Chapter 1 --  Spiral Dynamics:  Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change
Different Times Produce Different Minds

Captains of both the private and public sectors are restructuring, downsizing, reengineering, and playing catch-up with the change curve.

Today's world is chaotic, crisis-filled, and complex almost beyond belief.

Several core ways of thinking are grinding against each other.

Expanding sciences and technologies have shrunk folks into global villagers.

Great Ideas are Forged in Chaotic Times

Occasionally major chaos erupts to trigger order-of-magnitude, epochal changes

The Humpty Dumpty Effect

Sometimes Earth seems to be rocking out of control.  

Once our system crashes, there may be no way to put it back together again.

Distortions in Cycleland

Cycleland's back-and-forth, up-and-down rhythms and patterns.

Minds Change with the Times

Different times force us to think differently.

It is in our nature to solve problems, but then to create new ones.

New times produce new thinking!

The Pathfinder on the Mohawk

Graves sought to get to the mind of the matter and explore why people are different.

Human thinking evolves in recognizable packages as the world around us gets more complicated and we try to keep up.

Graves would summarize his point of view with the following:

  1. Human nature is not static, nor is it finite.
  2. When a new system or level is activated, we change our psychology and rules for living to adapt to those new conditions.
  3. We live in a potentially open system of values with an infinite number of modes of living available to us.
  4. An individual, company, or entire society can respond positively only to those managerial principles, motivational appeals, educational formulas, and legal or ethical codes that are appropriate to the current level of human existence.

Genes and Memes:  Circuit Riders on the DNA

"memes" is used to contrast with "genes" in identifying the origins of human behavior as opposed to physical characteristics.

What biochemical genes are to the DNA, memes are to our psychocultural "DNA".

When the human nervous system reacts to an experience memes are born.

A meme reproduces itself through concepts like dress styles, language trends, popular cultural norms, architectural designs, art forms, religious expressions, social movements, economic models, and moral statements of how living should be done.

Memes can be so dominant they are misinterpreted as "types" of people.

Memes encode instructions for our world views, assumptions about how everything works, and the rationale for decisions we make.

As lone as a meme flashes and repeats its message, the pattern will continue.

Memes are like a parallel life form.  We are barely aware of their power.  They act at three different levels:

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Personal notes on reading from :
Beck, D.E. & Cowan, C.C.  Spiral Dynamics:  Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change.