“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 other.

How did we get here? And how do we get out of this mess? How do we structure systems that handle the complexity of our interconnectedness while allowing people to grow and move naturally through the stages of human development?

The answer to that is a quest I've been on for 40 years:

I am an optimist. I believe in the power of humans for regeneration. As a baby, my mother would sing the state song of Oklahoma to me, “There's a bright, golden haze on the meadow,” followed by the chorus, “Oh, what a beautiful morning …” Never mind that Purcell, Oklahoma situated in the Great American Plains was part of “tornado alley,” and we lived with the constant threat of losing everything every time dark clouds came up from the southwest. I was a child from the land of the golden haze. I knew all was well.

But more than just an intuitive feeling, history confirms the validity of an optimistic outlook for human beings. Our history is one of regeneration as we time and time again tackle challenges and create new ways of living and thinking to solve those challenges.

As a young professor, I was looking for the Rosetta Stone¹ of human development. I spent 20 years delving into the best and the newest of what psychology had to offer, and was well on my way to being recognized as an emerging leader in dissolving conflict. I knew that solutions to conflict lay deep in the human psyche, deeper than most of us could explain. I also knew that if we understood human development, not just how we changed but why we changed, we might be able to successfully address any number of human dilemmas.

When in 1974 I read Dr Clare Graves’ article in The Futurist² on human emergence I found what I was longing for – a meticulously researched explanation of why humans emerge and how they do so. Emergence is not an event. It is a never-ending process. We are always engaged in the process of becoming something more than we were and not yet what we will be.

Graves, the professor emeritus of psychology at Union College in New York, had spent decades unlocking this process – one research subject at a time – until tens of thousands of individual cases yielded a pattern for human emergence. The name he gave his discovery was as exacting as his collection of data. Graves called his discovery “the emergent, cyclical, double-helix model of adult bio-psychosocial behavior.” That is a mouthful but it boils down to this. When challenges come up that we cannot solve at our present level of being, we make a leap to a newer, higher-order system biologically, psychologically, socially and spiritually. Later, this theory became known as Spiral Dynamics.

The old system does not go away, however. It remains a part of us, accessible to us when we need it. Clearly, we have a powerful and dynamic mind. It recalibrates itself in response to life conditions, and it does so quickly. While human genes take their own sweet time to bring about change, codes on the evolutionary spiral can pop up virtually overnight.

What Graves's research showed was an explanation of how humans emerge. He named eight levels, and declared more levels will come. Six of these constitute First-Tier codes and include the organizational structures with which we are familiar, such as tribes, empires, holy orders, strategic capitalism. These are the systems, each convinced of the rightness of its code of values, which are battling each other today for supremacy. The future lies, however, in what Graves saw as a great leap to a Second-Tier system. His research found a few individuals who were expressing a new view that encompassed all of the First-Tier codes. These individuals understood that to move forward from here, humans must accommodate each level of emergence by providing healthy conduits for movement through the codes. And the answers to doing that lay with a new way of thinking.

Humanity is in a state of constant motion. We are shaped by the code of the Spiral. In short, we can change our own psychology. The brain can rewire itself. Society is not static. Today's problems are yesterday's solutions. Evaluation and revolution are part of our future. We are on perpetual treks of the mind. Many believe we are now passing through such a momentous transformation, a major turning point, a history-making sea change. A new different pattern of thought is beginning to emerge worldwide, and in various fields of human activity. Graves, in Roemicher (2002, p. 125) predicted: “The present moment finds our society attempting to negotiate the most difficult, but at the same time the most exciting transition the human race has to face to date. It is not merely a transition to a new level of existence, but the start of a new movement in the symphony of human identity.”

That is what this book is about. It is about the Universal Master Code, the underlying code that contains all past codes and all codes to come. Understanding humanity's Master Code will not only solve today's challenges but will take us further faster with less conflict than we thought possible. And we must understand this code. Not just because we have people with Attila-the-Hun mentalities eyeing nuclear weapons as a means to build their personal empires, but because we also have biochemical and medical technologies that are challenging our very concept of what it means to be human. We have to deal with both these extremes and do it well.

It can be done. I have field-tested Graves's research for 40 years, adding both to the research and practical applications of this body of knowledge. I have embedded myself in every code. I found practical ways to create what I call the Power of the Third Win – you win, I win, the planet wins. This book is about that journey, the journey to find Humanity's Master Code.

With this book, I attempt to offer new insights and ways to challenge societal, business and political leaders alike, with doing things differently. The book extends into a website with the name www.spiraldynamicsglobal.com where a depth of articles, blogs, newspaper clips, academic theses and other sources of Spiral Dynamics application can be found. This body of knowledge will also emerge and deepen over time.

I will gently suggest that many of our usual constructive dialogue and leadership ways are limited whenever we are phased with complex, wicked, systemic problems where the risk to polarize is inherently present. Here I challenge leaders to construct sustainable cultures where leadership develops, propagates and updates a compelling vision, a sense of transcendent purpose and a series of superordinate goals to create a common cause for a complex culture.

In the words of Ken Wilber (spiraldynamics.net: np): “spiral dynamics is one of the first integral psychologies now available, and as presented by Don Beck, I give it my highest recommendation. It has profound implications for business, politics, education and medicine, and it will give you the tools to begin applying these revolutionary ideas in your own field immediately. Don't miss it!”

My hope is that through my life's work and this book, I can leave a legacy of value-adding social systems and functional geo-political spheres, while simultaneously inspiring individual leadership to co-create a future we all want.