A short history of E-C Theory and Spiral Dynamics
(part of a series of posts introducing E-C Theory and Spiral Dynamics)
E-C theory was developed by a man called Clare Graves. In the early 1950s he was a psychology professor who had an itch to scratch, but he could not quite find the spot. His students kept asking him which of the psychological models that were prevalent at the time actually worked. The problem was, as far as he could tell, none of them did. This inspired him to develop an experiment that he hoped would shed some insight on the matter. It went something like this.
He set an assignment for for one of his new freshman classes. In this assignment he asked his students to write a description of what they considered to be ideal human behaviour. He then passed these papers to another group of freshman students who did not know the first group and asked them to group the papers into categories. The only condition on them being grouped was that the students thought that the papers were similar.
He then repeated, washed and rinsed the same experiment for the next nine years and then spent the next twenty years adding new variables, cross correlating with other psychological research and performing longitudinal studies.
The end result of all this was a pile of data and a theory with a schizophrenic name. At the time he stopped writing he referred to it as the ‘Emergent, Cyclical, Double-Helix Model of Adult Human Biopsychosocial Systems’, which is a bit shorter than some of his earlier names. Unfortunately, while Graves was writing his magnum opus he had a stroke after which he never managed to finish his book.
Fortunately his work did not completely die with him, several of his students including Christopher Cowan and Don Beck set up in business as consultants using Graves work to help people and in particular businesses. They needed a business name that would help them sell their wares and they came up with the name Spiral Dynamics.
The Spiral Dynamics team carried on where Graves left off, their studies expanding with a more cross cultural perspective and looking at the specific problems that their clients were faced with. Eventually, they wrote a book, published in 1996 called, ‘Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change‘.
A few years later Cowan and Beck parted ways. Both carried on in the same vein of business consultancy, however both also developed in new directions as well. Cowan, along with his new partner Natasha Todorovic managed to unearth a lot of Graves original manuscript and published ‘The Never Ending Quest‘, they also continued their consultancy, training and empirical studies. Meanwhile Don Beck had teamed up with Ken Wilber, a philosipher/psychologist who had used Spiral Dynamics as part of his AQAL theory. Beck and Wilber together renamed the theory ‘Spiral Dymanics Integral’ and this is also used in consultancy and training.
There are differences between Graves original E-C theory, the early Cowan and Beck Spiral Dynamics, the Cowan and Todorovic Spiral Dynamics and the Beck and Wilber Spiral Dynamics Integral. I originally encountered this body of work while reading Wilbers ‘Theory of Everything’ and his other books. However, on reading some criticisms of Wilbers work, which I agreed with, I no longer ascribe to the Spiral Dynamics Integral model (I will go into detail about this in a later post). I later read the original Spiral Dynamics Book and The Never ending Quest, which I then followed up by attending the SD1 and SD2 training with Cowan and Todorovic. I now lean quite strongly towards the Cowan and Todorovic camp, but I do have my criticisms of their work as well. I will explore my criticisms and my own stance in more depth once I have finished fleshing out the main theory as it will make more sense then. I prefer to use the term E-C theory rather than Spiral Dynamics, which is the term used throughout The Never Ending Quest. Another name that is sometimes used is ECLET. Most articles on the web use the term Spiral Dynamics and few people would know what I am talking about if I never mentioned it so I sprinkle the term around here and there and always use it when specifically talking about work done after Graves.
(The source for this information is from the Never Ending Quest, the original Spiral Dynamics book, the SD1 and SD2 courses and the the three main websites to do with Spiral Dynamics: www.spiraldynamics.org, www.spiraldynamics.net and www.clarewgraves.com. This wikipedia article is also pretty good. )
Tags: E-C Theory, ECLET, SD1, SD2, Spiral Dynamics