Emergent Insights approach to Values Intelligence (VQ) is primarily based on the life work of Professor Clare W. Graves who identified graduated levels of value systems that define the development of human behaviour and thinking styles, and how individuals, organisations and cultures respond to different life conditions or circumstances. In addition we draw on additional insights from Jean Gebser, Ken Wilber and others. Our approach is a synthesis of the research, theories and practice models dealing with human value systems, thinking styles and worldviews that has been put forward over the past century.

Worldviews represent an 'adaptive values intelligence' because they have, and do, emerge in response to the environmental complexities that individuals, teams and organisations experience. Once they have emerged, they remain available to a team or organisation, and each serve very useful functions. These worldviews are not the commonly referred to beliefs and theories about the world. They refer to deeper, structural differences that can hold any number of different belief systems themselves.

Each worldview supports characteristic needs, motivations, reasoning styles and relationship preferences in response to a perceived situation. Organisations, as well as individuals, often have preferred worldviews they operate from. When individuals and teams have worldviews that are not synchronised, misunderstanding is common and team or organisational effectiveness is diminished.

Understanding the spectrum of common worldviews and how each responds to changing circumstances or life conditions facilitates the development of a particular worldview, the Integral value system.

With an Integral worldview, individuals, teams and organisations are able to recognise the worldviews active in their environment, enabling access to a deep structural understanding of the utility of each within their operational context. This access allows for a deeper appreciation of the strategic priority of the contribution made from that worldview, within themselves, other individuals or stakeholders, or in a team collaboration context. This in turn, allows for another level of critically reflective discrimination on how to integrate the worldviews, establish clear communication between them and achieve the compromise that is essential for the achievement of collaboration and shared goals.

An Integral worldview can discriminate and anticipate the underlying dynamics present in negotiating change and can therefore develop more effective change management strategies, more targeted public marketing, branding and issues management strategies, and more plausible forward views. Emergent Insights use VQ throughout our approach as it is a well developed Integral approach to understanding and working with the psychological and cultural realities (or the subjective and inter-subjective) in all situations.

If you would like to know more, please see our Entering Spiral Dynamics workshop or how it is integrated in our Strategic Team Management workshop.