I’m reading through, for the first time, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan’s book Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change. Having worked for Ken Wilber, who helped to popularize their work, and knowing many people who are into their theory (about theories) I’ve been exposed to the ideas before, but am finding it much more nuanced than it first appeared. I’ve been on a kick lately to understand more about developmental theories, and having just finished reading Robert Kegan’s In Over Our Heads I’m finding this a delightful (and closely related) read.
Toward the beginning of the book Beck and Cowan use a metaphorical narrative, where they are traveling around the world asking different people the question, “What is life all about?”. They use the people, their surroundings (i.e. their context), and their answers as ways of highlighting the different vMEMEs, or levels of individual and social development, that exist. I found the last person’s response, who was supposed to represent the “yellow” or Flex-Flow stage particularly interesting. He is a park ranger, in an African game reserve, and when asked the question he responds:
Well, I’ve given that some thought and don’t have anything spectacular to offer—but as I see it, I get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of working here to reclaim and preserve our natural habitat. So I guess my answer should be that I believe we should celebrate and respect life as it is. Even more than that, I think we should seek to understand how everything relates to everything else, and how nature has its own tempo and flow of which we are only a small part. ((Spiral Dynamics, pg. 37))
Three things stood out to me when reading his description. One is that the ranger is fairly humble and grounded about what he is doing and why he’s doing it. The why includes both his personal satisfaction and the good generated by the work he does. Secondly, he emphasizes the need to understand the relationships and patterns of all things. The need to understand and see these relationships, from a meta-viewpoint (of everything), is quite interesting and corresponds strongly to Robert Kegan’s descriptions of the 5th order of consciousness. Lastly, and most interestingly at the moment, is his emphasis on respecting “life as it is” and seeing that “we are only a small part” of nature which “has its own tempo and flow”. This seems largely to express what I described as an integrated sense of responsibility or what I’ve been terming cosmic responsibility. Notice the similarities between the fictional character’s description of his place in nature and how I described integrated responsibility at the end of my post on the subject:
When we open fully to the larger context in which life is happening, that isn’t solely reducible to my experience or my desires, then a greater level of surrender & happiness can result. The happiness isn’t one borne from getting what we want, but rather from seeing how things really are.
I feel more convinced now that “integrated responsibility” is how one expresses their individual role in the life—which is one part of the answer to what life is about—from what these authors call the yellow (“integrative”) stage of development.
Also, check out the recent interviews we did on the Conscious Business show with Don Beck on his work and it’s application to business. Listening to him speak is what finally encouraged me to buy his book and go into his work more deeply. I’m glad I did.
