Spiral Dynamics- Raising Our Consciousness

‘Spiral Dynamics’, coined by Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan, represents the different stages of human evolution with a corresponding colour. As humans evolve and raise their consciousness, it follows that organisations and society will evolve too.

Currently, in the developed world, the majority of organiastions operate at the orange level, however, humanity is experiencing a great awakening and we are evolving to higher levels of consciousness. There are many people who operate at the higher levels (green, yellow and turquoise) on an individual level, but there are few organiastions operating at these levels. This is because an organisation is the sum of its individual parts and it’s unlikely that all the employees would be operating at green or higher. Additionally, individuals can operate on a variety of levels depending on the situation, someone might be green in their approach to their home life but blue in response to their work life.

The level succeeding orange is green, this is what most organizations today should be aspiring to. One may ask, why not aspire for yellow or turquoise? The answer is that society in general may not be ready for an organization operating at these levels, also it would be difficult to find employees with a level of consciousness to match this ambition. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, reiki healers, tarot readers and hypnotists might operate at yellow or turquoise successfully due to the nature of their work and the small size of their organisation.

So how do organiastions advance from orange to green? There are several stages:

1) Awareness - firstly senior figures must recognise that they need to evolve

2) Modeling - create a blue print of what you want to become

3) Planning - map the present reality to the vision and create an action plan

3) Realignment - realign employees through coaching and mentoring