Spiral Dynamics discussion live

[grundomatic]

Bicycle7 and I are going to do a video call to talk about Spiral Dynamics, since they just finished the book. We are opening it up for others to join, just message to get a link. I will probably post some discussion questions as I do for the MMG, just to help keep things moving in case discussion stalls out. Others are welcome to suggest discussion questions.

Time: Monday, Jan 22nd, 10AM MST (5PM UTC)

[berrytwo]

I'll be there

[jacob]

I'll join, pls send link. It's been a while since I read [the book]. I'm interested in anecdotal/practical applications.

[grundomatic]

Some discussion questions, no particular order:

1. Has it been your personal experience that you "developed" along the spiral? Can you identify events that precipitated a change, or was it gradual?

2. What impact does knowing the model of SD have on one's own personal development?

3. How do you use SD in everyday life?

4. What do you like about the framework? What objections do you have?

That should get us started, and/or we can take it in whatever direction people want to go once we are live. Feel free to suggest other discussion questions.

[Lemur]

PM sent

[grundomatic]

I checked out the ebook again yesterday to peruse before our discussion. A bolded section on pg 57 stood out to me, comparing the individual/warm colors to the communal/cool colors. A reproduction:

Individual/Elite Pole
Take charge, make changes, move against nature, control the external world, rely on the power of the self
Task: Explore the outside
Locus of control: Inside

Communal/Collective Pole
Accept the inevitable, live within nature's constraints, focus on coming to peace with who one is, seek authority from the outside
Task: Fix the inside
Locus of control: Outside

Anyone that knows the model understands the locus of control part, what struck me was the "task" part. I think sometimes the cool colors get short shrift for being lemmings or ineffective or whatnot, but understanding that their primary task is internal helps explain why they are happy to relinquish control to the group. If one feels broken and is trying to put themselves together, it makes sense that they would just want a group that accepts, listens to, and validates them. If one has destroyed their life with overt selfishness and is trying to make things right, it makes sense they would look for all the answers in a group that seems to have it together and offers salvation.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Interesting point about the individual/collectivist poles. One thing that stands out to me about spiral dynamics is that it captures this constant tension between how the external world defines you, and how you define yourself. Contemporary culture is pretty much entirely seeped in the Kegan3/blue transition to Kegan4/orange that it can be difficult to see that yellow/turquoise/Kegan5 is actually more about the dialectic between these poles and the process of creation.

This is where the discussion of language mediating reality comes up because, at higher levels, one starts to see how the social world creates intersubjective reality through language, and then we use language to describe ourselves, which keeps us tied to the rest of the social world, which is what's creating our experience. It's why other forms of knowing (physical, meditation, mindfulness, whatever) can be important to tap into at higher levels to realize how language (and therefore the broader social world) have been overdetermining one's experience.

For example, if I write "go to the store to buy milk" on my to do list, this presumes that stores are a thing that exist, that money exists, that cow's milk is something I am going to drink, etc. This might even create certain identities for myself through language that I otherwise would never have. Perhaps I am a former grocery store employee, I am lactose intolerant, etc. Things like groceries stores or drinking cow's milk only exist because the culture collectively made them exist--certainly there are many other places in the world where neither of these things exist socially--such that even if I decide not to drink milk or buy food in the store, the fact I've made choices not to partake in those things still necessarily implies the existence of those things, which means they are still a part of my internal and external landscape, thus part of my experience and who I am. Alternatively, focusing more on purely physical experience (beige?) or consciously picking the story I tell about grocery stores ('this is a terrible way to get food' or 'isn't it incredible how much I have access to here') starts to dramatically change how I experience the task. This is the real power of yellow/turquoise if you can master it: you can start to really pick the way you operate in everyday life (which, perhaps paradoxically, also requires total surrender to whatever experience you're also having in the moment).

Of course, you can get ridiculously deconstructive with this, which is not really useful, but realizing these sort of conceptual stories created through intersubjective understanding/language are an inescapable part of being human is what it took for me personally to start moving out of the individual axis and more toward the collective axis/yellow/turquoise.

[grundomatic]

Well, in my enthusiasm to see everyone and get started, I forgot to assign a note-taker. The discussion was mostly guided by the posted questions.

One theme that came up a lot was the difficulty of communicating across colors, and how even being able to take someone else's perspective and talk to them can be lonely. You understand them, but they don't really understand you.

Another great point was that if someone intentionally "levels up", they are just welcomed to a new set of more difficult/complex problems.

Anyone else feel free to post their favorite takeaways from the meeting.

There was interest in a future meeting,

[grundomatic]

One member shared this website: https://effectivecollective.net/teal-resources/, which cites Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations.

I have a copy of that book in my pile. Reading and discussing it might be a natural extension of today's conversation.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Thanks for hosting this. It was a great discussion.

I'd definitely be interested in some followup discussions or book clubs where we read and discuss material for specific levels of the spiral.

[AxelHeyst]

I'd like to propose 'surfing the rainbow' or 'rainbow ridin' as shorthand for when you inhabit another vmeme for the purposes of communication, conflict resolution, or lulz.

I took a couple rando notes:

>Each of the colors has a use... you don't want to be green in a war zone.

>A common misperception/false stereotype of green is likely due to seeing redgreen, not green. (AKA the objectionable behavior is a result of unhealthy application of red patterns to poorly grasped green perspective, perhaps adopted due to social mileiu, and then weaponized at other people/society with dysfunctional results.)

>Reminder to all people who like models: remember that people contain multitudes. Don't confuse the map for the territory. Depth of knowledge of the models is one thing: skill and grace in executing the productive *use* of those models in our lives and societies is another. Don't forget to really listen and see people - take the filters off sometimes to spot check yourself.

>People interacting with people. People interacting with institutions/societies. Societies/institutions interacting with societies/institutions. (At various vmemes.)

I'm now motivated to read the book. Thanks all, and Grundo for organizing!

[Lemur]

@AxelHeyst

The memorable quote: “The higher your vibe, the smaller your tribe.” Number of humans decreases with each increase in level.

Yellows quite often may feel lonely / frustrated with the lack of companions and being misunderstood by the tier 1 colors. Similar to Wheaton levels where lower levels won’t be able to grok 2+ steps higher.

Definitely something to be learned and integrated from each color.

I had to put in a request for my library to order this book. Hopefully will receive in a few weeks. I’m interested in future discussions.

[7Wannabe5]

I'm sorry I couldn't join this discussion. I'm reading Ken Wilber's "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution" and it has me, once again, wondering about the overlap or integration of all these somewhat different models of developmental psychology. I'm also reading "Spiral Dynamics in Action" by Beck. One of the interesting things about Spiral Dynamics is that it evolved from somewhat unexpected results in Clare Graves' research project. He collected conceptualizations from thousands of humans asked to complete thoughts such as:

Healthy people are...
People who are mature are...
People who have it together are...

Graves tried to map the data he collected to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which he had studied along with other similar models, but found that it didn't "fit", largely because many humans held more "self-sacrificial" belief/value structures than the more individualistic or "expressive" model of Maslow could encompass. "He (Graves) strongly believed that a healthy personality in action that was not based on individual personal needs was at play beyond the Maslow self-actualization level."

A fairly obvious thought I had (likely derived from my current occupation which finds me "pushing" students from age 6 to early adulthood up the math ladder which is so congruent with Michael Commons' MHC (Model of Hierarchal Complexity)) is that humans/societies currently in Cool levels of the spiral are largely concerning themselves with hauling other humans up the ladder. IOW, at each Warm level you are first "putting on your own oxygen mask" and then at the next Cool level, you are doing the second implied task of helping others.

Wilber quotes Habermas at length outlining a phylogenetic needs hierarchy. The main takeaway is that with each transition, as old problems are solved new problems are created, and these new problems can be well associated with new forms of scarce resources:

Purple: Scarce resource = Power over nature.
Red: Scarce resource = Social security.
Blue: Scarce resource= Legal security.
Orange: Scarce resource = Value.
Green: Scarce resource = Motivation/Meaning.

So, a question might be what scarce resource is being created at Yellow as it attempts to "fix" the scarcity of motivation/meaning at Green? The semi-ironic thing is that those humans at Green who are not experiencing a scarcity of meaning/motivation are likely engaged in helping others obtain the Value resources at Orange which they have rejected for themselves. Thus, an anti-careerist such as myself will often find herself selling math as a skill necessary to "find a well paying job." One context in which this was not the case was many years ago when I was the Math Tutor/Resource for a highly liberal "school" for home-schooled kids who were granted the freedom to choose their own curriculum.

Actually, it seems to me that Yellow is concerned with individuals revitalizing Motivation/Meaning for themselves, and those few humans at Turquoise are more like gurus concerned with revitalizing Motivation/Meaning for others.

[jacob]

Also recommended are the 2+ hr overviews of each color from Actualized.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3hNosy ... NrvLte92kN

Also reminder: Individuals do not develop along the spiral. The spiral describes societal evolution, not individual. However, a given societal color requires individuals to reach a certain maturity (Kegan and Cook-Greuter). Otherwise it won't work(*). People are born into a society with a given color (or two) and trained on the values of that color and up to the maturity level of that color. To exceed one's "childhood nurture" one can relocate into a different environment. Again, this does not have to be done in order because [that] society already did it order. If the gap between where one individually is and where society is is large, it will be much harder though due to all the little things one never learned from the more "primitive" perspective.

(For example, growing up the sticks and believing in things like "my family, right or wrong" or that "the spirit of my dead brother appeared to me as a lone butterfly"---yes, there are people in the US who sincerely believe this---but leaving for the big city and going to college with the likely outcome of installing Orange if STEM and Green if humanities. Such an individual does not need to first explore Red tribal/gang warfare or barfights, followed by Red/Blue crusades, followed by going to Blue church. The spiral for an individual does not appear in order.)

(*) For example, Orange requires at least Cook-Greuter levels specialist or achiever. Green requires individualism. Yellow requires strategist. Turquoise requires construct awareness. Another way of putting it is that all warm Tier1 colors will work at Kegan2 and all cold Tier2 colors will work at Kegan3 with the caveat that Kegan4 is rather useful for Green. Whereas Yellow requires at least a solid Kegan4 and Turquoise demands Kegan5.

(The reason Green objects to SD as being colonialistic is due to the normative structure of spiral. It is perceived by Green as the western elites telling e.g. Red societies what kind of social/cultural measures are next as opposed to letting them have their own "unique and wonderful opinions").

[7Wannabe5]

The spiral for an individual does not appear in order.)

I think it could be argued that it does/would appear in order for children/youth in a society/setting composed largely of Tier 2 adults. For example, I agreed with a Master kindergarten teacher I worked with that the trend towards removing imaginative play from the school experience for the very young is harmful or at least counter-productive. For example, she ignored directive towards cultural-neutrality and engaged a classroom full of wide variety of immigrant children in a whole month of Leprechaun activities in March, and defintiely NOT because her thought was "These immigrant children must be indoctrinated into the right-minded mythology of a sterotypical Irish-American." , but from a recognition that the very young still inhabit a world filled with Magic. OTOH, I find it very difficult to "enforce" the concept of cardinal order on my 6 year old students who have not yet begun to leave the world of Magic behind, as they clearly ascribe animistic intention to even symbols such as numbers.

Another example would be that in the most Yellow school communities in the U.S., children are allowed to fight on the playground, because developmentally appropriate. In the least Yellow school communities in the U.S., children are threatened with mace if they fight.

[jacob]

... in a society/setting composed largely of Tier 2 adults.

These societies or even settings are exceptionally rare.

[grundomatic]

Also reminder: Individuals do not develop along the spiral.

The first discussion question was meant to see if the participants agreed with this statement. Nobody claimed that they had made waypoints at each color and color intersection. Indeed, almost everyone told a story of "I was raised in x, but ended up being more y after experience z". There was mention of institutions deliberately changing the vMeme of recruits.

The reason Green objects to SD...

I wondered aloud during the discussion what tier 1 vMemes are actually interested in or even "ok with" spiral dynamics. Green may object for the reason you mentioned, for blue, SD is not part of the sanctioned literature, the only thing I could come up with was Orange using it as a marketing manual.

[7Wannabe5]

These societies or even settings are exceptionally rare.

Absolutely. I was describing the policy at an elementary school located in one of the most educated neighborhoods within the most educated city in the U.S. vs. a middle school in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. ,where social security is a scarce resource. One phrase I've heard used fairly frequently in settings where Level Blue is somewhat ambitious is "home-training", as in "Why are you all acting up like that? I'm going to call your grandma and let her know that you are acting like somebody with no home-training." However, as Wilber notes in his similar cosmology, we all now live in the Modern connected world, so it is very much the case that even kids in the most rural backwaters or collapsed, crime-ridden city environments can sometimes bootstrap themselves beyond their communities. For instance, when I attended a very Blue/Orange high school, I would hide out in the library and read "Harper's" and plot my eventual escape Also, there always the born geniuses who shine out before their time. For instance, "Tristram Shandy" was written in 1759, but the voice is already almost post-modern, as the narrator humorously describes how the day of his conception could readily be calculated, because his father routinely only copulated with his mother on the same day he wound the clocks.

So, my take would be that it's maybe a little bit towards being politically correct to ascribe the levels of Spiral Dynamics only to societies. When one of my neighbors engaged me in conversation/diatribe along the lines of "Well, I know a lot of young guys who are ex-military, and they're not going to put up with any of those people coming up here.", I felt little compunction in designating him as Level Red individual.

[grundomatic]

1. Has it been your personal experience that you "developed" along the spiral? Can you identify events that precipitated a change, or was it gradual?

So maybe the question should have been:

How has the vMeme(s) you express changed throughout your life? What do you think caused the change? Was it a better understanding from yourself (wow, now I see the need for rules and regulations), or an adaptation to the environment (that was a lot of dirty looks from the hippies when I tried to talk about portfolio allocation)?