A Review of Ken Wilber's All Quadrant/All Level Model

Our planet has become very small; any action by any of us may effect all of us. The health of each business affects the health of our planet on many levels economic, social, political, and personal wellness. Our ability to create material objects, such as nuclear bombs, has outpaced our universal consciousness. We see this in the U.S. where a few kids with guns wreak havoc on the enormous good created by millions of teen-agers.

We need every business to be healthy and that health includes maximizing resources and focusing on productive results. New ways of thinking are required now that our world has changed so radically. Even our understanding of information and what to do with it is vastly different than it was only a few decades ago. As Ken Wilber points out in A Theory of Everything, we are at the beginning of an entirely new age - the information age. In the entirety of human history as we now perceive it, there have been only five ages - foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, and now the information age. Carl Sagan's one-year calendar of development beginning with the big bang puts the widespread development of science and technology and the emergence of a global culture as occurring in that last second (11:59:59) of that metaphorical year. Through the internet, and so many other streams of communication, we are gaining information in nearly overwhelming amounts. This is a shift of tremendous proportions! Perhaps, it is a boundless opportunity, but is there an adequate map on how to get where we are going, or some way to focus on what we should do? Our maps, even the tools we make maps with, have changed.

An all quadrant/ all level ("AQAL") approach to problem analysis and solution entails using powerful new strategies as a map to support the new thinking required for today's world. This AQAL approach is based on the combined brilliance of Ken Wilber's work, such as that found in A Theory of Everything and Integral Psychology, with Don Beck's and Chris Cowan's, work with Spiral Dynamics. With this approach we discover new ways to construct our maps - maps which can promote a phenomenal level of success. Though "success" must also get redefined in our new universal information age.

Ken Wilber advocates viewing any project or endeavor through the 4 quadrants of human interaction. These are two that are objective and two that are subjective. For each of these two there is an individual and a collective subpart. Thus, we have behavioral objective (i.e. the brain), social interobjective (i.e. systems theory), personal subjective (i.e. personal psychology) and cultural (i.e. our worldview).

Don Beck and Chris Cowan of the National Values Center built on the seminal work of Dr. Clare Graves who developed a Value Systems theory of "levels of human existence" and married this work with that of biologist Richard Dawkins' concept of "memes". Together these create Spiral Dynamics‚ a way of understanding human thinking and behavior which shifts away from the surface behavior of issues, ideas, beliefs, and actions to the WHY and HOW of the behavior and thinking. Beck and Cowan refer to this as value memes - vMEMEs. Spiral Dynamics identifies 8 levels of human consciousness and behavioral development as a way to understand human behavior and thinking.

Thus combining detailed information on these eight levels of human consciousness and viewing each level through each of the four quadrants articulated by Ken Wilber provides a comprehensive picture of the full dynamics affecting a particular problem or project. This state of the art approach provides the information needed to make decisions in the context of the great information available today. For more information, or to give us your ideas, email us at connect@cgrowth.com .