Part 2, Evolution and Spiral Dynamics: Eight Principles That Can Bridge the Developmental Divides

In Part 1, David Sloan Wilson and Don Beck helped me see that resistance to moving beyond Blue’s tribal loyalties isn’t ignorance, pathology, or immoral. It’s how evolution has wired us. That reframing changes how we approach the problem. Now the question becomes: are there structures that can support cooperation across that developmental divide? David introduces the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, whose research produced eight Core Design Principles (CDPs) that can be applied to our problem. They look simple, but each is necessary.

Wilson: While these originated with Elinor Ostrom’s research on common-pool resource management, the “Tragedy of the Commons,” we have generalized them beyond resource management to apply to virtually any group that needs to cooperate effectively. So I think they can support Spiral Dynamics stage transitions.

One other thing. As you read these CDPs, they might seem so common sense that you discount them. You must see them as a system and not a list of options to choose from. If you neglect any principle, you greatly jeopardize your chances for success.

Core Design Principle 1 — Shared Identity and Purpose. The group has a clear sense of its membership and why it exists. Members can articulate what they’re doing together, why, and feel a sense of “us.” Without this, there’s no foundation for anything else. And I’d note — this doesn’t require ideological uniformity. Avoid rigid uniformity, because members at different levels will have different values! Instead, this principle requires a shared understanding of what the cooperative project is.

Core Design Principle 2 — Equal Distribution of Contributions and Benefits. Distribute the costs and rewards of cooperation fairly. People contribute according to their capacity and benefit in proportion to their contribution and need. When this breaks down, when some people do all the work, and others reap the rewards, cooperation collapses. Our psychology is exquisitely sensitive to free-loading. We evolved to detect it and punish it.

Core Design Principle 3 — Fair and Inclusive Decision-Making. The people affected by decisions need meaningful input into those decisions. This doesn’t mean direct democracy in every case. It means people feel their voices matter and that decisions aren’t imposed from above or by outside experts who don’t have to live with the consequences. This is the one, Don, that I think Orange and Green violate most consistently when engaging with Blue.

Beck: Agreed.

Wilson: Core Design Principle 4 — Monitoring of Agreed-Upon Behaviors. People need to be able to see whether others are holding up their end of the bargain. This is about creating the conditions for trust. Trust doesn’t come from blind faith. It comes from verified reciprocity. In small groups, this happens naturally because everyone can see what others are doing. At larger scales, you need intentional and ethical mechanisms for it.

Core Design Principle 5 — Graduated Sanctions. When someone violates the group’s agreements, the response is proportional. First offenses get a gentle reminder, not expulsion. Repeated violations escalate. This is critical because it allows for mistakes, for learning, and for repair without destroying the cooperative relationship. And I’d flag this as especially relevant to what we’ve been discussing. Orange and Green have a tendency for binary responses. You’re either in, or you’re out. That violates this principle, and it’s devastating to cooperation.

Beck: Let’s not forget that unhealthy Blue does this, too. Excommunication. Shunning. Each stage has its version of punishment. Orange: You’re fired! Green: Cancelled!

Wilson: Core Design Principle 6 — Fast and Fair Conflict Resolution. Conflicts are inevitable in any cooperative system. The question isn’t whether they occur but whether there are mechanisms to resolve them quickly, cheaply, and in a way that all parties perceive as legitimate. When conflict resolution is slow, expensive, or perceived as biased, grievances fester and cooperation erodes. Many groups fail not because of the conflicts themselves but because they lack effective processes for working through them.

Core Design Principle 7 — Authority to Self-Govern. The group has the autonomy to manage its own affairs without external authorities overriding its decisions. This is local sovereignty. When higher-level authorities — whether governments, institutions, or, in our context, people operating from later developmental stages — override a group’s self-governance, it undermines the group’s capacity for cooperation and breeds resentment. This, I think, is the principle most relevant to identity protection.

Beck: And the one most frequently violated in development work of all kinds — international, organizational, and cultural.

Wilson: Core Design Principle 8 — Polycentric Governance — or Nested Enterprises. Groups are nested within larger cooperative structures, and each level has appropriate autonomy while coordinating with other levels. This is the federation principle. It’s the design solution for scaling cooperation beyond the small group without dissolving it. Local groups manage local affairs. Regional coordination handles what local groups can’t. And so on upward. Each level respects the autonomy of the levels below it while providing the coordination that no single group can achieve on its own.

I want to reiterate something about these eight principles as a whole that I think is important for the concept you’re developing, Gary. These aren’t eight separate things. They’re a system. They function together. You can’t cherry-pick three of them and expect cooperation to work. And when groups fail, it’s almost always diagnosable as a failure in one or more specific principles. That’s what makes them so useful as a diagnostic tool, which is what you suggested earlier. You can look at any struggling collaborative effort and ask: which principles are being violated? And the answer usually points directly to the intervention needed.

Beck: And what I find remarkable, David, is how closely they map onto what healthy expressions of every stage already do intuitively within their own boundaries. The challenge has always been extending them across boundaries, extending them through transitions. Your framework gives us a language for that extension that doesn’t belong to any particular stage — and that may be its greatest practical value for what Gary’s identifying.

Gary: Thank you for highlighting the importance of transitions. Living within the boundaries of a stage is relatively easy. Living through a transition can be much harder, which is why people can be so reluctant to embark on those changes.

Don, I interrupted you when I asked David to review the CDPs...

Beck: It was good timing. Ostrom’s work is foundational, and David was brilliant for identifying its importance to cultural evolution. And I commend you for connecting it to the inter-stage transitional barriers we contend with in our work.

To continue my point, take the principle of fair and inclusive decision-making. When Orange comes in with technocratic expertise and essentially says, “your traditional ways are inefficient and backward, here’s the rational way to do it” — that’s a violation of the design principles. You’ve just excluded people from meaningful participation in decisions that affect them. If you are going to assist a group at an earlier level, you need to realize they will be on guard and watch you very carefully. Their radar is very sensitive. They know when they’re being dissed.

And Green can be even worse in some ways, because it talks about inclusion while simultaneously defining it in its own very narrow terms. For instance, Green language policing is so foreign to Blue that it won’t take but a minute before they’ve stumbled into some violation. Blue will think, “Who needs this?” and retreat. Greens often seem unaware that they’ve created the conditions that exclude anyone who doesn’t adopt Green language and Green values. They talk about allies, but create conditions that reduce the number of their allies. In fact, each Tier 1 stage has, to some degree, binary filters that prefer being with people “just like me,” and are not troubled by people leaving. The multi-level groups for which the 8 Design Principles are built help us see where potential conflicts can arise. Hint: “language policing” violates CDPs 3,4,5, and 8.

Wilson: This is a good example of how the CDPs can diagnose problems in multi-level groups. The evolutionary prediction there is clear: when you violate those principles, you trigger the in-group/out-group rejection response. You’re essentially confirming for Blue that these people are outsiders who can’t be trusted with your or your group’s well-being. It’s not irrational defensiveness. It’s a functional response to a real threat to the cooperative structures that Blue depends on.

Beck: Gary, what you’re really pointing at is that Ostrom’s principles could serve as a kind of stage-neutral accountability framework. If people had agreed to use the CDPs, they’d give us a way to say to Orange and Green: “You think the problem is Blue’s rigidity, but look, you’re the ones undermining the conditions for cooperation right now. You’re breaking principles 2, 3, and 6, and then wondering why people won’t follow you.”

Wilson: And simultaneously, they give you a way to work with Blue communities by saying, “You already know how to do this. You already practice most of these principles within your group. The question is how you can extend them to include others. If we start from the needs of a common project, a question that might come up spontaneously is, “We need some new skills to accomplish this project.” That could lead to developing current group members or recruiting new members with the skills. This could feel risky, letting some outsiders into the group. But if they are a healthy group, they can probably manage it. The group is managing the change to get the work done. That’s a very different conversation than “you need to evolve.”

Gary: This is very satisfying. It’s putting into words vague ideas I’ve not been able to articulate. But I wonder whether the CDPs fully address all the conditions for inter-stage cooperation and for creating healthy conditions for individuals to develop through the stages.

Wilson: The CDPs are necessary, but there are more ingredients. They describe the structural conditions for cooperation, but the motivational and identity dimensions, Don’s territory, still need to be addressed. You can design a perfectly principled institution, but people still need a sense of belonging.

Beck: Agreed. The scaffolding must be in place, but individuals also need the motivation to use it. I don’t think there’s a clean, universal answer. But I have some hard-won lessons from decades of fieldwork.

The first thing I’d say is that you cannot motivate people by appealing to a stage they haven’t reached. This sounds obvious, but it’s the mistake that gets made over and over. Green likes to say something like “diversity makes us stronger” and expects that to move someone whose sense of meaning and safety and strength is rooted in their own community.

Wilson: From an evolutionary standpoint, that’s because belonging isn’t primarily a cognitive commitment, based on logic, especially a view they don’t understand. We first need something that gives a felt sense of safety. “These people will look out for me. I can predict their behavior. We share enough in common that I can let my guard down.” We often forget just how powerful a sense of safety can be! That’s not something you can explain to someone. It has to be experienced.

Beck: Right. So the practical question becomes: how do you create experiences of expanded belonging that don’t require people to abandon the belonging they already have? How do you transcend and include? Please pay attention to this. This is too important to brush past! People in later stages forget just how difficult, and sometimes even scary, it is to make a change they think might mean abandoning their family and friends.

Wilson: Don, the answer from evolutionary science is nested identity structures, similar to the nested Spiral Dynamics levels, including the earlier stages. This is design principle eight, polycentric governance, or what I sometimes call nested enterprises. The idea is that you don’t replace the small group with the large group. You embed the small group within a larger cooperative structure where the small group retains its identity and autonomy while participating in something bigger.

Here’s an example. You have a person who is involved in his church, and his faith and his family are important to him. During the week, he supervises a group of network administrators who do highly technical work. His reliance on scientific principles to be excellent at his job does not undermine his religious faith. These worlds can coexist; he can inhabit both Blue and Orange with few qualms.