Don Beck & Spiral Dynamics

Let’s talk about Don Beck, the creator of the well-known Spiral Dynamics framework. Though originally and primarily an academician, Don Beck later became very interested in applying this theory to national politics, and he worked with dozens of political leaders in his quest to do so.

Don Beck’s approach to politics and societal change is based on a Spiral Dynamics Yellow perspective, perhaps even Spiral Dynamics Turquoise. I believe, and hope, that his work is but a glimpse of what is to come as the upper developmental echelons of First-World countries continue to move into 2nd tier territory.

We’ll focus on how he created the Spiral Dynamics theory and then implemented it in various countries, including Iceland, Palestine and Afghanistan.

Don Beck & The Origin of Spiral Dynamics

After deeply learning both models, it seems to me that Clare Graves had already done most of the heavy lifting. ECLET comprises the meat of Spiral Dynamics, including the stages, the concept of 1st-tier and 2nd-tier, the process of the stages emerging, as well as much of its theoretical foundation. Don Beck’s innovations fleshed out Graves’ system and made it more user-friendly and packageable.

Don Beck was teaching at the University of North Texas when Clare Graves published his ECLET model, the predecessor of classic Spiral Dynamics theory. Inspired by Graves’ work, Don Beck contacted him and they initiated a lifelong working relationship. Don Beck and his graduate student Chris Cowan went on to write the book Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, which remains the master text on the theory.

If you’re a Spiral Dynamics enthusiast, it’s well worth reading Clare Graves’ original work, which offers fantastic insight into these systems or stages. And by comparing it to Spiral Dynamics, we can see the enormous influence the former had on the latter, as well as Don Beck’s innovations.

Don Beck introduced the popular Spiral Dynamics colours (Beige, Purple, Red, Blue, Orange, Green, Yellow and Turquoise), one for each stage in the model, and gave the stages new names. He also incorporated the theory of memes, first proposed by Richard Dawkins and developed later by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He believed that memes were the fundamental building blocks of the Spiral Dynamics stages, which act as meta-memes, and he went on to name them vMEMEs or values memes.

Whereas Graves tended to use his research subjects to describe the typical features of these stages, Don Beck went broad and described them as they appear, combine and clash in entire societies, and gave great insight into how these stages create friction and chaos.

In his interviews, Don Beck often mentions Graves and his pioneering approach, praising him for his attention to biological, psychological and social factors, his insight into the need for multi-pronged approaches in psychology, and his respect for all levels of human behaviour.

Don Beck & Applying Spiral Dynamics

Don Beck not only created the modern Spiral Dynamics theory, but he went to extraordinary ends to apply it in politics and business. You can read about this work in depth in his book Spiral Dynamics In Action.

Don Beck had a lifelong interest in the causes of conflict, which led to a lifelong project in South Africa, which he visited 63 times in the eighties and nineties to consult for companies working in major industries.

It seems he introduced the classic Spiral Dynamics colours at this time (with the approval of Graves) to create a race-free classification system that would aid his work with different segments of the South African population. His book The Crucible: Forging South Africa’s Future in search of a Template for the World, chronicles Beck’s work in the country, where he helped to prevent civil war.

Beck later launched a similar project in Palestine. Though it was cut short due to lack of funding, it made clear his interest in applying Spiral Dynamics to large-scale change. He regularly wrote columns on US politics and was involved with projects elsewhere. A particularly notable is the Centre for Human Emergence in the Netherlands, which aimed to address anti-Islamic sentiments. In Red-dominated Afghanistan, he worked to install a stable Blue system.

Don Beck wasn’t so interested in individual development, he worked closely with leaders such as Ken Wilber, Dr Jean Houston, Dr Bruce Lipton, and Barbara Marx Hubbard. He also tried to work with George Bush and Bill Clinton in applying his theory to American politics.

You might like my video on Spiral Dynamics.

His Spiral Dynamics Views & Methods

Let’s explore some of Don Beck’s key views and methods. Clare Graves claimed that people like Beck appear once for every 10,000 people in the population, and the points below make the reason for this clear. His way of navigating politics, conflict and crisis are unique and rare in the current system.

Don Beck Saw Conditions As Crucial

One thing you garner from his work is that he viewed conditions as critical to the solutions we come up with. In a broad sense, he was adamant that in conditions that match a particular level on the Spiral, you cannot impose solutions that aim to solve problems from a different level.

He also believed that you cannot force people to develop to levels that aren’t supported by the Life Conditions that they face. The chaos that the American government caused in Iraq, when they attempted to install Orange democracy in a Red/Blue theocracy, made this clear to him.

In this sense, he saw Spiral Dynamics as a highly flexible meta-tool, rather than a unitary system or a one-size-fits-all, as all -isms and -acies tend to be. The solution must fit the Life Conditions, otherwise it is doomed to failure.

Healthy Expression

On the track of Life Conditions, Don Beck viewed a healthy society as one in which all Spiral Dynamics levels exist in their healthy version. A healthy governing system meets the needs of people at their level(s) and is open to change whenever change occurs. Societies and individuals possess a layer cake of levels, all of which are required

Implicitly or explicitly, we tend to assume that societies will only be healthy when they reach a certain Spiral level. It’s true that societies tend to improve in many dimensions as they evolve, but it may encourage us to hastily form an ideal and try to force all societies towards it, which is precisely the opposite of how Don Beck approached large-scale change.

Conflict & Upheaval

He also had a 2nd-tier view of conflict. Rather than seeing them as the deluded fighting the deluded, or right fighting wrong, he saw it as worldviews bashing against one another, or as faulty systems that cause the various levels of the Spiral to turn sour and run amok.

Change

Don Beck was careful not to force change on people when they weren’t ready for it. He worked with a system of ten conditions for change, and tried to gently encourage the next level of the Spiral to unfold, rather than pushing levels that went way above the heads of those experiencing change. He saw change as a non-linear leap in consciousness to a new set of Life Conditions and a new system of inner logic to match, just as Graves’ double helix model suggests.

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