.
When the Curve Is the Wrong Curve
There is a harder question underneath all of this, and it is the one most development frameworks avoid.
Optimizing your growth curve only makes sense if it is the right curve.
Stay tuned for the 4 installment