To my colleagues in the Spiral Dynamics community, please, let’s not be too critical of our friends in the integral community.  WE ARE different members of the same tribe. It is only a difference in philosophical opinion on which quadrants/triads are more important than others. A few days ago, I posted a link to the upcoming online Integral conference with a  comment that was intended as a joke to accentuate our philosophical differences, but apparently it was taken as a criticism by some.

It is the SD community, not the the Integral community that lags behind on moving its own work forward.  Bence Ganti and Dennis Wittrock, the organizers of the European Integral Conference, were very gracious to invite Don, Elza, and me to be keynote speakers at the 2016 Integral European Conference. We were grateful for the opportunity. It was also at that conference that we celebrated the 20^th Anniversary of the launch of the original Spiral Dynamics book. A 20^th Anniversary event for the book never materialized in the SD community due to many reasons, but primary because of too many diverging egos wanting to claim ownership of the SD legacy.

Our own community’s division has also been our Achilles heel in moving our work forward. But this doesn’t absolve the Integral community from all responsibilities.  At the core of our continued differences remains the fact that the Integral community still has a  marginal understanding of Graves/SD. They approach SD as an opportunity to expand on how Wilber sees it, and are disappointed when they see that our work stands alone as its own whole systems approach and chose not to unlearn the Wilberian version of it. This is what’s at the heart of the division. Wilber pacified our important stuff, accentuate the stuff that makes his stuff look good and intentionally made our stuff an increasingly smaller part of his evolving theory that explains everything while we stood back defesnelessly and allowed it to happen.

There’s no dispute that one of the most successful systems application of Integral theory is reflected in the highly successful work of Frederic Laloux. Other than Wilber’s books, Laloux’s  book Reinventing Organizations is the most successful in integral literature that has penetrated organizational culture at deep levels. But what would you say if I told you that Laloux based his book on Spiral Dynamics, not Integral. The man is a consultant who understood systems not a monk or a therapist. It was due to Don’s insistence that he be named as co-author that Laloux chose to change the colors and approached Wilber to write the Foreword. Wilber, desperate for someone who understood systems, welcomed Laloux with open arms. Strangely, Wilber’s foreword reads a lot like the foreword that Don wrote for my book. Just change colors and add quadrants.

This is an example of the power of how the Spiral with the added elements of the Quadrants  can expand the use of both models into the mainstream, while respecting both as independent frameworks. There has to be more people who fully understand verticality and systems  the way Laloux does in the Integral camp, and more people in the SD camp who can understand the complementary aspects of Integral and reinterpret them through SD, not allow Integral to swallow SD whole.

But, sadly, our division comes from the very top. In my opinion, there is very little inclination within the integral community to understand the systems and Large Scale applications of our work. We also shy away from their fuzzy circling stuff with arms raised to salute something or someone, or nothing or everything, etc… These are differences that need to be tolerated and even respected instead of criticized in order to develop tolerance and respect for both models separately.

While the Integral community is organized, we are everything but. We are a greatly divided community as demonstrated by the wide division and the huge ego flexing at the 2018 Spiral Dynamics Summit. I set up that conference to be a unifying event, and to formulate a legacy plan moving forward. Instead it turned out to be the point of entropy to the SD Constellation in its current form.

In order for SD to become the legacy it deserves, there needs to be a rebirth that sees its long term use by world leaders to solve world problems, and augmented by new academic rigor. It won’t survive just in the world of consulting and training. There has to be a long-term deliberate plan that requires serious commitments  by people who are detached from their egos. I believe there needs to be a return to academic rigor that needs to be housed at a globally respected US institution for higher learning that will become the global clearing house for everything Graves/SD.

This will be a homecoming for the three American academics, Graves, Beck and Cowan, met by American academic exceptionalism not some watered-down version from some obscure places injecting the framework with local colloquialisms and calling it science. Without that, we have little credibility moving forward.