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Running Numbers

Posted by Joseph Riggio on Tuesday, August 01, 2006

The impact of the Grave’s Values Set modeling today ...

Good Morning ...

For years we’ve known that values drive response through a process of setting up the way individuals and even whole societies perceive the world they live and operate in - simply put our values create our behaviors. Dr. Clare Graves spent a lifetime doing work around “values sets” of both individuals and cultures, eventually postulating a model of the evolutionary cycle of value systems. I’m going to do my best to make this as simple as possible ... Dr. Graves wrote extensively about at least six values sets that he delineated were fully evolved on the planet during the time of his work, and at least two more that were emerging (I think one of Dr. Graves favorite words might have been “emergent"). So we would have to consider at least eight values models if we were cataloging his life’s work. However, we really only need to speak about two of these for our purposes today ... his value sets “Five” and “Six.”

I’ve chosen these because they are by far the most prevalent in our current “modern, first-world” societies. Simply put these models represent the Materialistic and the Populist positions of values. I’ll begin by laying out what I think you’ll find in when you come into contact with these values as “types” using Dr. Graves work on modeling values.

Let me share just a little of my Grave’s Modeling process with you:

5s = SELF-PROTECTIVE, i.e.: self-interest pulled into the center of the individual and framed in terms of materialistic security. It’s about making sure “we have enough” - which is unbounded so therefore there can never be enough. There’s always someone who’s got more ... more money, more power, more knowledge, more skills ... more, more, MORE!!! And, anyone who’s got more is a threat of some kind, because they might have what you need/want at any moment and you won’t have it or have access to it. So the key is get “enough” so that, that can’t happen. “Remember there’s no one to count on but ourselves ... so get out there and do it to them, before they do it to us.”

6s = HEDONISTIC, i.e.: self-interest extended to the group and framed around “being happy and having fun.” It’s about life becoming an adventure ... in Disney-esque terms. Not “real” adventure ... i.e.: no threat, but the sense of adventure ... “WOW ... this is going to be exciting” ... to the bungee-company operator who’s been certified and licensed by the state with multi-million dollar liability insurance policies to cover any inadvertent errors ... “Are you sure that this will hold me and that everything will be okay?” This is the aspect of six that defers any real personal responsibility putting it onto the system instead ... to become responsible for taking care of them and others (think U.S. tort litigation if you will ... Advocate “become Senator” John Edwards standing tall on the shoulders of those nasty five doctors and hospitals delivering babies for dirty money ... that is rightfully “ours” ... er, I mean yours ...).

So you can probably begin to see how these values positions put people into conflict ... especially when they don’t even realize what’s in conflict are their values.

We’ll pick it up again tomorrow ...

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Princeton, NJ

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