The Evolutionary Professional

All perspectives have equal validity, but they lack equal *value*, as they manifest different and varying levels of depth. #integral

I wrote the above line on facebook yesterday. Comments ensued:

@chris kosley said:

"Isn't value only assignable relative to a particular goal? Why should deep be inherently more valuable than shallow?"

To which I responded:

Thanks for asking the question. Good stuff.

What you say about value relative to a goal is true in other contexts [say, if I were talking about a skill or a thing; an object. But that is not what I was talking about.

I was talking about the inherent value in perspectives.

Why should deep be inherently more valuable than shallow? The simple answer is because it contains more. 

It requires more to demonstrate depth than it does to be shallow. It requires a larger embrace of the Kosmos. For instance, compassion is more valuable than anger because it requires a greater depth of development to demonstrate compassion than it does to simply get angry.

Therefore there *is* an inherent value that is greater.

Green [SD6] in Spiral Dynamics will not see this: they believe in flatland; all perspectives have equal value and it is all about cultural constructs and no culture is any "better" than any other culture. Of course they fail to realize that this perspective itself is a very high/deep level of development and stages below it do not share the sentiment.

Yellow realizes the folly in this, and its inherent falseness; Yellow [SD7] once again is fine with holarchies [stops judging them as bad or claiming they do not exist] as they are naturally occurring all around us.

And that is one of the charachteristics that truly distinguishes 1st Tier consciousness from 2nd Tier in the model. In other words, what distinguishes Integral.

There is so much good work being done in the world today. It is astonishing how many people are dedicating their lives more and more to helping others. The human potential movement has spawned organizations and individuals committed to bringing change to the world through changing the individual.

When Ghandi said “be the change you wish to see in the world”, he probably could not have imagined how many people would take up that call and attempt to make the world a better place by making themselves better people through self-reflexive observation and intentional changework.

As a result of the richness in the field that we can now experience, it is useful to distinguish among the many offerings. There are three basic approaches I have noticed, experienced, and participated in directly. They are: 1. Development 2. Transformation 3. Evolution. These are each useful in and of themselves. They are “good”. And yet they have limitations that come along with their benefits. Let us examine this together...

Personal Development is a huge and ranging field. Workshops exist for skill acquisition that are readily available in every major metropolitan area in the Western World, and Asia is quickly cathing on as well. Corporations, having long recognized that their only asset that increases in value over time is their people, send their people to workshops to accelerate that process—to increase their value.

You can attend workshops on money management, communication skills—be it negotiation, sales techniques, relationship models, etc.—health and fitness and well being, and the list goes on and on. What all of these workshops have in common is that they focus on one domain of your life. We could think of it as a vertical line—or multiple vertical lines—of development. When we acquire skills or we “develop” ourselves in this area or that area, we increase the level of that vertical line of development in that domain. Development takes time, investment, and persistence if we are to become developed in any particular area—in other words, to become competent in some area. Skill acquisition is necessary to be successful in this world.