What do you make of Spiral Dynamics?

I think it really all depends on…

Instead, it’s a theory of how people frame the reality they experience—how people see their worlds, why they choose to do what they do from a set of distinct ‘logics’ and what others can do because of that diversity of systems. Spiral Dynamics seeks compassion and integration without dismissing differentiation.

From everything that’s on the website, this would seem to sum up the intent of what Spiral Dynamics is. The manager of the department that I recently started to work for uses Spiral Dynamics, in conjunction with Strengths Finder, in order to gain an understanding of his staff and how to get the best work done. He uses Strengths Finders to assess and leverage innate abilities, and Spiral Dynamics to level set cultural and business experience differences (blended team of business and IT folks) across the department. People post their colors and strengths, and they are used as tools to foster better collaboration.

I am too new to the department and have yet to have my colors done, but the last department I was in, I can say Strengths Finder transformed a few people’s lives by motivating them to go back to school or asking for different types of work assignments and learning opportunities.

As a sort of atheist Taoist I go from the guideline of

The way you can go is not the real way
The name you can say is not the real name
Heaven and earth begin in the nameless
Name is the mother of the ten thousand things

The more precise and complex a system trying to describe spirituality or spriritual growth is, the more likely it is that it is wrong, and the more likely it is that it will have explanations that just do not fit for you. This seems like a very complex system with very complex concepts.

In addition, I see a lot on that website that makes me sceptical.

First, The attempt to use scientific-sounding words (“emergent, cyclical, double-helix model of adult biopsychosocial systems development”, “waves or particles”) in a way where they obviously mean something else than in science is never convincing to me personally. It makes it sound like the person either 1) does not understand science, or 2) (more cynically) trusts that his customers/followers won’t, but will be interested in technobabble.

Note that there is, in my opinion, nothing wrong in saying that something is sort of like something else, as a metaphore, in an attempt to visualize. But visualizations and metaphorical comparisons need to be such that they immediately suggest intuitive understanding of what the original concept is like, and I do not thing “emergent, cyclical, double-helix model of adult biopsychosocial systems development” does that for anyone – neither a scientist or a layman. All it serves is trying to sound more complex than it is.

Second, I tend to think that any spiritual development system that tries to charge you for the development – in the form of “buy our stuff!” – is probably not worth it. There are free churches and free public libraries and the web, full of information. You do not need to pay for a system to be spriritual.

And third, this all seems to be centered around a person (“Dr Graves”) who apparently knows more about spirituality than anyone else. That to me is always a warning sign – I do not believe any sincere practitioner of true spirituality can think that any one person’s theory are The Way.

All that said, if it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid. If the approach appeals to you, go for it – but do not give them a lot of money before you have actually seen development, and if you at any point feel you are pressured for money or to give commitments you are not ready to give, leave.

In before @mattbrowne.
He seems to have some knowledge of this philosophy.

I consider all religion to be a defense against existential angst. If yet another one pops up, and it serves to divert people from the uncomfortable contemplation of the void, what makes it different?

In order to give a truly informed opinion, I would have to read the original work, but here is my impression from the Web site. Like @Janka I am put off by the technobabble. When I hear this type of language, I get the impression that someone is trying to put one over on me. I think the whole thing can be boiled down to saying that there are different styles of relating to the world and a person may use different styles at different times and may or may not tend to stick with one particular one. The site hints at what some of those color coded styles are. There could conceivably be a legitimate personality theory behind this, backed up by scientific evidence, but I am rather skeptical that this is the case.

As for Enlightened Sprituality, the site, to its credit, discourages the idea: “Spiral Dynamics is about how people think about things like religion, and how religiousness, spirituality, non-belief, etc., fit their conceptions of their worlds. It is not about beliefs, but thinking about beliefs—the whys and wherefores.”

@PandoraBoxx ‘s discussion of how this has been picked up by at least one corporation serves as another warning sign. Now along with motivational speakers, corporations can bring in color coding specialists to create one big happy family Blech! No offense, PB, you know what I think of corporate culture

Spiral Dynamics is terrible, horrifying drivel designed to make you buy more of it.

The idea was vaguely sound at its invention in the sixties, or at least it was a sound theory. Many, many, many studies have disproved it as just more psychological nonsense, but that didn’t stop two of the originator’s grad students from spinning SD out into a profit machine.

It is a loose, strange mixture of evolutionary theory and Western Occult Thought. The idea, roughly, is that humanity has evolved through half a dozen types of civilization, which SD helpfully color codes. These psychological states are easily identifiable in others, and knowing what “level” they are operating at can help you better understand how to address them.

The second tier (7, 8, etc) of these levels of thought is known, I kid you not, as “Spiral Wizardry”. Like most occult-esque literature, anyone actually reading the literature is assumed to be better/more unique/ one of the few minds powerful enough to understand and use this – by knowing about Spiral Dynamics you are yourself a Spiral Wizard, and therefore better than non-Wizards.

There are big warnings throughout the Spiral Dynamics literature that separating people’s psychologies into levels is not “racist” or “elitist”, which would be fine, except that later in the literature the higher levels of thought are explicitly called “better” and “more useful”. Even if it isn’t inherently racist and elitist (which I contend it is), it invites both of those thoughts pretty naturally.

The only time I ever saw some give a talk on Spiral Dynamics, it was an hour of buzzwords that lacked any sort of content beneath them.

From an article I wrote about that speaker:

The Speaker took the Kool-aid of some random management cult. Rather than drinking it, he saved it and let it fester out in the sun. He took it and a half dozen other Kool-Aid samples from other terrible late-80s New Age Guru Cults and neo-racist, poorly-covered-over eugenics movements, and mixed them all into a sort of “jungle juice”. He then took this “jungle juice” and reduced it in the bathtub still of madness, until it became a fine liqueur of meaningless multi-syllabic garbage. Apparently if one bakes the cake of English hot enough and long enough, all meaning and content will actually evaporate from the words.

Even if the literature is not inherently bad, I can tell you from personal experience that it attracts just the most inane types of folks.

If you are looking for self-empowerment, you’re better off reading The Artists Way or Getting Things Done.

Makes my head spin . . .

@thinkitover For those who didn’t catch it before removal, thinkitover posted a long diatribe about the work he has done, specifically self-promoting his book The Strategy of the Dolphin, a post which pretty much self-confirmed my earlier accusations against Spiral Dynamics.

Keep digging, @thinkitover, and keep using Marine Metaphors!

That’s kind of odd. It looks as though @thinkitover created his account just to respond to this question about Spiral Dynamics. Is there some kind of service that scours the web and reports back to you any time somebody mentions your name or product?

@Zuma, I think you can set up (Google Alerts?) to notify you when a phrase or link you’ve specified is used and cached. When @aphilotus returns, he can answer more thoroughly because he’s used the service.

@Zuma @Beta_Orionis Google Alerts will send you emails at your convenience (as-it-is-indexed or once-a-day or once-a-week) about any time a search term of your choosing would turn up a new video, blog, web page, news article, or google-group (IE, when someone makes a blog post that happens to contain your search terms).

I use it to keep track of anyone who mentions my website by checking on any new pages that contain the word “Ekistomancy”, it’s title and topic.

Clearly, @thinkitover has either alerts or a similar service, and keeps tabs all over the net!

@aphilotus That’s kind of creepy. Why did the moderators remove the post? I kind of wish they had left it since , whatever it was, it would have given us some insight into what they are about. Now we can only imagine the worst.

The first thing that strikes me about Spiral Dynamics is that its name is a registered trade mark, which immediately alerts one that this is not your typical up-and-up scientific theory or spiritual tradition, but rather in the same proprietary New Age genre as EST, Dianetics, Scientology, TM, TQM and the like.

While they claim not to be a typology, a stairway to enlightened spirituality, a cult, or a pedestal from which elitists can look down on the rest of us, their behavior seems to indicate otherwise. Each of the splinter factions, for example, seems to hold itself out as the true heir, earthly representative and exponent of the legacy of Dr. Clare W. Graves, whose levels of existence appear to be at the core of all this cult-like devotion. Monitoring the Internet for every mention of one’s intellectual property, in order to defend it from the encroachments of “followers” rival variants is a very cult-like behavior.

According to the FAC referenced above, those who truly understand Spiral Dynamics see it as “theory of how people frame the reality they experience,” which purports to explain the distinctive internal logic of their behavior. Graves postulates eight “biopsychosocial systems” representing eight developmental stages which purport to offer deep insights into the thinking, motivation, values and aims of people through a unique synthesis of a number of disciplines. But despite the evocative and metaphorical use of concepts like “memes,” “strange attractors,” “wave” and “particle,” “double helix,” “collective intelligences,” and other buzzwords drawn from physics and the new biology, Spiral Dynamics is, at bottom, a psychological theory that seems to be singularly uninformed and uninfluenced by disciplines outside of psychology—notably, sociology, anthropology, and history.

So what are the “dynamics” in Spiral Dynamics? Presumably, there are eight distinct developmental stages, each of which forms a dynamic system organized and held together by a distinctive set of values—or mores—which they call vMemes. Now, in other developmental models based on systems theory (cf. Epidemiological Transition Theory) each stage of develop can be described in terms of the interactions between a set of dynamic variables (e.g., population, population growth, population longevity and economic investment). When these variables exceed a certain critical threshold, the whole system undergoes a “phase transition” to a higher energy dynamic state.

But, in the Spiral Dynamics model, there are no carefully specified dynamic variables, no dynamic variable tipping points, no phase transition shifts, no cross-cultural evidence supporting the claim that these stages necessarily occur in any particular order, or anything else one would to find in a carefully specified dynamic model.

So, as far as systems theory is concerned, Spiral Dynamics is all sizzle and no steak. For example, water undergoes a number of phase transitions from solid to liquid to gas to plasma depending on the value of a single variable: temperature. Spiral Dynamics seems to explain their vMemes as being held together by “strange attractors” which purportedly attract some memes and repel others. This is like saying that water changes from solid to liquid because, at some point, it acquires a “liquid” strange attractor and loses a “solid” one. This absurdity could have been avoided if the Spiral Dynamics folks had a foregone fancy made-up terminology of vMemes (or memetics altogether) and simply used an established sociological or anthropological terms like mores as the organizing principle of their “levels” and “stages.”

But such clarity would expose an even deeper difficulty: If all these color coded “vMemes” were part of our culture’s evolutionary past, then there would have been a red world, followed by a blue world, followed by an orange world, etc. as the culture evolved to its present state. From the sound of it, a turquoise individual wouldn’t last very long in a red world, or vice versa. So, why are we describing contemporary people in color coded terms keyed to earlier stages of human development? If a red, blue, or purple personality can survive into our time, what can you really say about the supposed evolutionary necessity of one “level” coming after another?

Memes are not individual psychological phenomena, they are collective phenomena. The hula hoop, the pet rock, or germ theory, for example, may be individual inventions, but these are propagated and regulated by group processes, such as communication, innovation, and social control. So, if there were master value memes (or mores) that prescribed modal normative behavior, there would be social processes springing into action that would enforce conformity to each mode.

In other words, if we still have “red” folks with us today, how is it they survived the evolutionary selection pressures that have supposedly created these inevitable “levels” of existence? How come all of us are not now “oranges,” “greens” or whatever is supposed to be present mode? If these evolutionary stages are inevitable and invariant, there shouldn’t be any color-types other than the present day type. That Spiral Dynamics sees several vMeme types coexisting today suggests that they see cultural evolution as driven by individual personality processes rather than social, cultural and historical processes. And that is just the sort of thing you would expect from psychologists attempting to construct grand theory.

While SD claims to be non-judgemental about who people are, this whole point of typing people according to their “colors” can serve only one purpose and one purpose only; namely, identifying people who are “deviant” and out of step with the modal stage present day evolution. In other words, if “green” is the modal vMeme of our time, the only reason we need to identify people who are “red” or “blue” is so that we can identify them as regressive (unevolved) elements and bring them along.

As for people actually being red “biosocial” personality types in the present day, there is no way to be sure. These are essentially labels being applied to people. There is no evidence that there is any underlying psychometric construct, or any psychological validity to these labels whatsoever. It is pigeonholing people, pure and simple.

Isn’t it curious how pseudo-science is able to appropriate the language of science? As I have said before, this works largely to an incomplete understanding by the general public of the scientific terms.

Some further thoughts about Spiral Dynamics:

One is that is that Graves’ “levels” or “containers” of existence seem principally defined by developmental stages of learning, thinking, and motivation. In this respect, they are on the same order of thing as Keirsey’s four Temperaments (Guardian, Idealist, Artisan and Rational); Myers/Briggs’ 16 personality types (based on a matrix of learning styles and cognitive preferences); Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (safety-belonging-esteem-by-others, self-esteem, aesthetic needs, self-actualization, and self-transcendence).

It would appear that the woodwork is positively crawling with psychologists and their theories of human types. There are, for example, nine Enneagram Personality types (Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator/Thinker, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker). There are the various competencies of Emotional Intelligence (self-control, empathy, optimism, self awareness, initiative and collaboration); and the Ten Lenses (Assimilationist, Colorblind, Culturalcenterist, Elitist, Integrationist, Meritocratist, Multiculturalist, Seclusionist, Transcendent, Victim/caretaker).

There are also Kohlber’s stages of moral development (magic wish, punishment and obedience, instrumental hedonism, good-boy-nice-girl conformity, law and order, social contract, and universalism); James Fowler’s Stages of Faith (magical-projective, mythic-literal, conventional, individual-reflexive, conjunctive faith, universalizing); there are seven different “intelligences” (linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, kinasthetic, spacial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal); Loevinger’s “Levels of Ego Development” (impulsive, self-protective, conformist, self-aware, conscientious, individualistic, autonomous, and finally, integrated); and Kegan’s “Orders of Consciousness.”

One of the things that you will notice that is common to all of these theories is that they are all logical and deductive in their formulation. In other words, these are all what you might call armchair theories, insofar as they likely begin with an observation that some people are, say, rigid, absolutist or status quo-oriented in their thinking, while others seem to be exactly the opposite; so the theorist attempts to enumerate an exhaustive list of all the logical possibilities in between.

As you can see, the problem isn’t coming up with a plausible theory. Plausibility is rather easy to come by in any deductively arrived at typology (as compared to one empirically derived through some sort of blind statistical analysis, such as cluster analysis or stepwise regression). The problem is establishing whether these theoretical typologies correspond to anything real. First, how do you know that a particular “type” actually has all the characteristics that the theory says it should. Second, how do you know that a given individual fits this construct? And then, assuming he or she does, how does this translate into human resources, management, self-improvement, or other expertise?

In the case of Spiral Dynamics, they postulate a purple meme that seems to correspond with an animist society. Is classical conditioning really the dominant learning system in such societies? Is their thinking really characterized as “autistic”; is safety really the primary concern for individuals in such a society? I can’t imagine many anthropologists agreeing.

Jared Diamond, in “Guns, Germs and Steel” describes a New Guinea bushmen as intellectually sharper and in better physical shape than his “civilized” counterpart. The lazy and the stupid simply don’t last very long in an unforgiving environment like the bush. In the bush people have to be intellectually engaged with both their environment and the technologies which their survival depends. In civilization, people can get by performing repetitive tasks involving machines and technologies they don’t really understand and the necessities of life are simply handed to them.

Why would nomadic people be particularly concerned with safety? They can simply pick up and go if they sense danger. It’s the settled agricultural folks who have to worry about marauding bands and overlords. Why, then would “operant conditioning” become the dominant learning mode at this point and not “avoidant learning” when power and exploitation seem to be the central preoccupations of life?

In my view, SD’s distinction between its “red” and “blue” levels seems artificial and contrived. From what we know of both early and advanced settled peoples, power and exploitation were very much present in people’s lives (and are so today). Egotistic and absolutist thinking are not mutually exclusive and often go side-by-side. And up until the invention of “progress” by the Jews, the entire pagan world was organized under an overarching cyclical mythic order, which was mainly materialistic and only occasionally otherworldly. “Salvation” seems to be rather out of place, since the only place in the world where it was of any importance was Europe after the Reformation. In this respect, the sense that the certain values, modes of learning and other components of SD’s Levels “belong together” depends on a rather sketchy and questionable reading of human history.

It is certainly not validated by any psychometric method that I can tell. Normally, when psychologists develop things like personality inventories, they give people a battery of questions and then factor analyse them so that they can identify the underlying constructs that these test items tap into. If the components of each “level” actually belong together, they will be tightly correlated in such a way that groups of variables can separated into distinct constructs. But, from what I could tell of the instruments SD uses to classify individuals according to their vMemes, none of this construct validity work has been done.

In other words, there is no assurance that these “levels” actually include all the elements they are hypothesized to contain or, indeed, that they are in fact sequential levels. In fact, there is actually no good theoretical reason to suppose that they would be since the claim that humans have changed systematically on psycho-social dimensions, such as self-concept or the human propensity and reasons for self-sacrifice over time, is not currently supported by mainstream anthropology, social sciences or evolutionary biology.

The Myers/Briggs typology, on the other hand, does have the benefit of quantitative validation. First of all, they measure an individual’s preferences for certain kinds of cognitive tasks, so there is actually something there to measure. There are tens of thousands of people who have taken these tests, and they reliably sort out into the categories predicted by the model. Moreover, they have correlated these cognitive styles with people’s occupations, so that they can now say, with some justification and confidence that if you have such and such a cognitive style, chances are you would like such and such an occupation. And this is useful in matching people to jobs they would likely enjoy. But I don’t see any such effort to scientifically validate SD theory.

I know from having worked with psychologists (i.e., developing risk assessment protocols for their use) that they tend to value intuition over formal quantitative reasoning. They very seldom put their theories to any kind of quantitative test—and when they do, the results are often embarrassing. I have had Ph.D. psychologists develop what they claimed was a “state-of-the-art” treatment program, only to find out several years later that the people who got the treatment didn’t do any better than the people who didn’t. I have also run into dozens of clinical psychologists who claim to be expert clinical evaluators because they have been doing risk predictions “for over 20 years,” but who never during that whole time, followed up to see if any of their predictions came true. When I was actually able to follow up a sample, I found that their predictions were no better than chance.

This leads me to conclude that Spiral Dynamics is a kind of cargo cult science .

Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling that the friend who recommended Spiral Dynamics to me will feel hurt that I decline to accept it with the alacrity enthusiasm he does, so I am writing this as a kind of due diligence to show him that my rejection of SD is not without due consideration. As we see above, most people encountering Spiral Dynamics for the first time have a kind of not-too-pleasant head-spinning experience; their bullshit detectors go off, but being the good, kind people they are, they often give SD the benefit of the doubt.

Those who have had contact with it seem to sense the inherent, though perhaps unintentional, cohesiveness of attempting to introduce “spirituality” into the workplace, even if it is nominally compassionate and intended to be nurturing. The employment relation is fundamentally a power relation; so as well-intentioned as people might be in introducing spirituality to the workplace, it has no more place in such an environment than the employer evangelizing his employees.

One peer reviewer is the business coach Graham Wilson. He criticizes SD for being ambitious to the point being grandiose, potentially “manipulative” and “pseudoscience.” When Ken Wilber replies (to other critics) that he sees the ” levels of consciousness are largely plastic, and the “Great Nest” is actually just a vast morphogenetic field of potentials.” you kind of get a sense of what he means by grandiosity.

Michael Bauwens criticizes the SD-Integral movement represented by Wilber and Beck as “rapidly evolving into a political neoconservative movement that uses the scientific basis of Spiral Dynamics as a cloak.” Color coding becomes a way of silencing critics. By implication, it also provides a veneer of intellectual respectability to the notions that some societies are more “spiritually evolved” than others, an idea not unlike the crackpot racial theories of the early 20th Century.

Apparently, researchers “have found, or hypothesize a correlation between spirituality and productivity.” On one hand, I suppose it is ultimately a spiritual distinction whether your workers as kindred members of humanity to be nurtured, as opposed to objects to be used up and discarded. But, on the other, I can’t help get the sense that once these connections are worked out that they will not become what Michele Foucault would call technologies of power.

Here is an index to a collection of papers in which the various exponents of different branches of SD have at it with one another. One of the striking thing about these papers is their scholastic (as opposed to scholarly) tone and style. In other words, these are philosophical assertions and disputations in the grand medieval tradition, where mockery and “You Lie!” seem to count as arguments.

At one point I noticed that one of them had made a claim that “2% of the adult population is at second-tier” and that “after four years of meditation, that 2% [in the population at large] goes to 38%.” In pursuing the matter a little further, I find out that this is not a sample of the general population, but a sample of 90 maximum-security prisoners, whom we learn are divided into four treatment groups and, presumably, one control group. Aside from the fact that the “treatment effect” could be explained by self-selection both in assignment to the treatment group and ultimately remains at the end. What you don’t get in either the presentation or its criticism is any sense that either party has a grasp of quantitative methodology.

Perhaps it is unfair to characterize the whole field by this example, but they so seldom get down to discussing “verifiable evidence” that it makes you wonder just how sound their claims can be—especially, if you have any sense of the kinds of studies that would be necessary to validate something like Spiral Dynamics. It would require thousands of subjects and several iterations to develop reliable instruments. It would be very expensive, to say the least, and there is no guarantee that it would hold water at the end (which I think is why you don’t see much interest in this kind of research).

Anyway, I hope my friend will speak to me again.

I am an artist and I use Spiral Dynamics a lot. I agree with the concerns about the Wilber/Beck movement. I think it may be rascist/elitist. I took an online course with Cowan who has a small SD training organization in Santa Barbara. They are secular in their orientation and stay away from the cult of Wilber.

I think it matters how you use SD. I use it as a skeleton to try to understand our past. Too often a stage of development rejects the others which escalates conflict. Somewhere in SD writing I remember reading that war stops all growth so the fighting between earlier levels of development only harms us.

Each level of development is a stage that gives us a new set of skills so when we reject a stage we reject the skills they give us. However, SD acknowledges that a level of development can manifest in a healthy or malignant way ( Is Wilbers group perhaps malignant turquoise?). For me the net of it is that it raises my awareness and enables me to look for healthy ways to integrate all the levels in my life. It can be used to raise one’s level of responsibility.

SD is not so fixed and dogmatic that it tells you what to think and when to think it. I use it as a tool to gain greater insight into problems, conflicts and issues. I use it to discover and integrate lost parts of the self. I like using it sometime as a diagnostic tool to see where differences can be better understood. I simply use it to raise the bar on myself. We are all on a journey to wholeness; SD has been helping me on my journey.

I hope this helps anyone considering investigating SD. It is fascinating and if you want to pursue it the Cowan Spiral Dynamics group has stayed away from the grandiosity of Wilber.

@Toffee Thank you for your answer and welcome to Fluther. Could you give us an idea as to how you have used SD as a tool in an actual situation? One of the things that makes it so difficult to assess is that it isn’t obvious how one can apply it.

For some reason I found this question today although it’s from November 2009. I recommended to take a look at the model, which does not mean that I am part of this movement or worse a missionary of it. This does also not mean that I agree with everything this model suggests. I first heard of Spiral Dynamics about 5 years ago, then bought and read the book. A lot in it made sense, but of course not everything. The reason for recommending taking a look at the model was that I thought it can a offer new insights in addition to a great many other sources such as traditional religions and philosophies as well as other modern approaches like Seligman’s positive psychology or Lerner’s spiritual progressives approach. Trying to understand various models does not mean supporting all of them. I thought SD was worth understanding.

I always try to draw from many sources. I’m probably as much anti-cult as you can get. I challenge everything and keep the good stuff and get rid of the rest. I try to keep an open mind. When reading a book like Spiral Dynamics I don’t feel like getting infected with some strange cult-memes I won’t be able to get rid of. I keep a healthy distance whether is Christian dogmas or fabrics of realities with multiverses in them or the blue and orange memes of SD. I liked the idea of life conditions and when observing corporate culture one can draw some meaningful conclusions where various teams and departments stand. Some stressing ‘blue’ overregulating everything other ‘orange’ innovating useless stuff as well fighting with more pragmatic colleagues showing their ‘red’ memes.