Graves Spiral in Business

This sprang out of a debate in Ecademy about why public sector organisations are so inflexible in their approach to selecting suppliers - my reply was

I think its fundamentally not solvable because bureaucrats are selected and measured against a different set of criteria from those we use in running small businesses.

Its an exaggeration to say that in the public sector world it's better to fail using the official channels than it is to get a result by being a bit of a maverick - but not much.

I've worked in both environments and one of my line managers on the public side said I was the most difficult person to manage she'd ever had - not because I wasn't positive or didn't contribute to the group but because "you have your own way of doing things" and I was always told off for presenting "inappopriate detail" - ie what you'd give your boss in a private organisation to convince him you had the angles covered.

The poor dears are always trying to help themselves - I worked on the supplier development strand of the (UK) national e-procurement programme a couple of years ago and there have been various attempts to rationalise and simplify the PQQ stage of tendering and to produce reports like the Better Regulation Task Force. Despite which many organisations such as the London Development Agency remain wedded to the wholesale destruction of forests even at the PQQ stage.

It basically boils down to mindsets - I amused myself in one bid for a framework contract by constructing a map of the Graves Spiral Mindsets and showing how they relate to the cultures of different types of organisation. Here it is. (Astonishingly enough we won the bid!)



The types of organisation are related to brain functioning on a 2 x 2 matrix left vs right brain, thinking vs instinctive behaviour. You get archetypes of visionary top right, accountant top left, entrepreneur /salesman bottom left and team player / guardian of established values bottom right

Getting to grips with bureaucratic behaviour is part of the process of business growth. Its a barrier - the Dawn of Formality - like any other. Your best bet is to get some standard policies lined up on your server in an easy ready to go form and gear yourself up to do the tenders as painlessly as possible if you want to play in that space.

Otherwise you continue to trade informally with other small organisations. (Nothing wrong with that by the way)

You need a business story to link you to the world. Telling it inside is leadership, outside is marketing.

You are probably familiar with the idea that different people think in different ways. There is a right side to the brain which deals in patterns and a left side which deals in numbers and logic. There is a front portion of the brain which likes to think and an instinctive, old brain at the rear which operates on immediate perception and impulse. If you map these into quadrants, you get 4 styles of thinking and behaviour which have different characteristics.

Top right thinkers are visionaries, who like to explore new things top left thinkers can be labelled as "accountants" who like control, bottom left are "entrepreneurs" who are impatient to achieve their goals and bottom right are team players who focus on people issues.

This is one dimension. Another dimension is what value systems people use. The Graves Spiral identifies 6 major world views that people adopt. These alternate between being group orientated and being individually orientated. Individuals (and societies) move between systems as they become aware of the limitations of their currently most dominant mind-set. As an individual moves up the spiral, the degree of complexity in their behaviour grows. Most of us have more than one view that we can adopt but one of these will be dominant.

Understanding these views and how they interact is important to telling our story. We need to be clear about what our views and values are and those of our customers since if you talk in language that the customer feels comfortable with, you are more likely to motivate them than if you don't.

The key stages in the spiral are shown in the diagram. The names of the systems are courtesy of Dudley Lynch of Brain Technologies whose MindMaker6 tool allows us to measure our profile these systems and understand where others fit.

A working knowledge is important as you have to have in mind who you are trying to sell to and what their values are if you want to write persuasive copy.

The systems on the left are self orientated while those on the right are group orientated. Inside an organisation, if you use "me" language with "we" people they will tend to work to hold you back or keep you in your place. If you use "we" language with "me" people, they will tend to see you as weak and try to marginalise you.

So it goes in selling or writing marketing copy.

In this final article on the Graves Spiral, I'm going to tell you about how I've been using this in practice. One of the Brain Technologies tools is an instrument called Mind Manager 6, which enables individuals to score of the relative extent to which they use the different systems in their everyday lives. If you want one I sell them - details in the marketplace.

As I mentioned in one of the earlier articles a key issue with running small teams and small businesses is to communicate properly. It's pretty apparent that if you talk to somebody in language that resonates with them you're more likely to get a result than if you don't. So I use these tools to help people understand the value systems that their own teams and their customers are likely to use. I do a similar exercise using the brain map for their thinking styles.

I use these as educational tools so that people can understand the variability in their own thinking and use this as a benchmark for how they might approach others. In my Refocus your Business workshop (next one 16th December) I use these two tools with the attendees to give an insight into both of these models so we can help them develop the story that they want to tell to their teams or their customers. Having got the story straight we can then concentrate on the practical aspects of where we tell the story and what balance of online and offline marketing, face-to-face networking, blogging and ad-words we might use to promote our message to the people who we think will be interested in it.

The reason that this stuff is important is because it's critical to use the right language. If you use "we" group orientated language with "me" people they will think you're weak and will either marginalise you or take you over. If you use "me" language with "we" people they will disapprove, sabotage and hold you back. Believe me I've been there as a former managing director working in a middle management position in a public sector space. A handy summary of how individuals using these systems talk is shown in the diagram.



So effectively this is where the values of these systems take them in the way that they feel comfortable in communicating and their underlying sense of how the world works.

So if you recognise the pattern you can either talk in their terms or decide you want to push their boundaries a little. Me I'd just go for the result.

That brings to an end this little course-let on the Graves Spiral - Hope you found it useful.