Why Green is not just a minor transition phase between Orange and Yellow/Teal*
I hear some folks interested in Teal organizations who are suggesting the view that Green is not a true stage of development but merely a transition phase. That view wouldn't be tenable after reading the original Spiral Dynamics book, in my opinion, but short of such a reading, here's my own attempt to respond, out of my own distress.
I've been distressed hearing that view because I feel it is dangerous: it will cause failure and suffering for those who attempt to live by it.** I'd like to try to articulate why I feel that way. I haven't the bandwidth now to go hunting for examples, but they are visible in the pages of Enlivening Edge Magazine. Perhaps you, a reader, can make a comment below with one.
Green is not only a full stage, it is the necessary foundation of the Teal stage. Green is the capstone of the First Tier, and the only basis from which one can move fully and healthily into Second Tier's first stage, which is Yellow/Teal. It is the only healthy springboard into Second-Tier consciousness.
I think to view Green as a mere phase is to not fully "get" the huge difference between 1st and 2nd Tier, and the role of Green in making that difference possible. Green is where the heart comes online in human development, put most simply. It is a radical expansion of the capability of a wide circle of concern. It is, we could say, a huge move in widening individual ego's scope of concern, awareness, and care.
Without that foundation, one cannot truly move into the scope of care and concern and awareness required for the leap into Teal/Second Tier, which involves building on that concern with wider systems-awareness, but with a quantum leap beyond any previous stage leap.
That's why Graves called it a Tier leap, not a stage development, between Green and Teal. Green still has the right-wrong, either-or mentality, despite how inclusive its values are. Green is, for example, very intolerant of intolerance. Teal and 2nd Tier is where inconsistencies like that disappear, for the first time in human development. Teal is the first FULL universality of care and concern. Because others are fully real in their wholeness, Teal develops a "both-and" synergistic approach to life.
