Can you foretell your future? Maybe so. The essence of the future for you is revealed in your value system.
According to Brian P. Hall's research, there are 125 documented universal human values. What is less known is how individuals, organizations, and nations shift up and back across the values scale.
Four phases of values containing eight stages of value generation outline a map to how a society can be led, how they can be intentionally moved from base level values of survival to loftier levels of mature interdependence. The middle stages, where most leaders stop in their development, revolve around the necessary social worlds of family and institutions, chosen vocations and the creation of new and robust orders. And if you think you can outpace your competition, forget it. One doesn’t leap over stages of values, according to Hall: they must be lived from one’s core. And in the living, each new higher horizon of superior values gradually comes into view.
So, what moves a person from one stage to the next? How does one transition from a self-centered worldview of safety and security to the recognition of rights, respect, and reason? What finally triggers the shift away from the worldview that life is a threatening proposition to seeing this earthly experience as a curious puzzle inviting solutions? In large part, successful transitioning from one stage to the next higher one requires serious question, a patient blending of moral, emotional, and cognitive faculties. It is also a move that grows out of being safe, supported, and secure experienced over extended periods of time. If I feel confident, secure, and able to meet each day’s challenges appropriately, I will likely continue my values development until I reach the stages marked by wisdom culminating in a vision of global justice and harmony.
But in the real world there are constant threats to my well-being. That covers pressures from within my immediate social circles up to and including society at large. Downward pressure is a negative social current running contrary to the innate upward drive toward positive transformation one feels drawn to achieve. It is a tug-of-war for me to reach and fully manifest more elevated values.
Moreover, when it comes to values, Hall tells us, we can reverse course. An entire society can reverse course. History is replete with the downward pressure where our advanced value systems were reduced to simple survival. Moving into the realm of deathworlds, millions have been led not just into social experimentation, but into social upheaval, revolution, war.
People and populations caught in downward values spirals may never recover to resume the natural escalation up the universal values chain. Too often the support needed to recover and rebuild is insufficient or just absent. The path is then left open, beckoning to the next generation.
With this in mind, as mentor I approach my client/participants to first determine which stage on the values scale they have attained. The second step is discerning how the preponderance of social, political, moral, and economic influences map to form the participants’ worldview. Are they being pressured to move up the scale, or down? A third step is an assessment of the client’s response to pressure. Is he or she weak, manipulable, pliant? Or does the client/participant possess resilience, strength of character, bringing a clear vision backed by a firm grasp of the values that rule or should rule critical decision making?
Using this methodological framework we can predict the future. How? By recognizing the simple fact that one’s values — whether they are consciously known and adhered to or not — are the key factors shaping the world we desire to create and actively seek to manifest.
Dictators hold to the low end of the scale and dominate their populations using values based around safety, security, family and institutions. They are not interested in global justice or harmony; they only give lip service to human rights, the arts, and creativity.
Enlightened leaders strive to reach the high end and bring their societies with them. They encourage legislation that funds infrastructure, hospitals, universities, and special economic/entrepreneurial zones. They focus on getting their people to freely engage in productive growth without resorting to force, violence or deception to infringe on the rights of others and without breaking international law.
One litmus test that gauges the quality of national leadership is asking to what degree a nation’s people describe themselves as free. Freedom is vital to a creative, innovative economy. Without it, society cannot prosper.
Leaders who resort to controlling their populations through censorship, illegal arrests, even the poisoning of their opposition short circuit the potential wealth their people would otherwise create. During the reign of Joseph Stalin, collective farms were the communist ideal. But the workers’ incentive to make them thrive was absent. A well-documented fact is that 33% of the food grown in the Soviet Union during that time was grown on 10% of the arable land, which happened to be the backyards of millions of suffering citizens.
The United States, by contrast, encourages a free market (which has its own inherent drawbacks) without limiting how and when its citizens may start up businesses. What limitations it imposes are mostly in the form of taxes and regulations. The industriousness and creativity of the American people is legendary. A free society will always out-produce dictatorships.
It is not, however, up to mentors to actively guide their client/participants or prescribe value systems for them to embrace. Rather, it is my objective to conduct decision making research in a consultative, leregogic, co-funded partnership that throws light on the values limitations of leaders. At the same time, I highlight specific steps, various ways forward, and a sound methodological approach to reach higher goals, if in fact loftier objectives are consonant with the leader’s agenda and motivation.
The essence of the future is found in the values profile of each leader. It is possible to predict the outcomes of leaders’ action logic based on their values. It is also possible — and highly desirable — to manifest the full potential of what greater good might be realized through a collegial vision of the highest and best values attainable.