Jennifer Garvey Berger Ep. 2
Guest is known for...
Jennifer Garvey Berger is a leadership thinker, author, and co-founder of Cultivating Leadership. Her work focuses on adult development and how leaders grow the inner capacity needed to navigate complexity.
In this conversation, she unpacks why capable leaders often struggle in messy, uncertain environments, introduces the idea of complexity fitness, and explains how our stages of meaning-making shape how we lead, listen, and decide.
Drawing from her book Changing on the Job and years of work with leaders globally, Jennifer offers a practical, humane lens on leadership development that goes beyond tools and frameworks.
Published in February 2026.
Here's what I will learn...
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What complexity fitness is and why it matters more than experience or expertise
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How adults grow through different stages and how this affects leadership effectiveness
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How hidden beliefs and assumptions shape decisions without us realizing it
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Why listening to be unsettled is essential for growth and better judgment
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How to support change in others by accepting where they are, not fixing them
LISTEN TO THE FULL CONVERSATION
From the Podcast
Leadership in a post COVID world
Jennifer Garvey Berger speaks about the notion of complexity fitness. Just like how in the physical world, we could end up injuring ourselves if we don’t have the right kind of fitness, she goes on to say that if we don’t have the right kind of complexity fitness we could end up going through injury, harm and pain as we deal with the world.
Jennifer Garvey Berger speaks about how AI has made inroads into many aspects of complex tasks and we have to keep amplifying our humanness to stay relevant as AI gets more and more powerful.
Jennifer Garvey Berger speaks about the different stages of adult development and what the transitions look like from each of these phases. She specifically speaks about the transition from a socialized mind to a self-authoring mind to a self-transforming mind.
Jennifer Garvey Berger speaks about what this highest form of human development looks like. She speaks about how self-transforming leaders don’t just meet the world with their minds but with their entire being.
Jennifer Garvey Berger speaks about how we should try and develop a distance with our beliefs, assumptions, mental models, biases and several other elements that might influence how we operate. Very often these might stop working for us and we might still be clinging to them. The key is to be aware of them and examine them and review them as an object than be caught as a subject without being aware.
Jennifer Garvey Berger speaks about the notion of taking someone to the edge of meaning making to really discern their complexity fitness.
Jennifer Garvey Berger says that we often have a wish list of what people should become but we forget to acknowledge where they are currently. In the absence of that, she says that the bridge is tethered to only one end and it is hard to make the change happen. A simple but a profound insight.
Jennifer Garvey Berger speaks about the notion of how we listen in a way so that we can challenge our own beliefs rather than just reinforcing them.
Jennifer speaks about how it is critical for parents and leaders to accept the situation the way it is and see reality in the eye and solve from there than an assumed ideal state of the world that doesn’t exist.