Values and Leadership: A Conversation with Alan Tonkin
Alan Tonkin is the Chairman and CEO of the Global Values Network (GVN) an international consulting business committed to the practical use of the Values Technology originally developed by Professor Clare Graves in the 50’s and further developed by Dr. Don Beck over the last 30 years from the early 70’s.
The Global Values Monitor (GVM) developed and owns the unique proprietary technology providing the capacity to map global values under the umbrella of the recently introduced WorldSCAN project and is an integral part of the GVN structure.
Dr. Beck is closely involved with the GVN in the further development of the GVM WorldSCAN Values Mapping approach as well as other practical applications using the values technology. Current GVN initiatives include a values mapping exercise in the South East Asia region, a EuroSCAN as well as a similar project in Southern Africa covering the SADEC Region which may be further extended.
Q: By way of background would you tell us about how you met and worked with Don Beck in South Africa?
A: I first met Don when a colleague of mine on the board of MS&A invited him to visit our company in South Africa during 1980. Don came out and conducted a series of workshops with our senior executives to explain how values technology (Spiral Dynamics) worked. Following the workshops we saw that there were major benefits in using this approach and asked Don to work with us on an ongoing basis. The result was that we put a whole system in place throughout the organization in order to support this approach.
You must also remember that at that time in South Africa there was massive change taking place at all levels of our society. Both organized business and government realized that there had to be major changes in the way South Africa was organized and run. In moving forward as a company we were able to demonstrate how this approach could be used effectively not only in business but also in all facets of daily life.
Don Beck continued to visit South Africa for us and others on a regular basis over the period from the early 80’s to mid-90’s and we developed a number of other innovative initiatives together over this time. It was during this time that Don and I developed a number of the concepts which were subsequently later incorporated into the Global Values Network and its website www.globalvaluesnetwork.com which looks at the practical applications of values technology in day to day life from organizations to the individual.
Q: In that experience how was Spiral Dynamics most effective?
A: Understanding values technology allowed us to illustrate the fact that it was not race but shared values that needed to be built on in the country, as well as in organizations of all types. Our company was situated in a very conservative, rural part of South Africa and it was only by using our knowledge of the values approach that we were able to demonstrate that there was “a better way of viewing the world.”
At this time (early 1980’s) many people from the tribal areas were moving to the cities into formal employment and this indirectly led to the formation of labour unions. At the same time the government was also changing its thinking and was moving from a more bureaucratic (Blue) stand to a more flexible (Orange) enterprise type approach.
This allowed for a number of other critical initiatives including the Chairman of our company (John Hall) being asked to Chair the National Peace Accord. This body was instrumental in keeping the political negotiations on track during the very volatile period of transition in the early 90’s leading up to the first democratic elections in 1994.
In addition many of us from business were involved in assisting where possible in moving values forward politically as well as in business. The real role of business is often downplayed, as business people are pragmatic and realized the massive contribution they could make at that time in our history.
Q: And today you are continuing this work with the Global Values Network. What is that about?
A: The Global Values Network (GVN) is working with a wide variety of client organizations both in South Africa plus countries like Brazil, the Philippines as well as in other parts of Africa in order to assist in spreading the practical use of values technology (Spiral Dynamics).
We believe that the original theory developed by Clare Graves is very elegant and following the work done by Don Beck needs exposure to a wider global audience in terms of delivering practical results on the ground.
We have also developed the Global Values Monitor (GVM) in order to be able to monitor values systems change over time. The GVM uses technology to offer on-line surveys that are custom made for the particular client organization. This can vary from businesses to countries and anywhere in between.
In addition to the GVM we have also developed a global mapping system that allows the data collected to be used in a variety of ways including “Values Maps” for the particular organization/country surveyed. This uses GPS and GIS technology allied to hand held computers such as the HP iPac to collect data on the ground in isolated areas where there is no Internet connectivity. We also use mobile technology to assist in this.
Q: What have been the most important things you have learned from this project?
A: You never stop learning from others in different societies on how to effect real and positive change. Often the developed Western countries and companies believe that the one approach fits all scenario works. However, following Iraq and other similar global situations people are realizing that leadership in developing and underdeveloped societies requires a very different approach to succeed in the medium to long term.
We tend to specialize in developing economies as the range of values systems is wider in these countries and the challenges and opportunities are also far greater. We also work with transnational organizations to advise them on the types of leadership style that can work best in a particular environment.
Q: In your work with leadership you use values as a focus in gathering and feeding back to senior executive teams data, thereby helping them get meaning out of it. You link the use of values with Peter Senge’s approach to systems.
A: I’m a great supporter of systems theory. That’s why I see Spiral Dynamics as being such an important system. It is an open system within itself and it infringes on so many other things. I’ve been saying to Don [Beck] for a long time that it is no use for him to just talk to the converted, which is by and large what he does. He really needs to be talking to the unconverted and getting out there and talking to people in business. He really needs to obtain a major funding source, but Don has been talking about getting major funding for as long as I’ve known him. I think part of the difficulty that he has is that he has not taken the next step and put a lot of this technology and theory that he’s got into good practical language that people can understand.
I am currently having conversations with Graham Linscott who authored the recent book Uhuru & Renaissance on values written in a very understandable way. The Graves/Beck SDi values approach is explored fully in Uhuru & Renaissance and is an excellent example of how values influence global events, including those in Africa. I believe that at this time we need to put out a further book containing practical examples of “Values in Action” using values technology for the better understanding of values.
In today’s world people want instant solutions. We have no instant solutions. This is a process. If you start understanding where the process can take you, you can actually use this technology very, very effectively. That’s where there is a slight difference of approach between the way that I go about things and the way that Don goes about things. We’ve done quite a lot of work in places like Brazil and the Philippines and I’m just about to do some work on East Africa. I think what people find attractive is that I can actually present this work in terms of what’s going on in developing countries.
This is where I think it’s easy to be wise after the event, but I think a lot of the issues that are handled presently by the United States and in Europe are actually looked at because people almost instinctively believe that they’re talking to people in other countries who carry the same set of values that they carry. This is absolutely incorrect. We’ve got to find a way of bridging that gap and getting down there and talking to those people who carry virtually all of the values that Don’s got in the Spiral - from Beige through to Green. I don’t believe that there are too many second tier values around. I think if you can find most of the first six, you’re doing pretty well.
Q: I agree. So the approach that I take is really more focused on what I guess Clare Graves might have called ‘horizontal development’ rather than vertical development?
A: Right. Could you explain that to me a little bit more?
Q: Yes, it means working with people at the level of values and at the world view that they currently hold and helping them make that a little more sophisticated approach in terms of a more integral perspective. This involves being able to bring all the different lines of development into awareness and attention as they’re moving forward, whether it’s in their lives or whether it’s in their businesses. Both are involved.
A: I would agree with you totally. This is also our approach because I do believe Don’s’ absolutely right. Don’s got this saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Q: Yes, and everybody has a right to be who they are, which is Clare Graves point.
A: Yes! I’m a great believer that you don’t try and change people. You can show them other ways of doing things, but you don’t try and change them because individuals want to be whom they are. Some people will change if they see that there is another way, but other people will feel very comfortable right where they are.
The strength of the developed democracies in Europe and America as well as countries like Australia and New Zealand is that there is this “core blue” that’s around that makes the trains run on time, that fixes the roads, that does all those things. I live in a country, here in South Africa, where there are lots of really positive things going on, so don’t take these as negative comments.
Unfortunately, what we’ve got in many of our government departments and many of our cities, towns and villages is complete lack of understanding of the need to put people into those key jobs to keep the country going where you actually need the trains to run on time. We need the roads to be well cared for; we need things to be maintained. Some of it is an issue of skills; some of it is the case of putting the wrong people in the wrong place. But people will make their own mistakes and we have to try and help them as best we can.
I am currently involved in my own community as Chairman of the Greater St Francis Forum that is engaged in making a positive difference in our area. We have the full spectrum of values from Beige through to Green with a small amount of 2nd Tier Yellow in our broader community. This fully integrated project is focused on working with our local Municipal Council in order to obtain basic efficiencies across the board for all residents. It is focused on the issue of leadership as well as other key output areas.
For those interested in an integral approach on the ground I suggest you visit our website www.stfrancisbay.org for details of the issues we face on a daily basis and how we are solving a number of these with our local authority in a developing country.
Q: When you’re working with corporations and the executive group helping them see the role that these different value systems play in their companies, are there types of interventions that you do with them? I don’t know what rubric it would go under. It could go in the area of strategic planning, training and development, team building, a variety of things like that. What is it that you would do with the company once they’ve decided that there is a value set that they need to pay attention to and work with?
A: Probably more than one. That’s a very good question and I know you focus very much on integral leadership. I believe that Integral Leadership is actually helping people at the top being able to identify what the skill sets and values sets are that are required in the organization to continue to make it successful. In addition then recognizing that not everybody needs to have all of those skill/values sets. There is an actual fact that, not only in South Africa but all other places where I’ve worked, most companies want very, very strong Orange leadership to make those companies successful. However, increasingly what we are seeing is the energy and other companies moving very much into green. They are very aware of the need for environmental conservation and similar issues, because they know they’ve got a public out there that they actually have to service in terms of environmental values being important.
Q: I know that Shell took a leadership role and other companies have joined with them in looking at hydrogen technology. Is that an example of what you are referring to?
A: I mean the advertising that the companies are using to make people aware of what they are doing in environmental conservation and not polluting the globe. When people are very strong Orange often there is antipathy to people who are very strong blue and want to take it a step at a time. We say to senior executives that those people are the key people in your organization. They actually make things work. We need to help reinforce that, but try and bring that next level of flexibility in so that people start to see another way of doing things and modifying that Blue. You talk about horizontal movement and the value shifts. In fact when we are developing people at the same level we are actually moving them as part of the spiral.
Q: So it could be diagonal development—moving within blue, but moving from maybe core blue to blue-orange?
A: I actually use a couple of terms when I’m talking to people about it. As an example you can actually have red-blue, negative blue or negative green. You can have positive blue. You can have blue-orange and a whole lot of ranges in between. That is at one level, but often as you know, you don’t get just one core value system. There is probably one that is the predominant one. But for instance in a developing country like South Africa, we’ve got lots of people that have come from the rural areas and tribal backgrounds with a very strong chief in charge who are now becoming urbanized. They are in the city and having great difficulty in making that shift. Some of them go right into red. That’s why in South Africa we have got a lot of crime. Of course, we’ve got a constitution that’s as advanced as any constitution in the world. We’ve got politicians and lawmakers who are actually giving us green law enforcement. Now, green law enforcement doesn’t work with red criminals! You’ve got to start understanding how to deal with these people at the different values levels.
Q: What’s really interesting to me is that if everybody has a right to be who they are and we want to think about leadership in corporations or in communities, we need to begin looking at what is the nature of the relationship between someone who is in Red for example, and leadership in these contexts versus someone who is in Blue or Orange or Green?
A: Absolutely because there is leadership in all of those levels.
Q: That’s right. And it’s not just the fact that there is leadership at all those levels, but that there are people at all those levels having to deal with a formal leadership system and whatever informal leadership systems emerge within the company or the community.
A: Yes, I think you and I are on the same page on a lot of this stuff, so I’m not going to tell you anything new, but I use the analogy of a Formula One racing car with all these gears. I say to people: When you’re in this Formula One racing car, you actually have to start the thing in the right gear to get it moving in the first place, otherwise you’re going to stall on the starting grid. But then when you’re driving down that straight and you want to go into a curve, you better make sure you’re in the right gear to go around the curve. It’s something that most people can understand. So you can say, “Now we’re going into a new situation in the company. The economy is improving or it’s going down or whatever. We are in a shrinking or expanding market. What do we need to do? Do we stay in the same gear? Do we carry on doing the same things that we’ve been doing for the last two or three or four years? Or do we start thinking about, “Hey, we need another gear! Do we change down or do we change up?”
So we actually start giving people some scenario stuff. There has been some fascinating work done over the last 20 years in South Africa with scenario planning, a lot of the stuff that Clem Sunter in Anglo American used to do. I don’t know if you know about Ari de Geus who used to do the scenario planning with Royal Dutch Shell? Ari has done some work with us over the years.
Q: In the writing I’ve been doing in the Integral Leadership Review in the last few issues my lead article has been about the use of scenarios in Integral Leadership Development. This is an area I’m very interested in so I’d be very much interested to hear what your experience with scenarios has been.
A: There has been some fascinating work done going back to the Mont Fleur Scenario’s in South Africa that was about the time that Don [Beck] first came to South Africa. Clem Sunter—who you probably haven’t heard about - is a Director of the Anglo American Corporation (AAC). You can track him down because he’s written quite a lot of books. Sunter is a very interesting guy who is also a Rhodes Scholar. He did a lot of scenario planning for Anglo-American, which is basically into mining and manufacturing right across the full spectrum of our economy. A lot of the scenario work in the 80’s was done to not only assist business, but also to start painting some pictures for the politicians.
That’s when I think the penny dropped with the politicians from all sides of the political spectrum. They realized they really had to make a change. It wasn’t possible in South Africa to go on as things had been. There were some other scenarios used that involved some of the ANC [African National Congress] people - before they were in power - in looking at what the high road and the low road would be for South Africa as a country. I really believe that a lot of that scenario work has been used very effectively in trying to manage the economy. Our economy has really been doing quite well - not as well as it needs to do to create sufficient jobs, but it’s been stable. The country stabilized. We’ve got a reasonable amount of political stability. There are a lot of positive things going on in South Africa and for people who are interested in global change, Don always has made the point that if you look at the percentages of skin colors and nationalities and so on, there are approximately the same percentages of white, black, colored and Asian people in South Africa as there are in the global community - not quite the same, but close enough to say, “Well, hang on a moment! Is South Africa the crucible (model) for global change?” In addition I believe our values mix is also similar to the global mix. This is fascinating. If we can get South Africa to work we can also get the world to work in a much more integral way.
Q: Or at least the microcosm that could serve as a model?
A: Yes, and I think it is because at the end of the day—all this talk that is going on now around the World Trade Organization and restructuring the United Nations—politicians and leaders world-wide are searching for global models that will actually help them change from the Industrial Age. A lot of the models that we’ve got are still from the Second World War era and before.
Q: In the July 2005 issue of Integral Leadership Review there is an interview with Joseph Rost who wrote 21st Century Leadership. He states that most definitions of leadership in the 21st Century are really about effective management. What’s required is a shift in our definition of leadership in the post-industrial era. His definition is probably Green. He doesn’t talk about leaders/followers; he talks about leaders and collaborators. But there is some truth in that notion in the sense that each individual imbues with someone else a leadership role of one sort or another and they have that role themselves in relation to others or under other conditions. So, leadership for me is not something that is based on the personality of an individual, but is something that emerges in the context and it can be different people taking on those roles.
A: It can be. I’ve had experience of both. The company (MS&A) where I was on the board was globally competitive in producing ferrochrome and stainless steel. We had a very charismatic chairman who was very supportive of the work that we were doing with Don [Beck]. We had overall support from almost all of our board members with this work. Different people brought different support systems to the table. I do believe they liked Peter Senge’s approach that scenario planning is one thing; producing that vision for the future is another. Sometimes a group can do that more effectively than one solitary leader, but you actually need to work through what is your organizational vision and purpose and implement the organization design and structures that are appropriate for the life conditions that exist in the environment in which it operates.
Q: I would suggest that in many businesses faced with increasing complexity of market, the world economy and so forth, it increasingly requires an approach to leadership that involves a group and not just an individual.
A: This requires strong teams at all levels of the organization or you’re just not going to be successful in this new global market. It’s very interesting - and I know a lot of it is currency related—but the Chinese are causing all sorts of problems for manufacturers around the world because their currency is undervalued at the moment. I know that there’s been a lot of unhappiness about how the Chinese are eating into the American and EU markets with a lot of their products, particularly textiles.
Q: Well, it’s showing up in lots of other ways too. They now have the ability to leverage some of the wealth that they’ve accumulated to enter into the International Oil Market, for example.
A: That’s right! That’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing consumption going up. When you’ve got a country with as many people as they have, the whole question of consumption becomes a very important factor for how the global economy is going to work, because it’s pushing up all sorts of things to very high levels including the oil price.
Q: So, in your work, do you actually get involved in companies in what you would think of as leadership development?
A: Yes, I guess you could call it that. I don’t personally call it leadership development. I would rather talk about having a strategic vision and purpose and then we talk strategy out of these issues. We work together on it, so they’ll start understanding and implementing a lot of the values work themselves. I keep in touch with them on a fairly regular basis and make sure that we are going in a particular direction. Sometimes it’s nice to have that outside reality check.
Q: You helping them understand the value sets that exist in their organizations and systems. Along with that they would be getting a handle on the value sets they themselves are bringing to the table. This would enhance their awareness as well as their focus on where they need to develop themselves.
A: Yes. I’m a great believer that consultants or people that work with organizations can assist in helping people to open doors, but at the end of the day, once the doors open, they’re the ones who have to make their thing work. What I’ve tried to do is to just put these things into fairly straightforward terms. I tend to believe that if you keep things nice and simple, the simple things are the ones that are understood and the fully understood concepts are the ones that work in practice.
Q: We haven’t talked at all about Integral. We haven’t talked about Ken Wilber’s work and Don Beck’s relationship to that. Has any of this work been influential on you?
A: I’ve read some of Wilber’s work. Some of it rings a bell with me. I do believe though that in many cases if you start talking to people in corporate organizations about some of Ken Wilber’s stuff, you actually lose them. But I read what he puts out and I think some of his work is useful. I really believe that what Don has developed and the original Clare Graves work is really more practical. It’s much more important than anybody really realizes right now. There has got to be an opportunity to actually make this much more widely understood. If you can actually get to the right people and make them understand or give them the tools to understand, they’ll take the thing and run with it. They’ll run faster than you can ever run by yourself. The challenges facing organizations require a whole lot of people all working together in concert. I really believe that’s what the next challenge is for this SDi values technology that Don has developed.
Q: I find value in the integral work - not just Ken Wilber, but also others like Mark Edwards and Ron Cacciope in Australia and a number of people here in the United States and in Europe, England and Germany in particular—they’re extending the ideas, the notions and the models. Integral Theory can be looked at in a couple of ways. One is in terms of development - going up vertically in the spiral - and second in terms of a mapping approach that helps people to make sure that they’re not getting lost in blind spots. With the four quadrants we have a map that basically tells us to pay attention to what’s going on inside the individual, their behaviors and the relationships between those while also looking at the relationship between what the individual is doing and the notion of the culture and the systems that are operative. Bringing those all together seems to me to be one of the big strengths of the Integral Approach and one that I would think that would be intriguing to you given your interest in systems as well as Spiral Dynamics.
A: I agree with that. However, my sense is that a lot of what you’re talking about now is coming out of developed countries. Even Australia is really a developed country these days. I think at that level it certainly applies. But when you start getting into the developing countries, then you start finding that the skills mix is not the same. So the concentration and the organization have to be on just bringing the skills up to a competitive level. That’s an Orange value. It is at a competitive level in terms of where you want the organization to be or where the organization needs to be if it’s going to continue to grow.
Have you read any of Thomas Barnett’s book called The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century? He was previously a strategist for the Naval War College and is now an independent consultant. He says there are core countries - the developed economies and some of the developing economies like Brazil and India and South Africa. Then we have a gap. The gap is with the countries where basically there is no system in place, no proper values.
There is a lot of Red Power around dictators and failed states and there is also generally chaos. In addition there is little or no economic growth and all those things that you see on the TV, the bad news stories like Zimbabwe, Somalia and other similar examples.
Tom Barnett has just come out with his latest book “Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating” which is a follow up to the first book. This provides some action steps when linked to values technology are incredibly important for real progress to be made in global progress towards a more prosperous and peaceful world.
What we have is a technology, using our on-line surveys where we collect this information in the company. We can actually map the company in terms of where the value systems lie. So, we can take a sample of people who are computer literate and they can fill in the survey on line. For people who aren’t computer literate there is a simplified questionnaire that gets collected by hand and is put onto a handheld computer by the person who is asking the questions. The input gets downloaded and put into the system. It gives a tremendous base on which to draw, especially when we have five or six different value systems, all in the same organization. Then we know how to start working with those systems to try and make the organization more effective.
Q: I imagine then you are anticipating technologies that are going to support this work?
A: Well, there are some technologies that are now starting to become available. One that we’ve been looking for and haven’t found the full answer to yet is the capability for using a GIS system or something similar. It’s interesting - now that Yahoo and Microsoft and all these other people are going into global mapping. We are looking at doing something along the lines of a contour map where you will be able to start with the Beige value system, working right through the Purple, the Red, the Blue, the Orange, the Green and so on. You will actually look at the map of the world and see the various countries. It will look like a contour map, but it will be a “values map.”
Q: Don has put together - or maybe it comes out of your work - a horizontal view of a “hillside” where you see the layers of the values.
A: It’s very similar to that. The technology is almost there now. We’ve tried some of this in Brazil and the Philippines. We’re not quite there yet, but we believe that it is actually almost do-able now. You can certainly do it in a company, because in a company it’s a lot easier and you can take a cut through the company. You can do it as a vertical graphic. You can show what the values profile looks like. It’s quite interesting when you start sharing that, both at the top level in the organization and at other levels.
In developing countries we also use an analogy of soccer. In South Africa for many people in organizations soccer is really a game that people understand. You can use the rules of soccer as being a way of illustrating to people how a company is run and why a company needs to work in a particular way. It’s a very effective way of putting through that sort of message in very simple values terms.
Q: Excellent. You mentioned that you were working in the Philippines, as well as Brazil; what kinds of companies are you working with? What kinds of systems?
A: In Brazil I worked with a very innovative guy who became a good friend that I met while I was in London, who was the Chief Executive of the Brazilian equivalent of Disney World. There is a very large theme park just outside of Sao Paulo. But he has got other interests and he now heads up one of the largest consulting firms in Brazil and they put together a series of workshops, which I went and ran with him. We assisted them in understanding the values technology. In the Philippines we worked with a different group of people altogether. It was more government and NGO’s, because they have different problems there. I found Brazil fascinating because there are many similarities between Brazil and South Africa even though language is obviously a problem because the people speak Portuguese. But many people in business seem to speak very good English. So, as long as you speak English, you’re usually okay.
Q: In the Philippine example, were you working around a particular theme?
A: No. Some people approached me and said they had heard about values technology and what is it all about? We had some conversations on the telephone and the Department of Internal Affairs was very keen to get to know more about values technology. I went over and ran some workshops with people from the Department and also some general workshops for people from the NGO community. There were very few people from business present and my sense is that I didn’t get the same depth of questions and understanding from people in the Philippines that I got from the people in Brazil. In Brazil they understood the full spectrum while in the Philippines it was more limited in the way they interpreted the values approach.
Q: So you have no sense of any follow up or any results that they’ve achieved or anything?
A: I think at the end of the day, they found it interesting in the Philippines, but maybe their problems are at a level where they didn’t see the necessity to take the next step. Don has always been one to tell me, “Sometimes you just walk away.” And I felt that was almost the case there. Maybe their problems were at a different level and we’re trying to show them how some of these things fit into an overall strategy. They weren’t looking at the bigger picture at that stage. There was a lot of Green thinking, which may have complicated matters to an extent, especially from some of the people that I worked with there. But again, I don’t think it was a representative sample. The people that I met in Brazil were much more from the business sector and had their feet on the ground.
Q: I’d like to go back to the notion of the values and of leadership. Let’s look at this from the point of view of the people who hold the values, not necessarily the point of view of the leaders per se. Some of this may be fairly obvious, but could we just walk through purple through green and talk about this a little bit? In South Africa with the presence of purple in urban areas and coming into entry level jobs in some businesses and other sectors of the economy, how would you characterize the kind of leadership that someone who is purple would value most in a leader?
A: I think somebody coming from tribal (Purple) into a more formal work environment is looking for somebody who is going to lead them in a very similar way. In other words, you must not give them a Red (Power) leader, for sure. They want a leader who is a very good, strong positive Blue (Order and Stability) who plays by the rules, who understands that there needs to be a structure, because when you look at people that come out of the Tribal Purple value system, they are used to very strict rules in the tribe. There are very clear ways to do things. Some of these things are breaking down in the rural areas now with people being much more aware of what’s going on in the urban areas. But good, strong Blue Order leadership is really probably the most positive way of actually moving people from Purple through Red into Blue. In my experience, I think that’s what a lot of the Purple and many people who come out of the tribal areas who are very tribal oriented really appreciate. They react very well to strong, positive leadership.
Q: What about people who have shifted from Purple into Red or who are just centered there? What kind of leadership are they looking for?
A: Positive Red leadership as well as negative Red leadership, if you can find a good positive role model. I think particularly of some of the work that I’ve done in the mining industry, because I came out of the mining industry originally.
Q: Which is where you worked with Don, right?
A: My original training was a mining engineer and I did a lot of work in my early career in the underground environment, which is a tough environment. There you can have very good, positive Red (Power) leadership. Find those Red leaders and get them thinking in a way that aligns with the direction of the organization. They can actually be very good with Purple people as well. But obviously what you don’t want is a Purple person coming into the organization and being managed by negative Red. Negative Red is actually going to do so much damage to the individual and the group.
Q: What about someone centered in Blue? Let’s assume that they are centered in a variation on the theme of positive Blue. What kind of leadership are they looking for?
A: I think sometimes in this age of technology, we often underestimate how many good positive blue people are still needed. I think that there are two different scenarios for people in Blue. There is good, positive Blue leadership leading other people in Blue and just at a slightly different level, but just reinforcing what the people who are a part of the team are actually experiencing. Then there is another level. There is good, positive Orange Enterprise reinforcement where good Orange managers are actually very appreciative of good, positive Red and Purple, as well. So Integral Management or Integral Leadership in my terms doesn’t necessarily require people to be in second tier.
That’s where I think in practice, I would have a difference of opinion between people saying, “Well, you’ve got to be in Yellow (Integral) before you become able to manage in an integral way.” I’ve seen plenty of people who actually fit into positive Orange being able to manage Blues and Reds and Purples very well.
Q: I mentioned earlier that the idea of Integral is being used in a couple of different ways. One is to describe it as a theoretical framework and the other one is the level of development. That gets confused sometimes in the way people talk about it. People I know that are doing leadership development work with executives are really focusing in on core orange, where you find many of the CEO’s anyway. Their experience is very similar to what you’re describing. What about people who are in orange? If they are going to find a leader, obviously they can find another orange leader, but are they looking for qualities above them at all or in the kinds of leaders they want to follow?
A: My experience is that the people who are in Orange are looking for something more. They are almost getting ready to change gears, if you use my racing car metaphor. They start going one of two ways. In one way they might start changing their leadership style. With their moving from Orange Enterprise into positive Green instead of being the leader of the group, they become the leader as part of a group working with a very focused vision. The other area might be that somebody traverses through that fairly quickly and starts getting the first understandings of what I would call the real integral leadership style where they start being able to see clearly, to put it in Don’s terms, every one really matters. They see that you can actually use Orange and Blue and Red and Purple and even Beige in certain cases. You can use those all in a very positive way.
When using them all together, there is a place for everybody to work together to achieve the overall objectives of the organization, whatever that might be. Some people will go naturally into more of a Green organization, which is a circle of equals almost. Others will take the next step and discover how they will I be able to use that circle of equals and other things as well.
Q: This is very interesting because one of the arguments that is made about second tier is that when one reaches yellow that one is then able to communicate and engage with all the first tier levels more effectively. But when one is centered in one of the first tier levels, there is conflict and there is difficulty in communicating and understanding across those levels. What I think I hear you suggesting is that when people move into Orange or when people move into Green that there is a capacity for being able to appreciate and understand the value sets at different levels and to engage with them in a constructive way.
A: Yes. People may not be able to articulate it quite as Don might articulate it in our different ways. My clear experience on this has been that I’ve worked with people that certainly haven’t been second tier and they have been able to do things with a group of people who have very different value systems. Instinctively, they’ve recognized those differences and being able to point them more in the right direction. Peter Senge uses the alignment model of showing how you get people moving in the same direction. He uses arrows with some arrows are pointing in the wrong direction. Transformational leaders do this. I don’t think we understand enough about integral leadership yet to understand how they would do this. There are leaders at different levels and that goes through from Purple to Red to Blue and right through the spectrum. People who actually understand that instinctively and do it. I’ve seen it happen many times.
Q: Do you have any notions about anything we can do beyond what we’ve already talked about to help foster that?
A: I think it’s a question of just working hard at it. Gary Player the international golfing star who is a South African said years ago - when somebody asked him why was he so successful at playing golf - “Well, I just practice a lot and the more I practice, the luckier I get.” I think that there is a lot of this in leadership, too. You’ve got to practice the things that work. You’ve got to practice them and keep on practicing them and being flexible enough to say hang on a moment; maybe we can do this differently. I like working with conflict, that’s when we’re moving beyond the traditional models, not only in the developed economies but also in business.
Business is global now. So what you’re seeing in global business, wherever it might be centered - in the United States or in South Africa or in China. Global business people are very much more flexible. That’s where I think business is important, because in actual fact, the places Don has had the most success has been with business people. They instinctively know they can’t stay where they are. They have got to keep on moving forward. They have got to find better ways of doing things. Sometimes people who are in government or NGO’s don’t have the same sort of need to make those shifts. People in business are a lot more flexible and more able to do that.
I listened to a fascinating interview on the BBC the other day where they were actually talking about exactly that. They were talking about how politics really peaked around the time of the Second World War. For a long time, people have seen politics was becoming less and less important in the world because major corporations were actually taking their place. That’s where I think the global corporations and other global organizations have got a tremendously important role to play especially as they often have greater financial resources available to them than many developing countries.
The last fifty years has seen massive advances in the real reduction of poverty. Globalisation can be a positive move for the global poor and disadvantaged, particularly in developing countries where the needs are so diverse and massive.
Q: People like you have a tremendously important role in helping them learn how to do that well.
A: You can only do your little bit. If we all do our little bit, then the world does become a better place for all of us as well as our children.
For those requiring further details Alan Tonkin can be contacted at aot@globalvaluesnetwork.com
27 November 2005