Spiral dynamics is a theory co-authored by Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan that has been implemented by many world leaders and organizations to create greater cooperation, collaboration and harmony amongst people – working with their world views and values as opposed to conflicting with them.
In spiral dynamics theory, the “spiral” captures how people develop diverse worldviews and the characteristics of those views.
“Dynamics” explores the process of human emergence and how living systems evolve, grow and change.
I first heard of spiral dynamics theory when I attended Tony Robbins’ Netflix famous seminar, Date With Destiny.
The audience was involved in a fun exercise where a few individuals where each given a colored hat.
Each hat represented a color from the “spiral” in spiral dynamics.
Each person wearing the hat was chosen by the meme or “level” in the spiral that they embodied best.
The man wearing the red hat was embodying the “power god” personality with ego-centric comments and views.
The man wearing the blue hat was embodying “order and the absolute” by religious fundamentalist views and telling everyone that they’re going to Hell if they don’t follow his religion.
The woman wearing the green hat was embodying the personality for someone who was all about loving each other and equal opportunity.
The man in the orange hat was embodying the entrepreneurial personality, offering to hire everybody to work for his company.
And the woman in the purple hat was embodying the tribal personality, seeking safety and refuge with whoever.
All of these “colors” are valuable and important in life.
Beyond the spectrum of choosing one over the other, there is the 2nd tier, which is mapped in spiral dynamics as “yellow” and “turquoise”.
At “yellow” there’s an integrated perspective in life.
“Yellows” acknowledge that everything serves a valuable purpose, and each is to be used at the time it must be.
“Turquoise” is the representation of the grand unification….oneness.
At Date With Destiny, it was described as the Awakened Soul.
Tony Robbins said he’s only met a few people in his life who live turquoise, the main one being Donny Epstein.
Ken Wilber, who’s done an extraordinary job at explaining spiral dynamics, has also said Donny has developed modalities for people that are directly aligned with supporting people to live congruent with the expanded levels of spiral dynamics.
I just wanted to give a brief summary of it, although the text I’ve written above does no justice at explaining how extraordinary spiral dynamics theory is.
I’ve went ahead and made a podcast episode, giving an expanded general gist on it.
For those interested in learning more, I suggest reading this book co-authored by the Claire Graves and Don Edward Beck.
Tune into the episode below!
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Spiral Dynamics is very fascinating. I wish it was taught in school. Maybe people would understand each other better. However I have noticed that the lower someone is on the spiral the less open they are to understanding it. It’s like they are following some sort of programming that’s only open to change when their environment forces it onto them.