Russ: Welcome back to the Integral Leadership Review, Don. You’re one of the important guiding lights for the very existence of this publication. The work that you and your colleagues have done around the world, has been noted to some degree at least. I’m not sure if there ever can be enough in the pages of Integral Leadership Review devoted , not only to reporting what you and your colleagues are doing, but what you and others have learned from these efforts. I look forward to there being even more opportunities for showing the potentials and the possibilities of Spiral Dynamics integral. If memory serves, you pretty much started applying the work of Claire Graves in South Africa; is that correct?

Don: Yes, that was back in 1981. That’s before I knew anything about Ken Wilbur or any of the other evolutionary concepts. So, yes, I was probably the first to attempt to apply a contemporary psychological framework on a complex large scale.

Russ:  That was in the mining industry?

Don:            Across the spectrum. I started out at Western Deep Level Shaft Sinkers andthen Middleburg Steel and Alloy,a stainless steel operation in the western part of the country – very conservative party areas. It was quite an experience when agitation started in townships. The guys in the HR function and Middleburg took the lead. That’s when even Bishop Tutu came and started crying. He said, “Never in my life did I think this would happen in South Africa.” So it was a major breakthrough in the business sector, which really took the lead in the transformation.

Russ: So 1981 to 2014 – 64 trips and this one must have been quite extraordinary given your history in the ending of apartheid, your contributions around that. Could you tell us a little bit why you were taking this 64^th trip?

Don:  Well, I worked with them up to the release of Mandela and the election for the transformation to happen. At that point I backed away, particularly after the Springboks Rugby victory [featured in the movie Invictus – Ed.]. I was working to provide them a superordinate goal, a simple way to proceed with nation building.

In the whole Graves paradigm of transformation there are 10 different things to consider. One is that the current system has to try its solutions before it’s opened to anything innovative. Let them extend themselves, try their solutions and see whether they were successful or whether there were major problems.

What I’ve sensed from the people I’ve talked to before I went and certainly while I was there is that they have reached the end of the Mandela era where harmony and non-racism were the keystone. But inspite of all that, the wheels are coming off big time, because when they didn’t follow what Graham Linscottt and I recommended in the book, The Crucible: Forging South Africa’s Future. F.W. de Klerk, last State President of apartheid-era South Africa, was speaking in Dallas recently. I asked him about it and he said that they wanted to do that, but The African National Congress (ANC) wanted power and they went down a track of instant gratification and plundering the country and simply handing off German motorcars to the black leaders. The needs of people were not met, because they weren’t getting to the critical issues.

I had a call from Stollenbosch University School of Business Executive Development close to Cape Town asking if I would come out and restart the process. Of course, I accepted. They said that the title of the work would need to be South Africans reinvent themselves for the 21^st Century.

What we are doing is taking leaders back to 1994 the day after Mandela was inaugurated in Union Building. The question was then posed, “Knowing what you know now, 20 years later, what would you have done differently then?” That stirred up the most interesting insights, because now they have the advantage of 20 years of experience.

Russ: Who was participating in this? Was it just mainly academics or community?

Don: No, it was cross section of business leaders, academics and educators. We spread it from the School of Business to a group in Johannesburg that Mandela had authorized and insisted be formed – the Da Vinci Institute of Technology – because he sensed that more traditional approaches would not have the effect on what we know as a Purple-Red pre-modern system. They didn’t have the background to understand them. Some of my friends were there and they reported seeing these people coming in, exploiting the country and taking money and then leaving. They didn’t stay to deal with the realities and the realities are the distributions of millions of people in a second, third level system. So it’s clear to us that was missed.

Now we are back with the question, how do we think about managing the whole society? The whole society is a spectrum of values and spiral dynamics. Whenever we would do research with our vital signs monitors, we would clearly see in the nine provinces the distribution of different mindsets and capabilities to respond to first world technology. That’s what happened.

Russ: The Stollenbosch experience with business people, government personnel, and academics – was there a product from this? Was there a report, anything like that?

Don: There’s going to be. In fact that’s what I’m working on right now. Assuming that South Africans want a fresh start with the knowledge that they have now, and that they didn’t have in 1994, what might that be? During this last trip, I have been in contact with a large number of leaders, both black and white, who were saying it’s time for something different. I reminded them of The Crucible that is now in third edition and the approach that Graham Linscott and I had mapped out. It ultimately would be a way to handle a huge gap between haves and have nots. Those gaps have something producing them. They have value system scaffolding; they have mindsets and levels of complexity of thinking. People are not the same.

If there were a re-distribution, then you would have a better process, a blueprint that is reflective understanding of those scaffoldings, those deep value structures that are at the core of economic, political, social, religious and law enforcement models. To simply skim over the surface and not get down to the cores is a serious, serious mistake.

Russ:  What would be an example of getting to the core?

Don: There is the critical importance of framing cultures, and most are pluralistic cultures, in a whole different frame. Its strangely like Spiral Dynamics – the seventh code. I’ve been quite encouraged by some writers, not within the integral community, but outside of it. What we are getting here is called deep pragmatism – not surface pragmatism – that’s Orange, fifth level. Deep pragmatism requires getting down to the understanding of the nature of things, how things actually work, what needs to be done.

It’s not a pursuit to our favorite things, which would be egotistic or blindly utopian. It doesn’t require magical or high tech abilities to measure happiness with great precision. It doesn’t require us to be constantly calculating. There is in nature processes that fit the levels of development of people. That is our stratified democracy. That’s what is in Said’s book on the different views of the economy Memonomics [see review by Laura Frey Horn in this issue of ILR – Ed.].

I see here for the first time the echo of what we call the master code. The master code is essentially different kinds of functions to be achieved. It requires an egalitarian approach. What needs to be done? That is the requirement that we often call value engineering or value management. But then again, the approaches do not advocate any particular color scheme whether it’s egalitarian, whether it’s multi-party, free market, any of those things.

One has to first look at the distribution of the various codes along the spectrum of emergence. Now this sounds complicated, but it’s really quite simple, because it shows how leadership can perform a whole different set of functions than what most of us were trying to do: looking for all those leaders, competing systems or whatever that approach happens to be. We simply ask the questions: “What needs to be done? What are you doing? and When do you know when you’ve done it?”

We have to read, not the topography of politics or economics, but dig into the subterranean, the deep kinds of pragmatism that work at different levels of complexity. A one person, one vote doctrine is effective when the income of the populations runs about $5000 per person per year. That seems to be a formula when the Orange carrot and stick is operative. What we learned is that to force Orange free market thinking onto Purple tribal capacity always causes a blow back, because a heavy Purple system cannot engage that way. Their tribal chieftains are the only ones who can make decisions.

It becomes very complicated when we impose a system rather than a code that determines which system will evolve. So a master code is not a doctrinaire imposition of a single solution; it’s just the opposite. It’s a process of determining what works when, with whom and how can all of those be accommodated within a national strategy.

Russ: This is exciting, because for me it’s one of the things that I’ve been learning in my own life, as well as the work I’ve been doing, is the importance of process. I don’t mean process as a thing so much as process as a perspective that supports seeing the movie, if you will, and not just looking at the snapshots. It seems to me that what you’re talking about being built on the idea of stratified democracy is attending to the movie of growth and shift and change in those stratifications so that you can build a society, you can build an economy, you can engage leaders and the larger leadership system in a way that is intended to honor what is there and build on it. It sounds easy to say, but it sounds like hard work.

Don: Yes and no. It’s amazing whenever you have the whole tapestry, the whole spectrum. Even when we spoke to Hamas in Bethlehem about it, they came trying to challenge us, because they heard that Elza Maalouf and I were active in the West Bank and introducing a whole new concept. They were quite concerned about that, so they came to find some way to counter us. But they left after two hours, saying how interested they are in this, because for the first time they’ve been exposed to value systems, to the assimilation construct effect [http://www.integratedsociopsychology.net/assimilation-contrast_effect.html]. There is a whole spectrum of approaches and all of a sudden they could see people that they knew who were like that.

Once Spiral Dynamics is introduced, it has an alarming impact on people that’s not even anticipated. So what we are finding now is like a hockey stick turn up of interest in what we are doing. Not only are we finding writers outside our particular background and discipline, but even those within the so-called integral world who rejected us early, are beginning with disguised language that articulates Spiral Dynamics. They will never tell you that. But that is the major shift that happened in theory “U”, for example.

When we first applied theory “U”  [see interview with Otto Scharmer in the August-November issue 2013 in ILR – Ed.] in the Netherlands with Peter Merry, I said, “Peter, there are some major difficulties with this theory, because when people reach the bottom of the ‘U’, they’re assuming a green egalitarian magical process that will suddenly produce solutions. But now, Theory “U” has a four stage effect, which they had not considered before.”

There have been three or four major American groups in South Africa who have been plying their wares, most of which have been basically positive, but extremely, extremely naïve, because whenever they invited people to the table, they invited a certain group of the oppressed majority. What they did, like everybody else, is enrich themselves. So today, I just saw a piece from the New York Times about what that produced. None of these approaches were able to get to the core issues. Consequently, we are going back with a new approach based on what I’ve learned over 64 trips and what my colleagues have found out since that time.

I have some hope that we can restart the process, but this time with the information about the nature of mindsets, value systems and changeability, what kinds of leadership models produce what kinds of effects and what needs to be done. Once again, it is deep pragmatism. It’s a new day and we are trying to extend Madiba magic into the next generation.

Russ: I know that South Africa is different in many regards. But in Africa the news we are fed is so pessimistic. It seems that despite this that the economic potentials of Africa are huge. There are just so much deterioration or breakdowns of efforts at bringing people together, strengthening economies, political systems and the like. What is it that South Africa has going for it that you think will make the kind of development that you’ve been talking about likely? Is it likely?

Don: Yes for sure. When I was at the UN with the Evolutionary Leaders group [started by Deepak Chopra and others – http://www.evolutionaryleaders.net/ – Ed.] recently, I met some sports leaders from some African countries who were there for a conference on the use of sports in development. I talked to one guy who said, “You know, Mandela made a huge mistake by identifying with the Springboks in that 1995 World Cup.” I asked why. He said, “That let whites under the tent.” I said, “It’s not white; it’s Blue/Orange.” I didn’t take time to explain to him.

But the contribution of Mandela was that he had an open system. He was pretty communist so I can tell you he went to conferences in Switzerland and heard the nature of the Fifth Level business system. He came back a changed man. Consequently, South Africa has as its advantage far less racism than in our own country, thanks to Mandela. That might sound strange to you, but that’s been the case all along. I kept warning during the transformation days – it’s not going to be a civil war. Rather, South Africa has a chance of being that much more, both white and black, thanks to Mandela once again.

I was at various hotels and meetings where there were very astute, well-dressed Orange blacks, women especially, who were just soaring at the Da Vinci Institute. I was at a graduation where my colleague Lorraine Laubscher got her PhD degree. Now Lorraine was with me on every single visit. Her prospects, because she reached the eighth grade, was to be a meter maid. But this woman who is amazing, her library is probably larger than most of ours. But she took the opportunity that was presented to her and I noticed the number of Africans who were graduating with PhD degrees.

Well, that tells me something. That tells me that there is a rising tide. It’s currently frustrated by first generation black leaders, other than Mandela, who plundered the country.

There will be an election soon (in May). We will once again reveal this issue because we are working for a particular candidate. She is the first woman to run for president if South Africa. She has the skills and insight. She’s Steve Biko’s [an activist who died in police custody before the end of Apartheid – Ed.] former partner. So there’s now an opening due to the fact that the Afrikaners are still there, because they didn’t have dual passports. There is a bridge that’s been built between blacks and Afrikaners. What I say to black leaders is, “Be clever. You’ve got here one of the most complex thinking cells in the world. These Afrikaners/English stayed in the country. Look what they were able to do over the years. With that capacity right next door, right in the country, there is a softening of a gap. If this happens in the upcoming campaign, some of the so called black leaders re-agitate along racial lines, then all hope is lost.

But I don’t think that’s going to happen. We were all impressed with the skill of so many blacks who were working in hotels and cafes and in service industries and enjoyed the kind of affluence that certainly was in Cape Town and Johannesburg. They’ve become like fractals that educate as people participate. So it is still a sticking point. What’s happened now is that today South Africa is worse off financially and there have been more gaps between have and have nots. What impressed me, Russ, is how quickly that is changing.

Mandela set the tone, but it’s going to take a new generation of black leaders. I was privileged in Stellenbosh to have a special session for some of the leading black leaders in the country. They are most interested in what we are saying, what is the pragmatist approach. Certainly there is an opportunity and my job and most of those trips that started in 1981 was to prepare the country for this transition. Now I didn’t tell them that or they would kick me out. Everything I did – even writing the book, The Crucible – was all designed to prepare them for the day to come. That day has now come with Mandela’s blessings.

So we are going to roll it out. There are no guarantees. But what a wonderful place to visit, if you’re a tourist. They have all the resources they need; water is a problem of course. But the rest of the world could just go away and the growing South African sophistication in medicine, health care and certainly education is a model for many of us to look at.

Russ: What can you tell us about the leadership in South Africa today and how developmental steps such as you’ve been describing will get rolled out?

Don: You see most people who even look at Graves’ work don’t pay any attention to what may be the major piece of it. It’s not in the color codes of value systems; those are critical. But what is important is the change dynamic. How does change happen? Rather than the very naïve notion that anybody can change anybody to become anything – which is absurd – there are processes that over time can begin to sink into a culture and it roll out along different value system lines. That’s what we are doing.

Certainly, when I go back – probably in April – then what we are doing now is building the connection to all kinds of groups, because there has to be a South Africa solution. I will speak about Spiral Dynamics in South Africa while I’m there, because it is local for them. After all the years I was there and all the groups that I worked with are now resurfacing. It’s a golden opportunity for leadership in that country. Some of our friends and I are working on a major statement that could very well be the next freedom charter. Getting freedom is not enough. There are so many groups who have said, “If I’m free, then everything will be like it is in the first world.” Well, it’s not. So it has to go beyond freedom and to responsibility.

South Africa is at that tipping point. Whether it will happen, I have no idea.

Russ: It sounds like networking is a really critical part of this, because when you’re dealing with the kinds of stratification and varying positions economically and politically in the country, some kind of web or some kind of network has to be created to integrate those activities in any kind of fashion. Is that right? And if it is right, what do you see as being the biggest challenges around that sort of network integration?

Don: Well, I’m working on a master plan right now. Certainly there are various segments of the population. One would be the academics from Stollenbosch University and others. We are trying to integrate all the different academic systems, all the skills of influence and so forth. Certainly we have major efforts in the churches and religious systems. One of the advantages of South Africa over Palestine is that the religion is almost entirely Christian in South Africa. That gives you a huge advantage where you don’t have to confront so many hard edge isms, gaps between Christianity and Islam and so forth.

So the stage is set in South Africa. Because South Africans, back when we were working there, learned how to do what’s called value management – value engineering, which is a whole different way of making decisions. It’s not negotiation. It’s a way for diverse points of view to sit together, not looking for a consensus, but looking for deep pragmatism – what actually works. What we want to do, what we favor or who has majority of support – none of those are criteria.

South Africa and Japan were the two countries that developed this unique technology. So we are about to introduce it big time in the United States, because we now have a chance of collaboration, the awareness of so many differences. After years and years of political correctness and pluralism where every entity is seen as equal, wherever they meet to try and solve problems, they can’t.

But the thinking process is to resolve issues. The movement in the United States is that local areas – like the work that Marilyn Hamilton is doing with Integral City – is like how you eat that elephant, one bite at a time. The fact is that we are working much more on community development, which is where change needs to begin. Then we can make an attempt at a national solution, but not until we have a capacity to solve problems. Given our political system from the left to the right, the ideologies and high levels of partisanship and polarization that we have created, we do not have a viable system today to solve the problems that have become more complex than our solutions.

There’s a lot to be looked at here, not just in South Africa. South Africa is a microcosm of the planet. It has a piece of everything in it. That’s what compelled me to keep going down there. I knew what I was looking at. I was staring at a global solution, not a naïve world centric solution. But the true global integration, which takes in our system that seventh level yellow system, before any kind of collective turquoise can make any sense at all.

Russ: Is there any kind of formal organizational presence or identity in South Africa that’s going to be advising, shaping or guiding the efforts there?

Don: It’s what Said Dhawlbhani [Memonomics, 2013] also talks about – about a distributed intelligence – not a central kind of organization with a top down approach, but rather the spreading of the intelligence with deep pragmatism. How can different entities look at the variables? What are the live conditions, what are the capacities of people, what are the leadership models? How to lead whom, to do what? That is more than a formula, a logarithm. It is not a prescription. That’s why I use the term master code, simply looking at what the environment, what nature says to us about how these kinds of problems can be solved with what kind of thinking.

What this whole thing will do over time is really shift us from what is called a dogmatic to a utilitarian approach. That needs to be done.

Russ: In addition to you, are there others in South Africa who can bring the perspective to this pragmatic approach?

Don: Oh yes! I mean that’s what I was doing over the 63 trips without them knowing it. I worked primarily by myself, because it has to be their solution rather than me providing solutions. I wanted to equip them at a stage when the change models say they should appear and why they should have stayed hidden for a while. But now it’s time for them to appear, almost like spiral wizards who have been trained in and who have practiced, experimented, refined, improved on these applications – where you have shifts out of a tribal system into a nationalistic system.

When you have the capacity to move out of ideologue into simpler Orange pragmatic approaches. At this level the Orange materialistic system suddenly becomes very sensitive with conscious business and the like. All those things are happening along that spectrum simultaneously and that’s how you build a country.

Russ: This is the network operating?

Don: I use the term meshwork.

Whenever I was looking for a model of collaboration, when people come together to solve problems, I was looking for a language I could use. What I found in the work of a number of theoreticians is recognition by the brain scientists that when they look at the internal processing structure of a human brain, they see the left and the right, the triad human brain and the limbic system and all those things that they form gestalts, they form a patterns.

The brain scientists call that pattern a meshwork. The concept comes out of brain research. I said to myself, “If that’s how the brain does it, should not that be how brain syndicates do it?” So that’s why we started to speak about a mesh that sometimes uses fuzzy logic that shows how to connect various entities in order to come up with a pattern to solve certain kinds of problems. So that’s why we popularize the term – a meshwork.

Russ: By implication, there is no formal organization like a community organization or a political party or anything else like that that’s going to be promoting this work. This is a meshwork of individuals who perhaps in this day of electronic communication can share information and ideas and understandings and then go and apply their learning in the context that they’re working in. Is that a fair statement?

Don: That’s an excellent statement. When Elza Maalouf and I spoke at the UN – and we’ve been there a couple of times now – that’s what we try to say to the UN. To get a perspective for you, jump from the South African map, combination of people and life conditions and change your focus onto the whole planet? How would you do it for the planet? Would you form an autocratic union where everything has to pass through New York. Or would you find ways to spread technology to leaders across all the cultures, which are so unique and so different?

Well, that’s exactly South Africa, because it is that microcosm. That’s why no particular segment, majority, privilege, power, any of those criteria are able to handle that complexity. We have to build a full-scale thinking. That is the first thing that obviously has to happen. A couple of my teams are working on that now. They are developing a vital signs monitor in South Africa. I want to profile all the nine provinces and go from province to province.

That’s what I did early, before I left the country, in order to demonstrate how each province can be developed economically, as opposed to trying to – in fact whenever the constitution group was meeting, they asked me if South Africa should be a Unitary State, a federal or a co federal system. I said yes. Given the social technology, given the nature of the place, the knowledge has to be distributed and this, the functional capitalism that Said writes about.

One of the things that we have to do in this process is raise money. We have to get South Africans contributing and maybe outside entities. I tried to get the World Bank to give me a watershed project in Durban to build all the dams, because I was working with the Mandela Children’s Fund. We took kids out of hardcore prisons with the adults, put them through a training program. But then we needed jobs. We needed blue collar jobs, which we didn’t have. The ANC turned it down to avoid helping Durham politicians.

The internal politics is what has destroyed so many options. I blame a lot of Westerners who brought in their programs and tied South Africans into spending billions on the military. Now why does South Africa need two submarines? I don’t know, because they can’t run them. They don’t have the technology to keep them functioning. But we have Western influences to sell or off load whatever it was from the British, to offload military equipment that South Africa has no business using. So there is a huge scandal, because many South Africans political leaders benefited from that sale.

So the rest of the world hasn’t helped South Africa. That’s actually been one of my pet peeves for a long time.

Russ: While you were there, Mandela died, Is that correct?

Don: Yes.

Russ: Can you tell me your experience of that series of events surrounding the death of Mandela while you were there?

Don: Sure. I was in Halton, which is a suburb of Johannesburg, close to his house when he died that Thursday evening. I was working with the Da Vinci Institute of Technology, an ambitious future’s program for Mandela, since he’s the one who encouraged some of my friends to set up that academic center. We were there planning the post-Mandela future when we got the word that he had died.

Even though everyone knew that it was going to happen, it was still a shock. Of course, the word passed quickly and what you probably saw from Western television, all the celebration, all the toitoi, it’s called. South Africans recognized that it was not a time to mourn. It was a time to celebrate and to honor a man who was like their George Washington and more. He was recognized globally as one of the four or five global leaders for whom there is a mutual respect from virtually everywhere. Of course, the papers were full of stories. I had my own private moments about it, because I had worked on that Springboks process. I had seen the movie Invictus. Mandela was such a champion. He understood why he needed to support the white rugby game that was seen as a racist apartheid sport.

Everyone should see this movie, because there you can see a nation building euphoria designed to connect great diversities, because it was the first time millions saw themselves as South Africans. That was very important that we work on that shift of which tribe they belong to. So, rather than Zulu, Xhosa or Afrikaans speaking or English speaking or Dutch or Scottish, they became South Africans. That’s a very important part of what we were doing. My team there was monitoring all the different reports, connecting them to different value systems, but recognizing that in his death Mandela had probably an equal impact that he had in his life.

We can see this in the great duration of love and caring that came out of that globally. Of course, national leaders and presidents and heads of state, couldn’t wait to get down there. South Africa had to close all the hotels. They kept the reservations they had but they shut down all the hotels, because they knew there will be a vast hoard of people coming in.

We didn’t anticipate that George W. and Lauren Bush would be on the same plane with the Obama’s. We didn’t expect that. But even in this country, there are some amazing kinds demonstrations of what Mandela meant here. I just wish Americans would copy his non-racial point of view. Mandela would never talk to me about black or white, because he truly believed in a non-racial South Africa.

I got upset with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and those kinds of people going down and trying to take credit for Mandela. They’re just the opposite of Mandela. Those who continue to play the race card from any side should be ashamed of themselves. It’s time that we matured and we developed the kinds of leadership in this country that’s truly non-racial. It’s time to do it. Other than that, I’m not opinionated!

Russ: I can’t help but think of the racism behind the attacks on Obama from day one that shows the spectrum of racism that occurs in this country. You’ve talked about the polarization problem, if you will. In South Africa do you that kind of polarization or do you see it shifting or changing in any way?

Don: As long as Mandela’s presence was in the country, you wouldn’t see it. That’s why I fear this upcoming political campaign. Campaigns can be nasty, as you know, and can artificially polarize us versus them. How easy it is for the us versus them to appear and the middle to vanish. So Bush would be called the fascist and Clinton the communist and all that pure nonsense that comes out of radical points of view from both sides of the political spectrum, it’s time that we grew up.

Maybe, Russ, we need to search for new ways to make complex decisions. I tried to get President Obama to join the Tea Party!  Join the Tea Party; aren’t you the president of the whole country. That fit who he is. Just look at his 2004 speech and all that really inspired so many of us. What he really took was not just a red state or blue state. He signaled a whole new dispensation that he wasn’t able to implement. But as soon as he had power, his leaders in the House and Senate passed that healthcare system that was jammed down the throats of so many people. They formed the Tea Party.

That’s what we haven’t learned. We need to get beyond the traditional and progressive stereotypes. There could not have been a progressive system, if there had not been a traditional system. Each is a part of the ladder. To attack the traditional system is really absurd. That is our source of stability – respect for law and order and certainly the Constitution that have made possible the progressives to emerge out of it For them to attack it is like they climbed on top of the roof and threw down the ladder.

I hope the day will come when some of our leaders will finally get beyond that polarization, because it’s blatantly absurd. That’s why, along with some people like John Steiner in Boulder and others are working on a so-called third way, a trans-partisan way. I’m convinced that as much as we have learned in South Africa, value management and other processes, hold the key to what we are going to learn in this country. I feel a bit guilty doing all of this in South Africa when in my own country we are having the same kinds of problem.

 In terms of patterns of leadership in South Africa, there are several. For one, it’s the enlightened leader and that’s Mandela. Then there is the general and that’s in Thabo Mbeki. Now there is the sergeant and its Jacob Zuma. Then it reaches the center of gravity of other populations. That’s been the pattern. It is our attempt now is to progress that and begin with fresh start, this new blueprint. I keep coming back to this term about the deep pragmatism. Until we can begin to think about that with a distributed intelligence, then we have a new system that is forming, almost a new value system, and we see it within the seventh and eight level codes of Spiral Dynamics.

Russ: I know that you’re inspiring a lot of others to do work in a number of countries. We have deep appreciation for the work that you’re doing. I want to thank you so much for the chance to talk with you and get a sense of your learning from your trip to South Africa. I look forward to the chance to talk again.

Don: Thank you, Russ.