This episode of the Social Enterprise Alliance Podcast aired on Tuesday, July 25th. This episode can be found on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

0:00:00.4 David: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Social Enterprise Alliance Podcast. Last week, we invited in Trace Bell and Tina Olsen of Open Aware Consulting to talk through a social concept called Spiral Dynamics. We learned about the framework and how it relates to different moments in human history. Today, we continue that conversation and go a bit further into how an understanding of the concept can help us in our social enterprises. Welcome back, Trace and Tina.

0:01:01.1 Lauren: I'm trying to make the connection between this is a collective view of human history, this is also a view of organizational structure, this is also an individual journey as well. It's interesting, it's cool to see all the different ways that that kind of appears. I'm just trying to put it all together in my brain, but I'm curious, is there ever a time when… In any one of those scenarios, people end up moving backwards to a stage or is it always kind of just this perpetual forward motion?

0:01:39.0 Trace: That's a really great question, and it actually seems like there's a bit of a debate within the Spiral community, at least from what I've seen, to this very phenomenon. Some people say, "No, you can't ever develop backwards." But then also some people say, "No, in times of extreme stress, people actually do regress." I personally fall more towards the latter side of that, I do actually think that people in extreme stress actually can regress and actually move back. Especially I think when people's early trauma is triggered and certain really… Certain trauma around early childhood experiences and certain unaddressed trauma surfaces, I actually do think people can regress to earlier stages and earlier levels of development.

0:02:27.2 Trace: Which I think it really just speaks to the importance of actively working on embodying the health and also actively working on healing the unhealth and healing the initial causes and triggers that cause us to fall into the unhealth of these stages, 'cause if they remain un-examined then certain… Stress is a natural part of life, and when stress comes and we feel overwhelmed, and something happens in our life that kind of makes us feel destabilized, we haven't really gone to the heart and the root of those triggers and those traumas, we actually can regress. That's my view of it.

0:03:01.6 Tina: Yeah, and what I would add is, going back to the model itself, one of the principles of healthy Stage Purple that we teach is that life is happening for you, not to you. And so if we find ourselves or if we find our organization in a place where we're at a stage where we didn't… We're frequently visiting some unhealth of Stage Red, let's say, and we typically think of ourselves as a Stage Green organization, then that pause for, why is this happening for us? Is this an opportunity for us to actually feel the pain of the unhealth of the Stage Red we've been in, so that we can actually feel the passion, the purpose, the positive momentum towards claiming our healthy Red? Because for example, we talked about the unhealth of Red being that overly egoic, that kind of narcissistic, dominator kind of mentality, but the unhealth of Red also is overly passive, it's letting everyone else take the lead and not needing to speak up.

0:04:09.4 Tina: And so you could definitely see where a green team might put a lot of ideas into the cooker, but no one's really willing to take it forward because there's not a lot of that healthy, empowered energy of someone really vulnerably putting themselves out there. And that's part of heart-centered power, is it's vulnerable. And so maybe if we find ourselves in an unhealthy Red position where we're asking our leader constantly to make the decision for us, let's say, and putting them in a role of having to be more of a Red leader, can we take a step back and say, "Why are we giving our power over all the time? Why aren't we going to our leader with our empowered recommendation?" And letting that leader then see with their sight line and the other things they know that we don't know about the situation, "Oh yeah, this recommendation actually fits really well and synergistically that uplifts everybody." Or, "Oh wow, I have a systems thinking gap on this team because this team thinks this is the best way to move forward, but they're not even taking in account this supplier or this customer that it's gonna leave out. What have I not fostered within this team for them to be able to fully systemically see this?" And so it really is such an evolutionary process that we kinda have to trust. If we're being dragged back into the unhealth, how is it happening for us?

0:05:34.5 David: Well, I think there's two words that I'm walking away from now that are really challenging what I need to be aware of as a leader. So I heard trauma and vulnerability, and it's like… So vulnerability being required, which means we're gonna be opening ourselves up, which means we probably likely will be hurt and exposing past trauma. Trauma also then informing past versions of where we might have fallen onto the spiral and defaulting to that, and I think I agree. I can see in my own life and then at times where I have maybe unintentionally caused trauma for someone else that's re-triggering something else. But also I think, again, why this is so important to unpack as social entrepreneurship leaders is, for many of us, there is a social component where you are trying to serve. And often, many of us are serving a people group. For example, I know some of our members have second chance employment, where they have taken people who have been incarcerated or really working through training programs or whatever, and again, that model can fall into many under-resource types of communities, but that individual that we are trying to serve is going to be carrying a lot of trauma potentially with them.

0:07:00.0 David: So I could even see where if I'm leading an organization and there's a moment where I need to be a healthy Red, the healthy… Even if it's healthy Red, I could trigger some hard traumas for people that I'm desperately trying to serve, and how do I be aware of all of that whole thing in my mind. So, now I have 1,000 more questions and I hope you have three more hours to talk through them. [laughter]

0:07:21.1 Tina: Well, this is one of the reasons why we set up how we did, because as soon as you start diving into this deeper and get into more examples and more lived experience, and it's one of the reasons why we feel like this model is so valuable for organizations to take a journey with. And it's not the kind of thing that can easily be done by a leader alone, one of the Tier 2 values is that we are truly living an interdependent life. And so, that means that a leader goes from being responsible in the earlier stages to your point to a servant kind of in Stage Green to… In Tier 2, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with many resources, and obviously your Social Enterprise Alliance is a great example of that, of being able to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a peer group who all have the same intentions. But really one of the questions I leave you all with is, how are you all being supported then in that endeavor? Because when you're serving populations where triggers are coming up often, traumas are coming up often, there are sensitivities you're aware of, and you're wanting to be…

0:08:38.0 Tina: To quote a book that we've got sitting on our desk, a healing organization, that concept that instead of an organization re-traumatizing everyone everyday and it going home as a negative ripple effect, where you can only binge watch Netflix and eat pizza for dinner, you can't even interact kindly with your kids, 'cause you're so burnt out at the end of the day. What does it look like that the organization is actually a place of healing for everybody who encounters it, and you go home with a positive ripple effect, and you go home with enough energy to be a positive contributor to your family and to your community. That is such a key flip, but that does require a journey and a process and support in order to be able to continue on that road and really transmute… If I can use that term, transmute that heaviness and that inertia that's kind of been in… The momentum that's been in one direction and turn it around completely to make it positive, which obviously is at the heart of what you all are doing, at Social Enterprise Alliance.

0:09:45.4 Trace: Yeah, so the concept of Social Enterprise, as everyone was probably aware of, is very aligned to the ideals in Stage Green and Tier 2. It's been a massive leap to understand that organizations can have a triple bottom line, care about people, purpose and profit. So we're already… This discussion is already centered around the ideals of Stage Green and Tier 2. So, the really important thing is if we're already here, how do we go back and how do we fully embody and fully integrate the health so that we are living in the most holistic integrated manner that we can… 'Cause if we want to… If we want to help bring other people into wholeness and bring the communities that we serve into wholeness, we need to be in a place of wholeness within ourselves, and that's… Ultimately why we love the Spiral so much is we see it as a tool for wholeness, and we see ourselves as guides, almost like guides to wholeness, and this is just a map that helps us get there in such a beautiful way.

0:10:49.5 Tina: Yeah, one of the coolest things about all this too, is there are these leaps… So you can put on your skeptical hat for a moment and be like, "Who came up with this? What exactly are we even talking about?" And obviously, the number one thing we say to people with skepticism is, don't believe us, don't just take what we're saying as some sort of dogma that we're trying to implant you with, but rather feel this into your own personal human experience and see whether or not it feels like it has truth and usefulness for you, and if not, we send you love and wish you well. And I know you'll find the teachers that are meant for you. But if this does resonate, one of the reasons it might be resonating with you is that same spark that came to you as a social enterprise, entrepreneur or a leader is… We would call it like a divine spark or a spark of inspiration or a spark from the universe, from nature, from some element outside of just our own little magical cooking in our heads. Something bigger than us kind of called us forward into, "Hey, we might be able to do things differently."

0:12:02.8 Tina: And the thing that's really cool about this is that the people who have studied and mapped this have seen that Tier 2 organizations are popping up all over the planet like popcorn. They're like their own sparks, these people don't… The people who are running them don't know each other, they're not in the same industry. I mean, they might know each other now, but it wasn't like one person is like, "Hey, I have an idea, and I'm gonna have a consortium, and then we're all gonna do this thing." It was totally random. Random, synergistic, but… So you've got everything from a school in Germany practicing these things, to a home health care system in the Netherlands, we'll get into some of the details of these organizations, to a publishing company in the US, to a tomato manufacturing or canning company in the US, to a French Auto Parts manufacturer. I mean all over the place. And the sizes of these organizations are totally random, if you will, as well, from a few people to a few 100 to over 10,000. And so that's really, really cool if you feel into the part that we are being called to be a part of something.

0:13:12.8 Tina: And of course, as Social Enterprise Alliance, you've all been called to be a part of something, but this something is an emergent property of humanity in this moment of human history. And so, a couple of specifics on that, one of them that I think might be one of the biggest rays of light is called Buurtzorg. It's a Dutch home healthcare company. So these are nurses that go into elderly or disabled or sick people's homes to provide them home health care. And we'll just give you a few statistics to satisfy your Orange logic. Okay, so we've got self-managed teams that have coaches that help. And I think these teams are about 10 people and they are nurses and they do all the functions, they do the hiring for their own team, so if somebody changes jobs or roles, and they have a spot, they're the ones doing their own interviewing. They've got their own budgeting, they decide how their hours are gonna be used. And this has been moved from the original Dutch organization to over 24 countries now. And they have achieved results such as 40% fewer hours needed in a home. And the brilliance of this is most of their home health care companies were using a model of, okay, this person needs an IV, that's gonna take X amount of time. This person needs medication, that takes Y amount of time.

0:14:39.5 Tina: It was all spreadsheets and you're sending the person in and they go poke them with a needle, or they set them up with their oxygen or whatever it is, and they leave. That actually is what… They achieve 40% better results by going in and having their first meeting, sitting down over coffee, and talking to the person, learning about their life, finding out if they have children, what the relationship is with the children, how much are these children contributing to this person's well-being. Do you know your neighbors? They would actually… The nurses would knock on a neighbor's door and say, "I don't know if you know, but your neighbor across the street has x, y, and z needs. Would you mind taking the garbage cans out for them? Would you mind stopping by once a week and just saying, hi." Connecting community members. I know we have a neighbor who's in that situation, and I purposely… When I saw home healthcare workers at her house, I stopped them and said, "What can we do?" And so 40% fewer hours and 30% fewer emergency room visits.

0:15:45.6 David: Wow.

0:15:46.1 Tina: That is absolutely incredible.

0:15:48.0 Trace: And they've grown from…

0:15:49.0 Tina: And these people are coming back to health.

0:15:52.1 Trace: Sorry. And they've grown from… I think they started with a couple hundred people and it's now over 10,000 employees. They've just grown…

0:15:55.7 Tina: In 24 countries.

0:15:57.7 Trace: Massively.

0:15:58.4 Tina: The other thing that's super cool, and this can be a little bit of a mind-bender to some, but to others who are already feeling this energy, they're like, "Oh, of course this is happening." The CEO, the founder of this organization, who is himself firmly in Tier 2, and he's the one who financed it and is leading it, he gives up his time for free. And now in unhealthy Green, we would say, "Be careful about burnout." But at Tier 2 we would say, "You know, he's actually not managing anymore, because these are all self-managed teams." So he's got time, so he consults with competing organizations for free.

0:16:41.6 Lauren: That's crazy.

0:16:45.1 Tina: I know. And that's how passionately he feels about the model he's created and how much he also knows that if everyone were to get here, how different the world would be.

0:16:58.6 Lauren: Yeah, totally, totally. That's so cool. I'm even thinking about it, like the 40% less time, that just… It makes sense from just kind of an efficiency and a community standpoint, but the emergency room visits, that's like its own… That's wild. That kind of connection. That's really crazy.

0:17:19.2 Trace: And there's this really profound shift from scarcity to abundance with Tier 2. And I love that story about how he consults with other organizations, there's this trust in the abundance. There's this move away from that lens of scarcity that if I'm helping these other organizations integrate these principles, kind of move into Tier 2, that's somehow bad for my organization, or there's not enough room for all of these organizations to be embodying this. Especially there is just trust in the abundance and there's trust if we bring everyone up, that's good and beneficial for everyone, which I find really, really beautiful about Tier 2.

0:17:56.7 David: I love that word trust too. My mind goes to… With my world with coffee, the goal is that we transform the way it's traded globally, so therefore I cannot do it by myself, I need my competitors to do it with me. But it's not fun when I lose a potential account to a competitor either. And that's also in my own… Stage Beige is like, "Hey, you need your self-care and finances are a part of that." So, it's like all that's kinda going off in my mind, but what I have learned to do is trust even the small steps, to be friends with, and to be able to text my direct competitors here locally. And also to be there when there is a small need. Maybe I'm not forming deep friendships, but I am at least trusting that the relationship is important long-term. But I have to lean hard and to trust, 'cause it's so new that it's… Sometimes it's hard to trust it, but it's like this underlying value.

0:19:08.0 Tina: I love that so much. A couple of things come up for me as you say that is just immense self-compassion for the pace that we're going at towards these things… The field of epigenetics just continues to prove more and more every day how trauma is passed down multi-generationally. For example, those of us who are in the US, like grandparents, great-grandparents, maybe even parents, were raised in The Depression. So scarcity mindset was thought to be responsible. So many of these things, it's like really patting ourselves on the back, and we do have… When we, A, can even catch it, 'cause most subconscious beliefs just flow right into behaviors unexamined. So the fact that we even have awareness, huge first step. And then to take any step to your point, because, obviously… Well, let me just back up a second. Tier 2 has a firm belief and truism that things work for everyone, so that includes me. And Stage Green, really good at self-sacrifice. And so part of this is, abundance includes me, so I trust that, for example, the person who started Buurtzorg and had the money to do this and has had the financial and success on all the levels, has the funds to be able to consult with competitors without charging. But if that person wasn't eating dinner because he's consulting all day and doesn't have any money to pay for some food, that is not a Tier 2 value whatsoever.

0:20:53.1 Tina: And so we don't know all the details of all the things, but I pretty much can guarantee that man has enough money, that part of the reason he's able to consult with others without charging, but that it's so interesting because through a Green lens, we could really easily get into, "I'm not doing enough." And, "Oh, I feel guilty for charging for my consulting hours." But it's like, "Hey, tell my mortgage is abundantly paid and I have plenty of food on the table and don't have to worry about things for quite some time, I should not be consulting for free. This is my work." So it's just very interesting catching that difference because a lot of times Green could see itself in Tier 2, but then you can kind of catch the ways that either self-sacrifice or guilt or things are kind of eroding at that, and it's like, "Yeah, no, we don't jump into thinking, we're in the next Tier. We actually naturally evolve into it by having such health in all the preceding Tiers."

0:21:51.5 David: Yeah, yeah, I love that. That kind of further exploration of that. And honestly, like the Green thinking too, one of the common things that I trace, that I find amongst social entrepreneurs, is high burnout because there is that self-sacrifice component.

0:22:09.1 Trace: Absolutely, absolutely. There's another organization that we like to talk about, just 'cause they're such a shining example of the Tier 2 principle of wholeness, which… So this organization is a German mental health organization named, [0:22:22.9] __. I don't know if I'm butchering the pronunciation on that, so I apologize, but they've incorporated… So they've incorporated a lot of practices into their organization, such as having a 30-minute daily meditation that's open for anyone who wants to participate. Any employee in the organization that's struggling with any kind of issue can book a personal coaching session, so they have coaching available for all their employees.

0:22:49.7 Trace: And then the teams in this organization, pause two to four times per year to work with a coach through tensions and any issues that have been arising. So this is something we see in Tier 2 organizations and these self-managing teams, is that they have coaches on hand to help coach them through the tensions and the problems that arise, but it's not managers and bosses that are telling them what to do, it's just people that are there to facilitate and healthy self-managing teams move as fluidly and as effectively as possible. And then every Tuesday, the whole company meets, minus the staff that needs to be with patients during that time, the whole company meets for 75 minutes to have a community reflection session on topics such as dealing with failure, company values, interpersonal communications, IT innovations and anything else that needs to be discussed.

0:23:40.3 Trace: So you see in these Tier 2 organizations really creating the space in the room for dialogue and connection, having that be something that's really intentional, not just something that's sort of in place just to kinda check off a box and people go through the motions. It's like space where people really show up, heart-centered and really show up with the intention to connect with one another and learn from one another, and that really builds that foundation of trust like we were talking about, and that foundation of wholeness within the organization.

0:24:11.4 David: Yeah, I love that. I love how it's integrated in so many different ways too. That's one of the things I think what I enjoy about Social Enterprise is there usually is a specific cause that an organization might align with, but then when we think about team culture and all the other values that we're trying to live, there's many other interaction points of embodying the principles as well.

0:24:38.3 Lauren: Yeah, and I'm curious too, how do you all define the relationship between the individual and the collective with this model? I would assume each have their own responsibilities, but what does that look like?

0:24:53.1 Tina: That's a really great question. So one of the early Tier 2 companies, he's called Holacracy one, and they're a consulting firm that helps organizations on a large scale start to implement some of these practices. And they have a great tool called GlassFrog, and you can Google it. It is one of the first things that we recommend to organizations that are thinking about implementing some of these practices or starting to infuse their culture with some more integral ideas. And what GlassFrog does, and I'm not a paid representative [laughter] but what it does… And you could do this on paper or even on an Excel spreadsheet or in some sort of Google Doc until it was time to get something fancier, but each person, instead of being the person equals the role, and so often we end up with this healthy but also unhealthy attachment to what that means, and so we think it's our domain, we think we're fully responsible for it, some of that unhealthy Orange, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

0:26:05.3 Tina: Hyper-independence gets involved sometimes, and instead, what this does is it breaks down… I believe people will have a profile and it shows all their skills and talents and their zone of genius and their interests and all that, but then any particular role that they're doing at the time is mapped on its own page, and then those roles are assigned to a person… And so instead of mistaking… It's easy to talk about this in a family system, instead of mistaking, I'm mom, and in all situations, I'm mom and that mom inherently means X, Y and Z that is spoken and unspoken. It decouples the human from the role, and it allows roles to be a lot more fluid. And what I love about this is it brings intentionality to how everyone is contributing and who I am as an individual, what gifts and talents I bring to the organization versus the particular things I'm being asked to do right now. And back to your point about individual and collective, a lot of these Tier 2 organizations actually overtly say to people, "I am hiring you. You are the right fit, you are the right set of talents and skills to round out our team." Then we'll figure out what you're doing, or if they're transitioning from another level in the spiral and becoming a Tier 2 organization, they overtly say, "We know we have the right humans."

0:27:42.4 Tina: Now, what each human does is gonna be figured out, it's gonna be mutable, it's gonna be changeable over time. You get sick and tired of doing this role, there's conversations about that someone else gets to do that role, you get to pick in a new role, and so it's no longer like, oh my gosh, I have to make sure there's enough make work for this role, or I have to be stuck in it, or if we have no growth right now, there's no opportunity for me to learn a new skill. All of that goes away, and instead we get to have intentional conversations about how we're contributing, knowing… And this goes back to our Beige needs, so many people have a very understandable scarcity fear around their work and their role at work, because if that goes away, their Beige needs aren't met anymore and they're not supporting their family anymore. And so imagine the difference of somebody hiring in you and saying, "I know that as long as you wanna be here, we need you and as long as you contribute in a healthy way, you've got a role here. And what that role is at any given time, we'll figure it out."

0:28:45.8 Tina: And that might even mean there's gaps in your role. You might have to make up… And there's a lot of stories about people making up new roles, seeing new needs as complexity increases, seeing another way that they could contribute, and all of a sudden offloading the roles they currently have and being allowed to go off and create some big project. One of them was in an entirely different country, one guy was working… I forget which particular company he was working for, but it was more of like a manufacturing type company, and he was like, "Well, I'm originally from [0:29:16.8] __, and I know how things go down there, and I really think that this is needed there." And they're like, "Go. However long you need, a year or two years to go figure out the landscape and talk to people and get things together and then start setting up your team down there." And so it's just an incredible like, "What? Who's ever heard of such a thing?" Imagine what your heart would feel like being hired into that organization instead with that premise.

0:29:43.3 Lauren: Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. That's huge. Well, it's so crazy to think too… When we have the person in the role so closely intertwined, I feel like one of the reasons for that is just from a productivity mindset of like that just is how it is to get things done. But in, as you said, the decoupling of productivity increases. Like when you're not so focused on just this productivity, and I guess maybe that would be the Orange stage, like you kinda take your mindset off of the thing that you're trying to achieve and instead focus on the how and the relationships and the people, then you end up having more of what you were maybe after in the early stages of it. It's just fascinating.

0:30:26.1 David: In that kind of example, what I really am walking away with is… One of the things I'm trying to do as a leader more than anything else, if I could sum it all into one word even is, safety. Create safety for people. So pay is a part of that, culture is a part of that. Obviously, the physical safety of the work environment, the emotional safety of the work environment. So to hear this example of… And I think this is true, a handful of people that work for me, I don't care what role they do. I want them in my team, so like the safety of evolution, and that helps them to have a growth mindset, a learning mindset, a curiosity mindset. So just like it's another level of safety that I wanna make sure I'm trying to be conscious of in providing for the people that work with me.

0:31:19.3 Tina: Yeah, I love that so much. That really fosters creativity and innovation.

0:31:23.6 Trace: Yes, yes.

0:31:25.4 Tina: Because when people feel safe, then they can be vulnerable, they can… And it takes vulnerability to have a new idea and to share it with anybody. How many times have you talked to somebody and they're like, "Oh yeah, I thought that." You're like, why didn't you say it? Because the environment wasn't there for them to feel like sharing it would have either felt safe or been of benefit. And we do this kind of stuff all the time. We don't think our creativity has anywhere to go or anywhere to land, but how many creative ideas are we potentially leaving on the table because of some misunderstanding of safety…

0:32:01.4 Trace: Yeah, organizations are mirrors for our beliefs about humans, and we see this in Tier 2 or the organization… Organizations in Tier 2 reflect that fundamental trust in humans and fundamental trust in ourselves and other humans and the nature of life. When you see organizations that are built on this mistrust of human, this is how we get bureaucracy and this is how we get those really… Those structures that stagnate growth and stagnate creativity, and that's what… As we grow as a society, I really feel that we're going to grow, we're gonna change our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and each other, and that's going to fundamentally change the structure of our organizations. And that's what's so incredibly inspiring about looking at these Tier 2 organizations, 'cause we're seeing how collaboration and innovation and organizations look when they're built on this different perspective of humans and when they're built on trust and this different perspective of trust.

0:33:00.8 Lauren: That's so interesting. I've never thought about bureaucracy as being a lack of trust or a symptom of a lack of trust, but… That makes a lot of sense. That's really interesting. Yeah, if you don't trust the people around you to do what they need to do, then you're gonna find ways to make sure that they do. And then again, I feel like that actually limits productivity because, how many studies are they're now saying like, "Oh, a 32-hour work week." People get just as much done because you're providing for them as like a full and whole human. This is amazing for employee retention because who would ever wanna leave an organization like that? And also people often leave because, oh, there's nowhere left for me to go. I don't feel like I'm growing, or I don't feel like I can fulfill this potential or this dream or whatever within this space, but it's like, well, if it's dependent on you and the things that you're saying and the needs that you want to address, then… Yeah, why would you ever need to leave? It's really interesting.

0:34:04.8 David: Yeah. Well, I know that we just scratched the surface of…

0:34:12.4 David: This whole thing. But I also feel like we did get… Do a good job of walking through it and seeing some examples played out. And also, I have to catch myself… I probably came into this conversation at least having some awareness of what Spiral Dynamics was, therefore, I was like, "Well, I'm kind of more evolved. But I would not have used those words, but probably subconsciously that's how I felt. Now I'm like, "Okay, I still have a lot of work to do." To continue to learn, to continue to evolve and to give myself grace, to give myself permission and all that kind of stuff as well. So yeah, I think it's really great to… Just to sit in this for a second and kinda catch my breath. Being that we did scratch the surface, where do you wanna point people to? Where can people go to either learn more about the Spiral if they're so inclined, or more about your work or maybe other resources that would be available as we begin to ask maybe some new questions?

0:35:19.7 Trace: Yes. So, you can find all of our work at open-aware.com, and we have resources on Spiral Dynamics to learn more about it and read more about the model, and you can find all of our other work and all of the other stuff that we do on there. As far as other resources for Spiral Dynamics, there's a website called Spiral Dynamics Integral Nederland, I believe…

0:35:42.8 Tina: Just Google that.

0:35:43.6 Trace: That's not actually what the website's called, but just Google that. That's the best source we found online for just diving really deep into the stages and the way their descriptions are really fantastic.

0:35:53.0 Tina: Yeah, and if you find yourself poking around and feeling less clear about it, but you really do want to move forward with some very practical ways in which the Spiral could actually help your organization, on our website we have free connection calls for organizations, I think they're scheduled at 45 minutes or an hour. We would love to talk to any of you and explore some of these ideas and whether that's… We see ourselves in a both and role of being kind of like concierges of helping people find their next best way forward, and also if that includes working with us, awesome, but we're also super happy to share other things that might be specific to the particulars of what came up for you in this episode. And also if you are interested in getting deeper into this, the book Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, is an awesome resource.

0:36:58.9 Tina: And you can Google that as well because there's a couple of ways to consume his material. There's a physical book, but then there's also an awesome illustrated PDF version that we've also found really, really helpful to get through this kind of stuff. We just love to be able to have this conversation with you all, to be able to share this with those of you who are listening, maybe we've provided a spark, maybe there's something in your heart that now wants to be seen. And I think the biggest thing as guides and people who are here to help the overall healing and expansion of the planet is that reminder that you just gave to yourself, David, of being really just gentle, compassionate with yourself in the process. Our brains that are like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much to learn here and there's blind spots. There's blind spots everywhere."

0:38:00.9 Tina: And I guess the little anecdote I'd leave you with is, Trace and I, before we start working with organizations, we took 14 groups of individuals through a seven-week process with this. And every single time we would do the homework that we gave the individuals for each page. And so we've done at least… And it happens more and more all the time, fourteen times worth of going back to every single stage is health and unhealth, and picking one more thing to work on, and yet they're still never-ending things that arise in a very spiral-like fashion to help our growth or expansion or perspective, so… Yeah, this is it. There's no part about perfecting any of this, it's a map for an ongoing human journey.

0:38:47.2 Trace: Yeah, it's a lifelong journey, not a destination, and I feel continually humbled, noticing the ways that certain unhealth shows up for me, and it's just such a beautiful tool for having compassion and for myself of… This is a… The human experience is a complex, very… It's a complex journey and… Yeah. It's compassion for ourselves. Every step of the way. It's really, really key.

0:39:10.8 David: Yeah. Well, very good. Yeah, again, thanks for sharing this space with us and look forward to just staying in touch and having our folks connect with you all and continuing all of our collective work in trying to make the world a better place through the work that we do. So I think this has been a very valuable conversation, I can already think of like five people that have come to mind that… Cannot wait to share this episode with. So yeah, I know that will have a ripple effect as well, so I appreciate that.

0:39:44.0 Tina: Awesome, thank you.

0:39:45.0 Lauren: Thank you both. This was so enlightening and just exciting and helpful.

0:39:48.5 Trace: Thank you so much.