The Top 10 Principles of Spiral Dynamics

Originally Submitted on 6/5/99.

I couldn't resist posting this material as it has been invaluable to me in understanding and in becoming more aware of why people don't, won't and can't change easily. Personally and in organizations we fight underlying currents of complexity and increasing turbulence, but this simple framework--although enormously complex--provides many of the secret answers to most of the world's perplexing social and organizational problems. Please visit the website http://www.spiraldynamics.com/textindex.htm for more information. Thanks to Don Beck and Chris Cowan for continuing Dr. Clare Graves elegant biopsychosocial work!

1. People value different things because they think in different ways. They think in different ways because the mixes of vMEMEs in their brains are different.

2. Different organizations -- companies and governments -- occupy different positions on the Spiral and need to develop managerial/governance strategies that match their people, their visions of the future, and the jobs they perform today.

3. Managers should develop a consistent and systemic approach to all the issues within the organizational loop -- recruitment, selection, placement, training, internal management, and external marketing -- so they all align, integrate, and synergize.

4. Organizations should be constructed from both "the top down" and "the bottom up" to link the functions, intelligences, and decision structures that the more complex new problems ahead will demand.

5. Successful organizations are in danger of failing if they continue to manage people in the ways that made them successful in the first place.

6. Many people need to be managed quite differently today because they have moved on the Spiral even further and faster than most of their bosses, teachers, and even parents.

7. Marketing strategies often fail because the designers use their "marketing mirrors" and assume the audiences they are attempting to reach share the same values systems they do.

8. The question is not "how do you motivate people?" but how do you relate what you are doing to their natural motivational flows. A person has a right to be who he or she is.

9. The present issues with productivity, quality, political instability, and restructuring are signs of growth and not decay which will force us to find new and innovative ways to manage people based on who they have now become.

10. Since people who learn in different ways form different kinds of teachers, the task of education is to match learners, instructors, learning situations, and technologies designed for fit, function, and flow.

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