Spiral Dynamics isn’t a spiral.

They’re not levels in a stack; they’re not linear progressions.

They’re dimensions.

I was reminded of this by an excellent post on the Psychology Today website, by Pamela Rutledge: Social Networks: What Maslow Misses. She makes the point that none of the ‘levels’ in the ‘hierarchy’ make much sense without an understanding of the role of social connection: this has significant implications for social-media, and hence enterprise-architecture. She redraws the ‘hierarchy’ as a circle/cross-format, an ring of relationships between the nominal ‘levels’, with ‘Connection’ at the centre. In other words, a flattened-out tetradian-like layout, portraying a set of independent yet interdependent dimensions.

I don’t know why people are so enamoured of hierarchies and simple ‘stack’-type structures, but the reality is that it rarely works that way in practice. Take Maslow’s Hierarchy, for example: the Abraham Maslow website shows us this graphic:

And then asserts:

Abraham Maslow’s model indicates that basic, low-level needs such as physiological requirements and safety must be satisfied before higher-level needs such as self-fulfillment are pursued. …[W]hen a need is satisfied it no longer motivates and the next higher need takes its place.

But it’s a classic example of that adage about “For every complex problem, there’s a clear, simple, easy-to-understand wrong answer” – because the reality is just not that simple. For example, from first-hand experience about survival in a concentration-camp, psychologist Viktor Frankl explains:

Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival.

In that extreme context, the ‘hierarchy’ is inverted: survival depends first on ‘self-actualisation’, without which there is loss of access to any of the other ‘levels’.

I’ve long seen exactly the same about the Spiral Dynamics model. Spiral was derived (some might say ‘mutilated’…) from the work of Clare Graves [no relation], a contemporary and colleague of Maslow.

[And, apparently, a very close colleague at times - so much so that apparently Maslow's later versions of his 'hierarchy' do draw strongly on Graves' work.]

The Spiral model is invariably shown as a linear progression, each ‘level’ able to incorporate and extend the capabilities of each of the levels beneath:

(The original Graves letter-codes are just-visible here on either side  of each ‘level’-colour – individual on the left, collective to the right.)

But again, the reality is quite different. In most ‘traditional’ societies we simply don’t see the supposed characteristics of the Red, Blue, Orange or even Green layers – but we do see key instances of the systemic views that are supposedly characteristic only of the ‘higher’ Yellow and Turquoise layers. As I’ve said in other posts, it makes much more sense to think of Spiral not as a simple linear ‘stack’, but as a set of intersecting dimensions.

A key reason why we don’t see much of Spiral’s mid-’levels’ in ‘traditional’ societies is that those types of characteristics only become relevant in larger, denser social contexts, with greater complexities arising from multiple-order Dunbar-Number social-connectivity.

For example, the Green ‘level’ still needs an ‘Other’-group – a ‘Them’ – to carry the blame for everything; it’s only in a systemic-viewpoint (Yellow or ‘above’) that there is awareness that in practice there is only ‘Us’. Yet within a small grouping, there’s simply not enough separation to create much of a meaningful distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: hence the apparent Spiral ‘stack’ is compressed to just Beige (survival-individual), Purple (family – survival-collective), Yellow (systemic-individual) and Turquoise (systemic-collective), because the supposedly-intervening ‘levels’ simply aren’t relevant in that context. Thinking in terms of dimensions rather than ‘levels’ makes this point much easier to understand.

In Clare Graves’ original work, societies and individuals ‘move around’ within the ‘stack’ – which, again, makes more sense in terms of dimensions, because each change is usually an adjustment of intensity or focus along one dimension at a time. A key complication – which is often missed by Spiral aficionados – is that whilst individuals may place themselves anywhere, they’re likely to find themselves in significant social difficulty if their ‘position’ is more than about half a ‘step’ away from that of the mainstream culture in which they live. In practice we often see people simulating a ‘position’ that they don’t actually hold at all: and the tension of maintaining that ‘non-natural’ simulation can cause significant damage – a point that, as Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons document so well, definitely applies to ‘survival-tactics’ in overly-bureaucratic organisations…

Another huge danger with any linear-progression model is that it can be used to prop up delusions of ‘superiority’, and hence assertions of ‘right’ to priority or privilege. The problem is particularly severe with Spiral Dynamics, where ‘higher’ is all too easily conflated with ‘better’.

[As summarised on the Wikipedia page, Chris Cowan seems acutely aware of this danger; Don Beck and his co-'Integral' partner Ken Wilber don't seem to be aware of it at all, and even seem to encourage it, which is not a good idea...]

Shifting perspective from a linear progression to an intersecting of dimensions helps us to break free of this trap – which again can be extremely important in a business context.

So Maslow’s Hierarchy isn’t a hierarchy; Spiral Dynamics isn’t a spiral: those are just the largely-illusory outcomes of viewing a complex set of intersecting dimensions from a single arbitrarily-selected viewpoint. Once we move away from that fixed view, some very interesting implications can arise, along with some very interesting possibilities and options.

Over to you, anyway – comments, anyone?

Cynefin framework (original (c) Dave Snowden / Cognitive-Edge c.2003)

Cynefin is probably one of the most useful conceptual tools that I hold in my ‘consultant’s toolkit’. It is an enormously powerful and enlightening framework to understand the relationships between the simple, the complicated and the complex, and to understand why long-proven approaches such as Taylorism and Six Sigma can sometimes (or often, these days) go spectacularly wrong.

Yet for several years now – in fact pretty much since I first encountered Cynefin – I’ve been concerned that there’s been very little attention paid to the role of the Chaotic domain. So that’s the theme I want to tackle here: how may we reclaim the Chaotic, to make Cynefin more complete?

(I’d better say upfront that there’ll be a fair amount here that Dave and others may disagree with, sometimes quite vehemently – and that’s okay, because this is definitely a ‘work in progress’, and probably with gaping holes in the reasoning in places. I need that critique if this is going to work in practice. In no way do I consider that any of the other work in Cynefin is somehow ‘wrong’ – particularly not the work that Dave and others have been doing in the Complex space, which I regard as crucially important in business and elsewhere. All I’m suggesting here is that perhaps we need to approach the Chaotic domain with the same degree of discipline as we do with the others – and not simply ‘run away’ to the Simple or the Complex as soon as we hit the Chaotic, which is about all that standard Cynefin offers at the moment.)

This one will again be long (my apologies…), but should be useful to anyone who’s familiar with Cynefin, or has any practical concerns about how to handle inherent uncertainties in business and elsewhere. More after the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway.

As I understand it, the Cynefin framework describes a ‘diagnostic/solution space‘ – four distinct categories of tactics to filter impressions of an unknown (‘disordered’) context, so as to support sense-making and then decisions for appropriate action. To put it at its simplest if perhaps most tangled, Cynefin is a decision-support framework to support the decisions needed to support subsequent decision-support.

These four sense-making modes or ‘domains’ are usually presented in flat two-dimensional form, as in the diagram above. But for reasons I explained in the previous post, they also fit well with the traditional Western ‘four elements’, which, roughly speaking, equate to physical, conceptual, relational and aspirational. These represent intersections of fundamentally different properties:

• physical: entity or entity-property, transferable, alienable (if I give it to you, I no longer have it)
• conceptual: entity or entity-property, transferable, non-alienable (if I give it to you, I still have it)
• relational: exists between entities, not transferable, requires active support from both ends
• aspirational: exists between entities, not transferable, requires active support from one end only (but may be dropped at the other end)

(In business, a simple example of an aspirational property is a brand: the commitment to the relationship comes from one end only – the ‘consumer [I hate that term, but it does apply here...] – but the relationship is destroyed if the brand is lost, and may not easily be substituted fro another.)

If we view Cynefin from that perspective, the four domains can also be understood as dimensions that mark out a ‘solution-space’ surrounding the initial ‘disorder’ of the unknown:

Cynefin domains as tetradian dimensions

To find appropriate techniques for solutions (responses) for the context, we need to be able to move around the solution-space in an intentional, integrated way. The Cynefin dimensions align somewhat with the ‘four elements’, so we can use the latter to suggest probable places to start: if we’re dealing with physical things, Simple is probably best, if it’s conceptual we would start with the Complicated, and so on. But the catch is that pushing hard in one dimension tends to preclude use of the others – hence Taylorism, which works so well in the predictable physical world, would instead be a flat-out disaster if we assume that it will work just as well in the complex messiness of interpersonal relations (the Complex domain).

Which brings us back to Dave’s slide from the seminar, about the lifecycles of scientific modalities in the Cynefin space:

Concept Lifecycles ((c) Dave Snowden / Cognitive Edge 2010)

Dave here implies that there’s something close to a linear development of management-science, with each modality superseding the next. But that’s actually not what happens: instead, each new modality becomes the ‘scientific fashion‘ for a while, following much the same adoption-pattern as the well-known hype-cycle. The slide above only shows the first part of the hype-cycle, the initial trigger, and then the rise to the ‘plateau of inflated expectations’ – where attempts are made to use the techniques for everything (as in the old adage that “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”) - followed by the descent into the ‘trough of disillusionment’. In the later part of the hype-cycle, we reach the ‘plateau of productivity’ – which, in essence, means that we learn to use the techniques only in contexts where they are appropriate. Hence, again, Taylorist time-and-motion analysis does work very well in certain specific contexts; likewise Six Sigma, and so on.

The danger with the ‘ascent’ notion implied in the slide above is that it risks leading us to the same kind of deluded ‘holier-than-thou’ supremacism. In other words, much the same that we can see, for example, in Don Beck and Ken Wilber’s so-called ‘Integral‘ version of Spiral Dynamics – initially a set of tools that are very useful in certain specific contexts, but one that’s been mangled beyond sense and context into an overblown cult-like ‘Theory That Explains Everything’, that has understandably triggered Dave’s ire on more than one occasion. Yet we can see the same risk also applies here: that initial excitement and exuberance at breaking free of the constraints of the ‘old regime’ are what drive the mistaken millenialism of the hype-cycle. And would not be helpful if Cynefin too becomes a cult, in the same way the Taylorism and Six Sigma have done in the past.

One way to prevent that from happening is to recognise that the S-curves in the slide aren’t a linear development: rather, they’re explorations into solution-space, with a specific emphasis in each case along a specific dimension of that solution-space – Scientific-Management for Simple/Physical, Systems-Thinking for Complicated/Conceptual, Dave’s Sense-Making for Complex/Relational, and so on. Right now, it’s the “and so on” bit that interests me – because right now there isn’t an equivalent science for the Chaotic/Aspirational segment of the solution-space – yet it’s something we definitely do need.

The reason why it’s important should become clear once we look at Cynefin in relation to time:

In real-world practice, the closer we get to the real-time of ‘NOW!‘, the less time we have to think – all we have time for is to do. In effect, this forces us towards a very limited range of choices across a spectrum of ‘truth’ to ‘value’ – in Cynefin terms, either Simple or Chaotic, because the time needed for Complicated analysis or Complex experiments is a luxury we simply do not have.

But Cynefin at present does not have any means to operate within the Chaotic domain. Instead, we’re told, we must ‘act > sense > respond’, either ‘taking control’ so as to push the context into the Simple domain, or grab hold of a few random nominally-unrelated items as the content for subsequent abductive reasoning in the Complex domain. As can be seen in the later part of the seminar, Dave has done brilliant work with fitness-landscapes in his SenseMaker software to bring the Complex closer to real-time – but it’s still not actually the in-the-moment ‘now-ness’ of the Chaotic, and arguably never will be, because by definition the assessment always happens after rather than during the event.

So we need something in Cynefin to fill that hole – because on the one hand the Simple-domain ‘solutions’ are likely to be too simplistic, and on the other we don’t have the time we need to do anything else.

As for why we need it, contrast marketing with sales.

Almost all the classic marketing techniques sit either in the Complicated-domain – trend-analysis, market-segment analysis and so on – or somewhere near the Complicated/Complex border – test-marketing, the dreaded ‘focus groups’ and the like. More recently there’s been a lot more emphasis on viral-marketing, ‘social CRM‘ and the like, which is more solidly into the Complex-domain regions of the solution-space. The point is that it takes time, and it works with large numbers of actual and/or potential events.

But at the point of action, sales is always dealing with ‘market-of-one‘ – an individual quantum-decision to either buy or not-buy. Marketing helps us before that event; it will probably help us after the event; but by definition it can play no part at the immediate instant of the event. Each sale is an internalised quantum-event, a literally one-off decision in the midst of chaos – and no amount of external analysis or assessment is going to change that.

Using this concept of a Cynefin ‘solution-space’, the preferred approach for marketing/sales for most of the past century was to prevent the apparent ‘need’ for a decision – in other words, to ‘take control’ of the market, and force everything into the Simple-domain. A single monopoly for every industry; you can have any colour you like as long as it’s black; no choice, other than to buy or not-buy – and marketing-pressure, peer-pressure and blanket advertising aimed to remove even that apparent choice. Yet these days that Simple option has been eroded by factors such as proliferation of vendors, globalisation and, especially, the internet – so much so that sales-folk might well say “it’s Chaos out here in the market”. In other words, it’s shifted from Simple to Chaotic – from ‘truth’ to value.

(Hence, in my own field of enterprise-architecture, the importance of values-architecture, as summarised here, here and here.)

This is the point where Dave and I diverge, philosophically speaking.

Dave’s background is in physics, and thence to cognitive-science. I would say that he is, without question, one of the few real masters that we have at present in applying that category of knowledge and experience to real-world problems. As someone with such a strong sciences background, I would imagine his natural reflex when faced with any methodological difficulty is to go back to ‘truth’, go back to the science – and in most cases, that’s probably the most reliable approach to take. Yet by definition, it cannot succeed with the Chaotic domain, because in every science, all sensemaking is fundamentally dependent on repetition – and again by definition, there is no real repeatability in Chaos. The cross-over point varies from one context to another, but conventional physics suggests that Heisenberg uncertainty is only resolvable once we move above ten quanta or so; below that point, conventional ‘truth’-based scientific analysis no longer makes sense. Dave in fact alludes to this in one of his comments to the previous post:

I have a strong bias towards the natural sciences and the Cynefin framework is built from a science based position. However … I have seen too many examples of dowsing not to believe it works in some way, I can also see that in all the cases it is a deeply embodied skill that cannot be taught. …  I also have to respect the fact that all controlled tests have failed to establish authenticity. This provides an interesting dilemma. On the one hand I have seen it work with water engineers, and with the man/jcb symbiosis that dug out the drive to the side of my house, on the other hand controlled tests have failed to validate. That means we have a really interesting anomaly that requires investigation – but it does not allow a strong claim for authenticity and the solution will [not?] be scientific.

Dowsing (or ‘water-witching’, in the US) is a good example of a Chaotic-domain context – one which we’ll come back to shortly. Yet as Dave implies, it seems that the only available option in the scientific approach is to force an immediate break-out from the Chaotic domain, into somewhere where repeatability can apply. This would usually be a move to the Complicated domain, such as with statistics-based ‘chaotic attractors’ and the like; or, as Dave has demonstrated so well, into the Complex domain, with fitness-landscapes and ‘outlier-detection’. But it still doesn’t work on the Chaotic domain as itself: from the scientific frame, it seems that the only way we can work with Chaos is by not being there. Which, these days, is hardly a realistic option, because it’s chaos everywhere. And yet we’re still stuck with no way to fill that gaping hole in Cynefin’s solution-space.

My own background is almost the opposite to Dave’s. Although I majored in sciences all the way through school, at university-level I switched over to the arts: specifically, to graphic-design – typography and the like – which is why some years later I became one of the pioneers in creating what is nowadays called desktop-publishing. In essence I’m a technologist, not a scientist; I place much more emphasis and much more trust in usefulness than purported formal ‘proof’. Hence perhaps unlike Dave, my natural reflex when faced with any methodological difficulty is to go to the ‘value’-side of the spectrum – Complex or Chaotic – rather than the ‘truth’-side – Complicated or Simple. Where Dave would, I presume, turn to the peer-reviewed journals, my reflex is to go back to first-principles, usually by direct observation of the context. I’ll freely admit that in Complicated-domain contexts my approach is arguably less reliable than that of the scientist; but because it makes no assumptions about repeatability, it can work within the Chaotic domain on its own terms. That’s the crucial difference.

The other key difference is that I approach the Cynefin frame not as a scientist, but as a methodologist – which is not necessarily the same thing! I’ve been working on various aspects of these themes for probably more than forty years; for example, it’s almost a quarter of a century since I first published my book Inventing Reality, which addresses the same overall space in a rather different way. So when I first came across Cynefin, way back in 2003, I already had a lot of background to connect it with – and that background did include the Chaotic domain. For example, to me it makes useful sense to cross-map Cynefin with a variety of Jungian concepts:

I suspect Dave might not approve of this cross-map, but the point is that it’s useful; unlike a scientific context, it’s neither necessary nor appropriate to claim that it is in some way ‘the truth’. (Which from Dave’s perspective it isn’t, of course: it’s doubtful that there’s any direct scientific cross-map between the two.) And the reason it’s useful is that this kind of cross-map gives us pointers as to how to fill that Chaotic-domain gap in Cynefin – by focussing on usefulness rather than ‘truth’.

As Dave implies, dowsing is probably a good place to start. I’ve been involved with dowsing in various forms since studying with Keith Critchlow at the Architectural Association, many decades ago; I’m probably one of the very few people doing systematic methodological study of the field, and likewise one the few people who can formally identify the fundamental flaws  in every so-called ‘scientific’ study of dowsing to date by self-styled Skeptics. To put it bluntly, I do know what I’m doing there; most people don’t (and many – especially from the so-called ‘New Age’ of the market – frankly don’t have a freakin’ clue… ) Which means there’s a real need for discipline there – and in many other contexts too.

So whilst Dave might be horrified at what I’ve done, in fact Cynefin provides a very powerful base-frame for a systematic approach to methodology in dowsing – including the Chaotic domain. (See the book Disciplines of Dowsing – you can download the full e-book for free from here. There’s also a two-page reference-sheet that summarises all the basic principles and practice.) The same principles apply in other fields: for example, I’ve recently been working with a number of well-known archaeologists to develop formal methodologies for subjective archaeology. And the same principles also apply in business – as in the discussion above about marketing versus sales.

Very short summary from all of the above:

• the Cynefin framework defines a ‘solution-space’ within which to select tactics to resolve problems in business and elsewhere
• Cynefin, as currently defined, severely constrains the solution-space by providing almost no means to manage the Chaotic domain
• if we include the Chaotic domain in a disciplined way, it greatly expands our range of options in the solution-space

So, how do we include the Chaotic domain? Here are a few suggestions to start with:

Don’t panic! In the extremes of the Chaotic domain, everything and nothing is true; nothing is certain, nothing stays the same for long. Hence Douglas Adams’ immortal catchphrase may prove very useful here… Standard Cynefin asserts that the appropriate tactic here would always be ‘act > sense > respond‘, to push us into another domain as quickly as possible: but that kind of panic-response may well lose us the information that we most need. Often the best advice here is the exact opposite of that: “Don’t just do something – stand there!”

Find the still-point, ‘the calm at the centre of the storm’. Every tradition asserts that there is such a still-point; every tradition also admits that finding that still-point ain’t easy… Hence the importance of practice, practice, more practice, and yet more practice. Which brings us to…

Repetition. In the Complicated domain, doing the same thing and expecting it to come up with different results is considered crazy; but in the Chaotic domain, it’s one of the few tactics that really helps. In a truly chaotic context, doing the same thing will always lead to different results: so here, repeating the same thing over and over provides us at least with something that will remain the same each time. That kind of repetition may technically be subjective, but it’s about the closest that we can have to scientific-style ‘controls’ here. Repetition works.

Use principles as a focus. Principles provide a stable point of reference amidst the chaos. In the business-context, this is the vision and values of the organisation. (By which I mean ‘vision’ in the ISO-9000 sense, as a stable anchor for the quality-system – not the flaccid marketing-puff that’s usually passed off as ‘our vision’, and about which Dave rightly complains.) “When in doubt, go back to first-principles”: that will help a lot here.

Allow serendipity. In the seminar, Dave describes abductive reasoning as “the logic of hunches”, a bringing-together of “seemingly unrelated items”. In the Chaotic domain, it becomes clear that everything is related in some ways to everything else: the patterns that we find there – and that we then evaluate via abductive reasoning in the Complex domain, as Dave describes – are actually little more than our choices, about connections that we choose to perceive between ‘seemingly unrelated items’. But we first need to create space for those ‘unrelated items’ to arise in the first place. In his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes this as ‘fishing for facts’; and likewise William Beveridge includes chapters on the role of chance, the use of intuition, and the hazards and limitations of reason, in his equally classic The Art of Scientific Investigation. Yet to quote Louis Pasteur, “chance favours the prepared mind“: in the Chaotic domain we create space for the unexpected to happen, yet prepare the space with principles, with repetition, and ‘the calm amidst the storm’. But there’s also one other essential instruction…

Listen. Probably the single most important advice for any consultant – and for any salesperson, for that matter. Stop. Don’t talk. Just listen. “Nature abhors a vacuum”: if you provide a ‘still-point’, a quiet calm, you may be surprised at what comes in to fill in the empty space. And very useful, too. Create the space. Listen. That’s almost all we need to know about working in the Chaotic domain.

To conclude…

My apologies that this has been such a long post: I hope it’s been worthwhile for you. But I guess what it comes down to is this:

Dave’s view of Cynefin is, as he puts it, “built from a science based position”. The advantage is that it is rigorous, largely context-independent, and firmly grounded in current cognitive research. The disadvantage is that, almost by definition, it can provide no real guidance on how to operate in the Chaotic domain.

My view of Cynefin is based in methodology-practice rather than formal scientific theory, and focusses more on individual difference and individual skill. The disadvantage is that it is less rigorous, and often highly context-dependent, hence arguably less reliable in the Complicated domain, and perhaps the Complex domain too. The advantage is that it does provide consistent means to operate in all domains, including the Chaotic domain – and hence can provide more options and opportunities in the overall Cynefin ‘solution-space’.

Which approach is best? I would argue that it depends what you want to do: hence neither and both, really. But I hope this exploration helps in the choice of how to move around within the Cynefin solution-space, and that it provides some useful suggestions about other ways to use the real power of Cynefin.

Over to you for comments and suggestions, if you would?

First, as per his comment on that post, Kent Bye has assembled on Flickr an excellent collection of more than 90 descriptive graphics about Spiral: see http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbye/sets/72157622255211051/ . A valuable resource for anyone interested in Spiral: strongly recommended.

Second, I probably need to emphasise a bit more a perhaps subtle distinction between awareness of the Other – as represented by Spiral layers as ‘distance from Self’ – versus responsibility toward the Other. If we’re not aware of the Other, we necessarily have limited ‘response-ability’ toward that Other because we’re not aware of it. Likewise there’s a crucial distinction between unawareness and deliberate indifference – simple ignorance versus a literal ‘ignore-ance’ of the Other and its needs – because in the first case there is no ‘response-ability’, whereas in the second there’s a deliberate refusal to enact ones known mutual responsibilities with the Other (passive dysfunctionality in relationship, otherwise known as ‘abuse’).

To give a direct business example, consider the mutual responsibilities implied in ‘corporate social responsibility’. In classic Friedman terms – “the business of business is business” – a corporation is an ‘artificial person’ and therefore has no responsibilities outside of profit-making: the consequences of such profit-making are, to use Douglas Adams’ phrase, made invisible by assigning them as ‘Somebody’s Else’s Problem’. In this view, there is no ‘Other’ beyond the corporation and its owners: the corporation is the enterprise, the enterprise is the corporation. Yet in order for the profit to be created, there need to be transactions, and a market in which those transactions occur: here, by definition, the enterprise must extend beyond the corporation, hence the Other must exist, and be acknowledged to exist, otherwise the corporation could only make its purported profit by cannibalizing on itself (not that that’s an unusual circumstance in business, of course…). So the Friedman model implies a classic game of ‘have your cake and eat it’: the corporation acts as if there are responsibilities to itself from the Other, but none of itself to the Other.

The relation itself can be highly asymmetric in responsibilities – as it is in functional variants of Spiral ‘Red’, for example, such as the trusted team-leader or platoon-leader – but as long as the responsibilities are mutual and do balance overall, the system will still work. (Spiral ‘Purple’ tribal, ‘Red’ great-leader or ‘Blue’ priest-led models are often essential where there’s a natural asymmetry of decision-making capabilities – hence ‘response-abilities’ – between the leader(s) and the bulk of the group.) But trust will fade and fail when that mutuality of responsibilities is not respected, in either or both directions. There’s usually more tolerance when the failure of responsibility arises from a true lack of awareness; but when the lack of awareness is feigned, or the mutuality deliberately ignored, expect there to be trouble, followed by rapid loss of trust. And from a business perspective, if trust fails, the transactions will also falter and fail – and likewise the profits. Hence one quick way to understand the current ‘Global Financial Crisis’ is that its root-cause has been a betrayal of trust on a massive scale. Another topic for another time, I suspect, but in the meantime, using Spiral as a means for architects to model value-sets, ‘distance from Self’ and mutuality of responsibilities seems like a useful way to go.

Probably not relevant to IT-architecture, but likely to be of interest to business-architects and others. Click on the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway.

Been having some great conversations over the past few weeks with Michael Smith, a human-context consultant mainly working with government and health organizations in Central America. Main recent topic of discussion has been about rethinking Spiral Dynamics – he’d been at a conference on Spiral in Santa Barbara, CA.

The original work on value-systems that underpins Spiral was done by Clare Graves (no relation) way back in the 1950s, and in the 1990s was extended and rebranded (and, arguably, ‘dumbed-down’ in some ways) by Don Beck and Chris Cowan as ‘Spiral Dynamics‘. In essence, the framework divides value-systems into a set of eight (and possibly more) main clusters or ‘vMemes’, usually labelled by colour, but which we could also describe in terms of perception of ‘rights’:

1. Beige (‘SurvivalSense’): there is no society, everything is focused on the individual need to survive
2. Purple (‘KinSpirits’): we band together as a family to help each other survive – the family/tribe is right (often matriarchal)
3. Red (‘PowerGods’): there is a Great Leader of the tribe, and the leader alone is right (extreme monarchy, often translated in combat etc as ‘might is right’)
4. Blue (‘TruthForce’): there is a Law that is greater than any one person, and that Law alone is right (e.g. theocracy, fascism)
5. Orange (‘StriveDrive’): there is individual ‘freedom’, individual ‘rights’
6. Green (‘HumanBond’): specific groupings have collective ‘human rights’, freedom must be constrained for the greater need
7. Yellow (‘FlexFlow’): the individual is responsible – there is no ‘other’, the only choice that works is ‘win/win’
8. Turquoise (‘GlobalView’): we are collectively responsible for everything

The ‘Spiral’ bit is that these seem to form a kind of linear progression, each value-system building on those before, much like in child-development; and the pattern sort-of repeats, in that ‘Yellow’ is a kind of system-oriented version of self-only ‘Beige’, ‘Turquoise’ a systemic version of familial ‘Purple’, and so on. There’s also a back-and-forth between individual (Beige, Red, Orange, Yellow) and collective (Purple, Blue, Green, Turquoise).

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the ‘linear progression’ concept in Spiral, as it’s wide-open to ‘cultural imperialist’ misuse – as exemplified particularly by the odious Ken Wilber and the followers of his mangled notions of ‘Integral‘-whatever. In that view, ‘higher’ positions on the spiral are deemed to be ‘better’, supposedly leading to some gloriously inevitable future apotheosis of society – a ‘spiritual’ variant of the old Marxist delusion of ‘historical determinism’, with the very worst of US capitalism and materialism portrayed as inherently ‘better’ than anything before. Instead, I’d viewed the Spiral value-systems more as a set of sliders on a mixing-desk, each value-set coming less or more to the fore as personal and societal conditions change, without any specific ‘linearity’ to it as such.

What’s intrigued me for some years now is the idea that the Spiral value-systems could perhaps be even better understood not as a linear spiral or a ‘mixing-desk’ (with each value-system distinct from the others), but as natural nodes within a bounded dimensional space. If the dimensions were primarily binary – a sharply-cut spectrum between two diametrically-opposed extremes – each major shift from one value-system to the next could resemble a Gray Code transition, in which one dimension would be changed whilst the values for the others would remain much the same. One clear example of that kind of dimension is the ‘individual vs collective’ distinction from Beige (individual) to Purple (collective) to Red (individual) to Blue (collective), and so on.

I’ve spent a long time trying to identify the right dimensions, and what the Gray-Code shifts would be, since clearly something like it does happen in early-years child-development – particularly the toddler’s transition into and (one hopes!) out of the dreaded ‘Terrible Twos’. The previous post on ‘Dimensions of a Spiral’, a few months back, summarises where I’d gotten to in that exploration by then.

What came up in the discussions with Michael Smith was the centrality of mutual responsibility, in relation to a kind of dimension of relatedness – in effect, ‘distance from Self’ – that describes where the boundary between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ (‘Them’, the Other) is drawn. We can then cross-map Spiral with that dimension of ‘distance-from-Self’:

1. Beige: all is ‘I’, there is no Other – there is only self
2. Purple: ‘We’ – ‘my family’, typically the family unit or extended-family, close-friends, or, in a work-context, the immediate work-team
3. Red: ‘my Tribe’, the people I know personally – self-referential ‘people who relate to me’, typically the scale of a village, or, in a work-context, the business-unit
4. Blue: extended-’Us’, the people of whom I have some actual or potential personal contact – ‘those who follow the same rules as us’, typically the scale of a town to a small region or city-state, or, in a work-context, the organisation; also religious affiliation
5. Orange: ‘my People’, an abstract grouping of ‘extended-Us’ with whom I acknowledge affinity – self-referential ‘all people like me’, typically those of the same nation, language or way-of-thinking, or, in a work-context, the corporation or the industry
6. Green: ‘all of Us’, often with a somewhat fluid boundary between ‘Us’ (people) and ‘Them’ (not-people) – in principle (if often not in practice) the whole human world
7. Yellow: ‘my World’ – self-referential connection with ecosystem – typically bounded by present-time or near to present time
8. Turquoise: ‘the World’ – engagement in / connection with entire ecosystem, without any specific centre – also typically bounded by near-present time
9. (‘Coral’ and other theorical Spiral layers: variations on interaction with timelessness and/or infinity)

If we think in terms of awareness of ‘the Other’ at each distance, we perhaps can view each of these as mixing-desk sliders. A small child, for example, is at first simply unaware of anything beyond self (Beige) and, slightly later, family (Purple). And intriguingly, many tribal cultures would have little awareness of any human contact beyond the ‘my Tribe’ (Red) distance, but probably would have strong awareness of and connection with the beyond-human ‘my World’ (Yellow) and ‘the World’ (Turquoise) distance, because skill as a hunter within a fragile ecosystem will depend strongly on that engagement and empathy with ‘the Other’ – a good example of where so-called ‘primitive’ cultures are necessarily more ‘advanced’ (in linear Spiral terms) than ‘developed’ ones.

Note that in that tribal example it’s not a simple linear progression: there is strong awareness both of ‘close to Self’ and ‘far from Self’, but actually not much in the middle-distance that is more typical of ‘civilised’ – literally ‘city-based’ – cultures. In effect, the apparent linear progression of Spiral is actually an artefact, a side-effect of increasing ‘distance-from-Self’. Hence none of the Spiral layers are inherently ‘better’ than any other: all that the layering means is that – exactly as we would expect – the ability to make finer-grained distinctions at increasing distance-from-Self enables a greater range of possibilities, of choices for action and interaction.

A crucial sub-theme here – and perhaps an example of a near-binary parameter across the ‘distance-from-Self’ axis – is the extent to which there is a perceived alignment with ‘the Other’ (included as ‘We’ or ‘Us’) or separation from ‘the Other’ (excluded as ‘Them’, not-’Us’). This parameter is variable, as can be seen in some examples:

• in war, the ‘enemy’-group  is almost invariably (re-)described as ‘not-human’, an extreme of ‘the Other’ – in effect, artificially increasing the ‘distance from Self’
  • (note that any ‘not-I’ may be viewed as ‘the enemy’ to be distanced here, from ‘my Family’ outwards; likewise even the Self may be treated as the ‘enemy’ – as may be seen even in simple everyday psychological issues such as procrastination or ‘if-only’ self-blame, offloading responsibility respectively to ‘self-in-the-future’ or ‘self-in-the-past’ to avoid responsibility of ‘self-in-the-present’)
• in peacemaking and arbitration, the former ‘enemy’ is explicitly redescribed as ‘human’ again, often using artificially ‘closer’ terms such as ‘our brothers’ or ‘our greater family’
• in many forms of meditation, the sense of separation between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ is explicitly and intentionally suppressed
• in Deep Ecology, the sense of separation between human and non-human is intentionally suppressed – “aims to avoid merely anthropocentric environmentalism … core principle is the claim that, like humanity, the living environment as a whole has the same right to live and flourish”

Next, we need to return to that theme of responsibility. We can view this as mutual and bidirectional at every layer:

• responsibility of Self to the Other
• responsibility from the Other to Self
• responsibility of one layer of Other to another

There are nuances to these mutual responsibilities that we could regard as dimensions in their own right:

• balance or imbalance (disparity) in mutuality – i.e. where responsibilities are not reciprocated
• difference between expectations of responsibility versus actual delivery of responsibility
• variances in capability – i.e. ‘response-ability’

The balance/imbalance dimension maps directly to the scores of dysfunctional versus functional used in the SEMPER diagnostic, which also has some relationship to distance-from-Self:

1. actively dysfunctional – prop Self up by putting Other down (or, in ‘lose/win’, prop Other up by putting Self down) – typical of dysfunctional Red
2. passively dysfunctional – evade responsibility to Other (or, in ‘lose/win’, take on inappropriate responsibility from Other) – typical of dysfunctional Blue and Orange
3. rule-based ‘best practice’ – typical of functional Blue
4. organisation supports individual difference – characteristic of functional Orange and Green
5. individual wholeness-responsibility – systemic awareness – characteristic of Yellow or Turquoise

There’s also an interesting cross-map between Spiral and the Cynefin domains:

• Beige, Purple: there is no certainty – Cynefin Disorder domain, “the state of not knowing what type of causality exists”
• Red: individual ‘great leader’ takes control – Cynefin Chaotic domain
• Blue: pre-ordained rules apply to everyone and everything – Cynefin Simple domain
• Orange: deeper analysis is required – Cynefin Complicated domain
• Green: identify and act on emergent patterns – Cynefin Complex domain
• Yellow, Turquoise: everything is also unique – Cynefin Chaotic domain, also active engagement in Cynefin Disorder domain

Bringing all these themes together provides us with something that can handle a much richer, more nuanced view of value-systems than basic Spiral. For example:

• Beige: no-rules, no-one responsible to/for me, I am responsble to no-one
• Purple: no-rules, family responsible for me, I am responsible to/for family
• Red (functional: chieftain): leader holds rules for all, leader is responsible to all, all are responsible to leader
• Red (dysfunctional: tyrant / ‘terrible-twos’ child): I possess the rules, I am responsible for no-one, all others are responsible to me
• Red/Purple variant (dysfunctional: royalty/aristocracy): single family possess the rules, family is responsible for no-one, all are responsible to the family
• Red/Blue variant (dysfunctional: ‘great leader’ fascist): nation possesses the rules, nation is responsible for no-one, all are responsible to the nation
• Blue (nominally-functional: ‘the Law’): rules possessed by entity beyond the nation / beyond knowable-human, entity responsible for no-one (though prayed to?!), all are responsible to the rules
• Blue/red variant (dysfunctional theocracy): rules from beyond-human entity are possessed by priesthood, priesthood responsible to no-one, all are responsible to priesthood
  • (common Blue theme: ‘responsble to’ = ‘blamed for’)
• Orange (nominally-functional: democracy): rules are possessed by nation, nation responsible to self, self responsible to nation
• Orange/red variant (dysfunctional: US-style ‘libertarian’, ‘kiddies’ anarchy’): rules are possessed by nation, nation responsible to self, self responsible to no-one
  • (dysfunctional Orange/Blue view of environment: I have “dominion” over environment, environment is responsible to Self, Self has no responsibility to environment)
• Green: rules possessed by other-than-self (many variants), other may or may not be responsible to self, self responsible to other
  • (common Green theme: ‘responsible to’ = ‘blamed for’)
• Yellow: no-rules / no-possession, self has personal ‘wholeness-responsibility’ to/for/with other; complex/emergent reality
• Turquoise: no-rules/no-possession, self as member of collective(s), collective has responsibility to/for/with other; complex/emergent reality
• Coral: pure no-rules; interactive ‘response-ability’; chaotic / infinite-complexity reality

Will continue working on this till I can clean it up to something that’s more immediately usable. But to me at least it’s clear that the standard Spiral layering is best seen not as stages, nor as individual sliders, but zones or emphases within a space bounded primarily by dimensions of relationship-with-other and responsibility-to/for-other.

Hope all of this is useful to someone, anyway.

The basic idea in Spiral is that individuals can be categorised in terms of a sequence of distinct layered structures of values, each layer building on the next. (A key component in Graves’ work, which is kind of glossed over in Spiral, is that the same is also true for whole cultures: people experience great difficulty when their own personal value-set is significantly different from the culture’s, as indicated in my own case in the previous post on ‘the natural anarchist‘.) The one-line summary for each colour-coded vMeme value-set is as follows:

1. Beige: there is no society, everything is focused on the individual need to survive
2. Purple: we band together as a family to help each other survive – the family/tribe is right (often matriarchal)
3. Red: there is a Great Leader of the tribe, and the leader alone is right (extreme monarchy, often translated in combat etc as ‘might is right’)
4. Blue: there is a Law that is greater than any one person, and that Law alone is right (e.g. theocracy)
5. Orange: there is individual ‘freedom’, individual ‘rights’
6. Green: specific groupings have collective ‘human rights’, freedom must be constrained for the greater need
7. Yellow: the individual is responsible – there is no ‘other’, the only choice that works is ‘win/win’
8. Turquoise: we are collectively responsible for everything
9. Coral: I live connection with everything

The ‘spiral’ kind-of repeats itself after six layers: Yellow echoes Beige, Turquoise echoes Purple and so on, but with a systemic awareness that’s absent from the ‘lower’ layers. In principle there ‘should be’ another three layers at least, but Graves said that Coral was extremely rare – he only came across a handful of people with that value-set in his entire career – so they remain a theoretical concept only; but the descriptions of the rest are solidly grounded in several decades’-worth of social-science research.

The Spiral crew – aided by by the odious Ken Wilber, whose pompous pronouncements I was supposed to regard as gospel on the Futures Studies course back in Melbourne in 2003 or thereabouts – seem to think that the layers represent a linear progression: “Spiral Dynamics reveals the hidden complexity codes that shape human nature, create global diversities, and drive evolutionary change”, says one gushing proponent. For these folks, Spiral is more like a milliennial religion – which fits well with the ethos of that culture, I guess. But whilst I would agree there’s some parallel with child development and the like, the work I did with Mary Sheridan a third of a century ago (ouch…) suggests strongly that it’d be better to think more in terms of dimensions – like sliders on a mixing-desk – rather than a crude layered hierarchy. Which in turn suggests it’d be interesting to identify those dimensions.

One dimension is obvious even to the Spiral crew: the tension between individual versus collective (represented respectively by the ‘warm colours’ – beige, red, orange, yellow, coral – and the ‘cool colours’ – purple, blue, green, turquoise).

Another dimension, or possibly a pair, is suggested by a cross-map with Cynefin. The transitions from each individual/collective pair – the ‘to’ between each of beige/purple to red/blue to orange/green to yellow/turquoise to coral – map pretty closely to Cynefin’s domains rule-based, analytic, hueristic and principle-based; a cross-map from there – rule-based = ‘inner/truth’, analytic = ‘outer/truth’, heuristic = ‘outer/value, principle-based = ‘inner/value’ – suggest that the inner versus outer and ‘truth’ versus ‘value’ tensions would match well.

Somewhere in there the systems-awareness arrives, because that’s the key difference both in terms of the ‘spiral’ repetition, but also in the transition from Green to Yellow – Orange is always looking for some ‘other’ to ‘win’ from in a win/lose ‘game’, and Green is still looking for some ‘other’ to blame, but Yellow and Turquoise recognise that there is no ‘other’, there’s only ‘us’. So the key tension that is see there is one of ‘rights’ versus responsibilities: everywhere before Yellow there’s an endless assertion of some form of ‘right’ – survival is right, family is right, the ruler is right, the Law is right, individual rights, human rights; from Yellow on there’s an awareness that ‘rights’ are a delusion, only responsibilities are real.

And another, perhaps more subtle dimension – maybe even a pair of them, though I can’t quite grasp it yet – is around the notion of rules/ruler/ruled versus non-rule – literally ‘an-archy’, without rule. Beige is a literal anarchy: there is no possibility of rule, there is only survival. Red and Blue are both about as rule-based as it gets: one individual, the other collective. Then we have the ‘kiddies’ anarchy’ of Orange – ‘rights’ without responsibilities – or Green’s obsession with ‘other-blame, which amounts to much the same thing. Then we loop back to functional anarchy – responsibility-based anarchy, the awareness of the the context-dependent limitations of rules – which is individual at Yellow and collective (e.g. Quaker-style) at Turquoise.

That’s where the ideas have come to at present: not final, by any stretch, yet enough to be clear that Spiral ain’t the simple linear-hierarchy progression that they make it out to be, but more a tension across multiple dimensions

I hope that helps, Shawn?

The literal translation is ‘one who accepts no ruler’, but it’s not quite as simple as that. There are two radically different forms, at opposite ends of a spectrum: one insists on ‘rights’ without responsibilities – what I call ‘kiddies’ anarchy’ – the other on responsibilities alone (because there are no ‘rights’ – in essence, so-called ‘rights’ are a self-centred delusion), as typified by principle-based anarchist groupings such as the Quakers.

I suppose what makes me a natural anarchist – preferably of the latter kind – is that I don’t belong. I’ve never been able to ‘belong’ to anything: a perpetual Outsider. Which, to say the least, is not a comfortable place to be, but it seems to be who I am. Oh well.

I don’t belong to any company: I’ve never been an employee, I’ve only ever been a contractor, a consultant, or an independent business ‘owner’. I don’t belong to any specific discipline, either: I’ve not so much had a career as careered. Which means that I’m good at linking across businesses and domains and skillsets – the quintessential generalist – but it again means that I never settle anywhere.

I don’t really ‘belong’ to any place, any country. I have dual citizenship, for a start (British and Australian); I’ve now lived (vaguely inhabited?) on three separate continents; and (despite that Australian anthem “I still call Australia home” etc), I’ve never felt anywhere to be ‘home’, the place where I belong.

Same with ideas and theories. I would agree strongly with Paul Feyerabend‘s dictum that in science “the only approach which does not inhibit progress (using whichever definition one sees fit) is ‘anything goes’”. Like Isaac Newton (though I hope without quite his level of vituperative irascibility!) I’ve probably written and published more on ‘alternative realities‘ than I have on anything else: as a author and theorist, I’m almost certainly better known as a writer on dowsing and related subjects than I am on my current main field of the architecture of the whole enterprise. Busy adapting some of that material right now for mainstream archaeology: as with the idea of ‘Slow Science’ (and yes, I need to find out more about that), it seems they’re at last starting to grasp the importance of balancing the objective analysis with the subjective ‘experiencing’ – I have a joint paper on that coming up in the next issue of the archaeology journal Time & Mind, for example.

And same is true at a social level:I don’t belong to any defined group. I’ve been an occasional member of some society, or a cluster of people playing folk-music, perhaps, but that’s about it. After a fairly short time the internal politics and the narrow focus begin to pall: it’s time to move on. Again. Always moving on. (Might explain why I’m endlessly moving-on on mywould-be holidays, I guess: can’t seem to settle anywhere. Oh well.)

And it’s also true at a personal level. It’s a painful fact that I share almost nothing with my parental family other than accident of birth: again, I don’t feel I belong, and never have – I’ve wanted to, for as long as I can remember, but that feeling was never there. Not excluded, as such; just no way for the ‘in‘ of ‘included’. A quiet absence of connection, rather than its active rejection, I guess: a nothingness. Same also applies to the direct personal side: I have no family of my own, and despite variously-unsuccessful attempts over the decades, I’ve now lived alone for almost three-quarters of my adult life – and as I approach my sixties, I see less and less chance or, now, even hope, that that would change. In an all too literal sense, out of touch with the rest of the human race. Again, it’s not an active absence, an active rejection, as I know it is for some others: it’s more like a subtly-closed door, a fog which prevents any way through, leaving me always as the Outsider, watching from beyond. That so-accurate Welsh term hiraedd describes it so well – “a longing and a grieving for that which is not, has never been and shall never be”. The loneliness – an all too literal ‘aloneness’ – never really stops hurting: it does fade into the background most of the time, fortunately, but it never actually ceases to make its presence felt. Gives me a better overview than most people have, I suppose – but that’s about the only ‘advantage’ that can be said for it. Hey ho.

Anarchist by nature. It’s who I am, I guess. My apologies to all, then, for being who I am.