The color of your values: how spiral dynamics theory explains the internal culture of an IT company

Reading time: 10 min. Frederic Laloux in the book "Reinventing Organizations"

argued that organizations with a flat structure and high involvement of a significant group of employees in decision-making have the best human potential development and greater resources. What do you think about this? Andrey Putin

CEO I am convinced that both employee motivation and the culture of business processes depend on the organization's level of development in Spiral Dynamics.

It is not always worth worrying about the absence of turquoise and striving for it: for many tasks, earlier levels of the spiral are enough.

I will tell you about my personal experience. The IT company I lead is six years old.

During that time, we went through several typical stages of development.

When we were a startup, we worked ourselves to the bone and almost slept in our clients' offices, all in order to survive and establish ourselves in our niche.

Decisions were made only by a group of managers: the company was small, and that worked quite well [in Spiral Dynamics terms - blue level and below].

Then we grew rapidly and changed our approach to work, introduced business processes and automated them through RPA, and came to understand our mission and values.

To motivate employees, we introduced KPIs that seemed right to us. Unfortunately, they did not work the way we wanted, and in this article I will explain in detail why [orange level and below].

We canceled KPIs, grew again, and changed...

We are now introducing a product approach and OKRs and shifting evaluation toward achieving the company's overall financial result.

In addition, we are actively improving our understanding of the Agile approach: the leader's role in projects is moving closer to that of a mentor, the team gets enough freedom, and in these conditions has the opportunity to make independent decisions based on project metrics.

Any employee whose actions affect the company's development can become a partner and take part in managing it [green and yellow levels]. Everything that happened to us was natural, with each new stage serving as a step in growth. In the end, we reached the level of development and the value system we have today. Our team includes people with different dynamics, and both we and the company as a whole are far from the turquoise level; yellow-green is closer to us.

In practice, it is hard to meet an organization or person with "cosmic" values, and not everyone really needs that.

But our business processes are already well prepared for it: we design them so that there is no way to return to lower-level values, such as those in the army or a corporation.

Let's look in more detail at what each Spiral Dynamics level means, which colors mark the levels, and how to understand what stage of development the company you work for now is at.

(SPIRAL DYNAMICS THEORY) Spiral Dynamics is a model of value evolution.

Its creator is psychology professor Clare

Graves noticed that people's values and beliefs change over time not chaotically, but in a specific sequence.

Stages of egocentrism and expressive self-expression (self-oriented) alternate with stages of self-sacrifice (we-oriented).

If you imagine human development as pendulum swings, the turns of the spiral are formed by a constant oscillation from the level of "I" to the level of "we" and back.

The spiral points upward: each next level contains the previous one and sits above it. Followers

Each turn of the spiral was assigned a specific color. Initially

Graves studied the worldview of his students as individual adult personalities.

But in the end it became obvious that adults, children, and groups of people develop in the same way too: teams, organizations, states - society as a whole. How, for example, does a child's personality develop?

States develop in a similar way: primitive people unite into tribes, where magical thinking and belief in spirits emerge first, and the group leader is the shaman.

Then leaders emerge who begin to fight for power and the expansion of borders; after that, the borders become more or less fixed, and statehood and legality take shape.

Industrial revolutions and rapid economic growth take place.

At higher levels of evolution in politics, values such as a multipolar world, tolerance, and environmental protection appear ("Earth is our common home"

). To move up the spiral, you need to go through each level in sequence, starting from the lowest.

Therefore, there are no bad or good levels: each simply corresponds to a specific stage of development.

In addition, depending on external conditions, each period can have a light and a dark side. For example, the light side of the red level is willpower, energy, and freedom, while the dark side is suppression and a strict hierarchy where everything depends only on the leader.

The light side of the orange level is efficiency and achieving goals; the dark side is emotional burnout in an endless race for achievement and stress from other people's success. And so on.

Let's take a closer look at how the company's level affects the level of the employees who work there.

Red: "You can write crap code - there is no tester anyway, and colleagues may not notice during cross-testing."

Orange: "I should take on the tasks that are most profitable for me to do. I'll complete them, and the others can deal with their part of the work however they want."

Green and above: "The team benefits from having no testers (we gave detailed arguments in the article \"We do without an army of QA: how the absence of testers saves developers' time and improves their skills\")".

Red and blue: "This KPI is impossible to achieve!"

Work only under a manager's supervision and usually show low performance. Orange: "OK, now I know which KPI I personally need to achieve. I can hack the system so that the KPI is formally met."

In practice, such an employee's influence can be destructive.

Green and above: can critically evaluate the process used to assess their KPI if they do not see a connection to the outcome for the team and the company as a whole.

At the upper levels, KPI is replaced by product goal-setting and mission. And here is the promised story about our experience with KPIs.

We started introducing key performance indicators about two years ago, and a year later (at the beginning of 2019) we had already fully abandoned them.

The system did not deliver the result we expected from it.

Some developers tried to meet KPIs only nominally, for example by making arrangements with testers (when there still were any) so they would write issues without reopening them.

To avoid this, we tried to calculate KPIs within a CRM operation based on invoices issued to clients.

But not all dependencies were obvious and linear, the calculation logic was opaque, and the main KPI requirement was not met - transparency and ease of calculation. In the end, we decided to replace KPIs with OKRs across all departments, and we are now restructuring all performance evaluation processes so that they decompose directly both top-down and bottom-up, based on the goals of the company, product, and project.

Red: depending on the sense of power (leader or subordinate), will subtly reallocate resources toward making their own tasks easier.

Blue: "Only the person whose job duties include thinking is supposed to think."

For red and blue, engagement in work depends on position.

In many companies that try to work with Agile but do not fully understand the essence of the agile methodology, there are team leads. In their paradigm, these are managers who make decisions in the team and are responsible for results. Our company also has team leads, but when the team is flat, they are not seen as managers in the usual sense.

A team lead is not a position, but a role close to that of a mentor in the team.

Personal motives always outweigh team motives.

Green and above: can work in flat teams and does so effectively.

Gives quality feedback, can be a supportive mentor, and at the same time learns from others. Red and blue: "It's a mess. How can you work if it's unclear who is in charge here?"

A flat structure is seen as a reason to abuse the rules.

All rules can be bent until management steps in. Orange: "Show me exactly what I need to do, and step aside."

Not especially tolerant of collaborative spaces.

Feels the downsides of open spaces painfully while benefiting from their advantages. Green and above: "It's nice to work in a team of like-minded people where everyone is equal."

Which color opinion is closer to you?