The Developmental Edge®
Our Story
Andy Fleming & Claire Lee
Co-Founders of TDE
- Founded in 2013
- Co-founded with Harvard faculty Dr. Robert Kegan and Dr. Lisa Lahey
- Originated as the research and consulting home of the Deliberately Developmental Organization®
- Co-authors of An Everyone Culture and "Making Business Personal" (HBR)
- Creators of the Developmental Sprint®, Super Sprint™, and Developmental Workout®
- 10,000+ leaders developed across 75+ countries in 11 languages
About
The Developmental Edge® (TDE) was founded in 2013 to address a growing challenge: the pace of change in business was accelerating faster than leaders were developing the capacity to navigate it.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Andy Fleming and Claire Lee worked with organizations striving to reach the top of Fortune’s “Great Place to Work” rankings, including helping Synovus Financial Corporation reach #1 in 1999. That work produced an unexpected insight. The organizations that had cracked the code on workplace culture had demonstrated that culture and performance were deeply connected, but being a great place to work didn’t automatically mean people would grow fast enough to meet the demands of the 21st century. As demands accelerated, people weren’t growing into the complexity; they were burning out under it. Organizations needed to become not just great places to work, but great places to grow. And not just for senior leaders or high potentials, but for everyone.
Andy had first crossed paths with Dr. Robert Kegan in the mid-1990s through a colleague at Emory University’s Center for Ethics who had worked alongside Dr.Kegan at Harvard. When Dr.Kegan and his Harvard colleague Dr.Lisa Lahey published Immunity To Change in 2009, Andy and Claire recognized the potential to apply these ideas at scale within organizations. They reached out to begin a conversation about how organizations could become environments where everyday work accelerated human development. Those conversations led to the founding of TDE, originally known as Way to Grow INC, as the research and consulting home of the Deliberately Developmental® Organization (DDO), and ultimately to the HBR article “Making Business Personal” and the book An Everyone Culture.
From Ideas to Practice
Since its founding, TDE has focused on translating these ideas into leadership development practices that scale, not by adding programs on top of the work, but by embedding development directly into the work itself. Through years of experimentation, the firm integrated the Immunity To Change® framework with insights about how teams and organizations build new norms and ways of working together, creating the Developmental Sprint® process and a broader operating system for leadership development that also shifts organizational culture.
Today, TDE programs have reached more than 10,000 leaders across 75+ countries in 11 languages, including a recent global client that reported millions in business impact, 10X ROI, and performance results that far exceeded their stretch targets. In 2025, Dr.Kegan and Dr.Lahey stepped back into emeritus roles, while Andy and Claire continue to lead the firm and advance its work with organizations navigating the demands of transformation.
Where We Do Our Best Work
TDE’s deepest client experience spans professional services, technology and digital companies, healthcare and life sciences, advanced manufacturing and engineering, and education and mission-driven organizations. Across these sectors, and others now undergoing significant change, TDE’s approach takes hold fastest where complexity is rising, where leaders are striving to build a true “One Team” or “One Company” culture, and where the goal is change that moves the most important strategies forward.