In recent years, I’ve watched talented leaders and companies chase growth, impact, and purpose - yet still end up burned out, misaligned, or struggling to create real sustainability. I’ve felt it too. Building businesses, navigating relationships, and striving to “do more good,” I began to notice a quiet dissonance. Despite all the tools, strategies, and success markers, something deeper was missing.
That tension led me to frameworks that could make sense of what I was experiencing. One of the most powerful has been Spiral Dynamics - a map of human and organizational evolution that shows why so many of us feel stuck in outdated ways of working, and how we can move beyond them.
Spiral Dynamics is a framework that maps human consciousness evolves through different stages, each one with its own values, motivations, and ways of solving problems.
The early stages are about survival and belonging. Later, we see power and control, order and stability, achievement and capitalism (represented by the orange colour), and then community and care. Beyond these sits a second tier - where instead of rejecting the earlier stages, we integrate them, weaving together the best of each into a more holistic way forward.
For business leaders, this framework has become a powerful tool to help understand how people and systems function at different levels, and where they may feel stuck.
Business Today: Hitting the Limits of Growth
Much of modern business still operates within the "achievement" or “orange” stage of Spiral Dynamics: competitive, profit-driven, and focused on individual achievement. That drive has fueled incredible progress, created innovation and wealth, but it has also left us with burnout, inequality, and ecological strain.
The cracks are starting to show. Endless growth comes at the cost of people, culture, and the planet. Silicon Valley startups chase unicorn valuations while ignoring social consequences; global corporations extract value without giving back to the ecosystems that sustain them. Even well-intentioned leaders can find themselves caught in this paradigm, where success is measured solely by financial metrics, and “more” is the only direction that seems viable.
And yet, at the same time, we are starting to see a shift.The emergence of movements like conscious capitalism, social enterprises, and the growing importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. Yet this stage - the green tier - alone is not enough. It is a vital corrective, but it can sometimes overcorrect - idealizing a community without providing the structures to make it sustainable.
That’s why the next stage matters.
The yellow tier of Spiral Dynamics offers a new lens for business. It acknowledges the necessity of profit (orange) and the importance of community and care (green), while integrating them into a more holistic, long-term, and regenerative approach. Yellow thinking asks: not just how do we succeed but how does the whole system thrive?
At InSpiral, we see this shift from companies as machines to companies as ecosystems. Ecosystem design borrows from nature, where nothing grows endlessly in one direction, and where every element contributes to the flourishing of the whole.
Applied to business, ecosystem design looks like::
This is not abstract theory. It is a practical framework for redesigning businesses to meet the challenges of our time. Because as Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them” - it’s time for us to see through new lenses.
Through our programs like Scale with Ease and our agency services, InSpiral is committed to work with leaders and companies who sense that the old paradigm no longer serves, but who may not yet have the tools to move beyond it. Spiral Dynamics offers a map, and ecosystem design offers the methodology. Together, they open the doorway to a new way of doing business - one that is more human, more regenerative, and future-fit.
We don’t dismiss profit, it matters. But profit alone is no longer enough. The companies of the future will integrate the orange stage’s drive for results, green’s care for community and environment, and yellow’s ability to hold complexity and design for the whole. This is the work of our time: to evolve from fragmented, linear systems into ecosystems that sustain life for us humans over the long run.
At its heart, this is not only a business strategy, but a cultural evolution. The planet will endure without us. The question is whether we will evolve quickly enough to thrive alongside it.
A Call to Conscious Business Leaders
Spiral Dynamics reminds us that every stage holds wisdom but no single stage can meet the challenges we face today. Business as usual cannot solve the crises it helped create. Ecosystem design, guided by integral awareness, offers a new way forward.
The invitation is clear: pause, reflect, and reimagine how your company could serve not just profit, but people and planet. At InSpiral, we are committed to this path, experimenting, and sharing what we learn. We believe the future of business is not “take more,” but “evolve and contribute” - moving from extraction to regeneration, from isolation, to connection.
And perhaps, through this shift, we will remember that business is not separate from life itself - it is part of the great spiral of evolution.
