Spiral Dynamics in Action

Preface

By Dr Don Beck

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein (nd)

We live in a complex, peculiar and dangerous world.

Why, after half a century of international diplomacy and peace-brokering, can't Israel and its neighbors make peace? Why do some African countries continue to spawn brutal political regimes that destroy their own economies, kill their own people and rape their own women? Why is America so polarized that collegial debate on issues now seems a faint memory of an earlier age? When did America and its close allies in Northern Europe begin to think so differently on global issues? And why did that happen?

These are the kinds of questions we need to answer. And we won't find the answer by looking at the surface. Today's headlines are just revealing the symptoms – not the cause.

We each have many ways of seeing things – lenses that color our perception of the world. We don't all think alike. We don't all have the same values. We don't all see the world through the same lens. That is what makes the twenty-first century so complex and dangerous. We now have more than six billion humans with different world views connected by migration, air travel and the internet into one intermingled whole. Most of us are convinced that our view is right, our values are right. We are pushing and shoving and growling and threatening and carrying banners that say, “My way or no way.” Some of us are even killing each ...