Basic Questions Section
What is SPIRAL DYNAMICS®?
The term, SPIRAL DYNAMICS®, means different things to different people. At NVCC it refers to a brand and a trademark defining NVCC’s workshops, training, consulting, assessments, services and various products incorporating the work of Clare W. Graves. These products and services are all designed to help you get at the map to the nature of human nature. Read more …
Is the Spiral About Waves or Particles?
Both. There are two ways to approach the theory included in SPIRAL DYNAMICS® programs. One views the emergent systems like overlapping waves that roll across the shifting sands of human nature. Each comes in gradually, breaks mightily and then folds back to become part of the next surge. There is overlap, mixing and interaction with as much emphasis on the transitions as on the peaks of the curves. Read more …
Is Spiral Dynamics a religion or cult? What about spirituality?
We get this question more and more. The answer is no. SPIRAL DYNAMICS® programs, products and services are not a religion—or a front for neoconservative politics, a New Age church, or representative of any particular ideology. Our work focuses on how people think about things like religion, and how religiousness, spirituality, non-belief, etc., fit their conceptions of their worlds. It is not about beliefs, but thinking about beliefs—the whys and wherefores. Spiritual experiences and concepts are the contents for analysis; the goal is to understand the process of conceptualization behind them. Read more …
More Complex Questions Section
Of Types and Turquoises
These days, students often come into our SPIRAL DYNAMICS® seminars having been pre-exposed to some variation on the theme of the Spiral. While there are some good representations of the point of view which begin to equip them well, other spin-offs are misleading in that they program participants into the typology trap – a color for everybody – or worse. Some versions foster obedient belief in the dogma of a quasi-religion with otherwise intelligent followers swathed in cultish saffron yellow robes and turquoise beanies more than critical thinking about emergent systems in human nature, how complex we are, and how much we still don’t know about who and why we are. Read more …
Are Existential Problems the same as troubles?
Thinking that Gravesian existential problems = difficulties is also a common confusion. Instead of troubles, think ‘problems’ in the sense of mathematical problems to solve; life equations to resolve in achieving a balanced state. “If the world is thus, then appropriate behavior is so.” These problems can be positive, negative, or neutral; what they represent is new factors and variables in the equation of living. In this sense, problems are growth-producing; they are not necessarily negative. Read more …