Bridging the Great Divides: A Spiral Dynamics Workshop on Cultural Integration, Global Cohesion, and Our Multiple Futures
The end of the Cold War has not brought us peace in our time. New and often explosive social mixtures have overwhelmed our current institutions and modes of decision making. While we continue to focus on the surface level manifestations—dangerous intra- and intercultural tension, threats to environmental sustainability, racial-based conflicts, revenge and pay-back motives, along with growing gaps in affluence and access to technology—the solutions we have to offer appear to often make things worse, not better.Spiral Dynamics is unique in focusing on the deeper memetic codes that lie beneath our worldviews, belief systems, and behavior patterns. The Human Genome Project is now isolating the role of genetics in impacting our biological DNA and disease potentials. Rather than fault the full moon or guilt-based causes, we now understand the role of genes and other biological agents in causing certain illnesses. In the same sense, this understanding of the underlying vMemetic codes can provide powerful insights into the cultural “diseases” that threaten our very existence. This presentation will map out eight core vMemetic codes—instinctive, animistic, egocentric, absolutists, achievist, sociocentric, integral, and holistic—and will demonstrate how they shape our psychosocial cultural “DNA” scripts or conceptual “chords.” The afternoon session will describe the micro, meso, and macro application of this powerful conceptual system, one that has been field-tested in some of the most complex environments on the planet, from inner-city Chicago to racially plagued South Africa. Since our focus is on the deeper vMemetic currents, we can suggest ways to move more quickly in the direction of deep dialogue and “full court press”-type solutions.
The focus will be on the underlying value systems (vMeme currents and contours) in Building Bridges among the diverse and even competitive economic, political, health care, education, religious, and community-based models. Everything connects to everything else. This session will use the current Israeli–Palestine crisis as a case study; will focus on the nation building dynamics in Iceland following the financial collapse; and will sketch in the master geopolitical code with the power and precision to facilitate the movement of 6.7 billion humans through developmental layers, waves, and worldviews. The workshop will offer bold, innovative, and multidimensional forms of Building Bridges in the twenty-first century.
Who should attend: Individuals looking for better ways to understand diversity, complexity and change and those seeking practical solutions to complex problems and searching for ways of providing practical methods of creating seamless organizations and societies.
What you’ll learn: Attendees will learn how memetic codes can get to the core of societal problems and even change organizational cultures.
How this new knowledge can be applied: Participants will leave with the knowledge to provide practical solutions to complex problems.
Don Edward Beck, Don Edward Beck, Ph.D, founder, owner of The Spiral Dynamics Group and the global Centers for Human Emergence; faculty, Adizes Graduate School; co-author, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change and The Crucible: Forging South Africa’s Future.
Elza Maalouf, Arab-American futurist and cultural development specialist focusing her work on cultural and political reform in the Arab world. She is the President of the Center for Human Emergence Middle East a think tank that emphasizes the scientific understanding of cultures. One of foremost experts on the Memetics of the region, Elza is the co-founder of the Build Palestine Initiative a movement that started in 2005 and calls on Palestinians to build capacities, institutions and infrastructure.
Said Dawlablani, is a social entrepneur and COO, Center for Human Emergence Middle East. A real estate developer and investment counselor turned social entrepreneur, Dawlablani has worked with clients such as Resolution Trust Corporation, the FDIC, US Bankruptcy Court and the Bank of New England. He is currently applying his vision to build sustainable capacities in people as well as sustainable habitats.
Friday, July 8, 2011
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
$179 Members/$229 nonmembers