And The Merger Nobody Due-Diligenced
Ask any HR or OD leader what’s keeping them up at night, and you’ll get a fairly consistent list:
- talent turnover, leadership development and succession planning
- delivering complex change and “not another culture transformation program”
- burnout and well-being challenges
- resistance to change and legacy behaviors
- the gap between espoused culture and daily practice
- and now – how to integrate AI
How do you respond to these pressures in a consistent and joined-up way, avoiding multiple disjointed metrics and fragmented training or consultancy initiatives?
There is a map that gets underneath all these problems and reads what’s actually driving all of them, because underneath every item on that list sits the same unanswered question: what does this organization, and the people in it, actually value, and has anyone ever properly found out? How does that generate the difficulties we experience?
A gap nobody’s job covers
I learned why that question matters the hard way, decades before I had a name for the framework that answers it. I was UK IT manager for a successful, rapidly expanding FMCG company that undertook a reverse takeover, merging with a larger but failing organization with a complementary product range. Commercially, the logic was sound. Culturally, nobody had looked at all.
The acquiring company was family-led, cooperative, driven by its brilliant product vision. The company it merged with had lost its way through aggressive over-investment in a failed strategy. Its culture was internally competitive, status-driven, and in at least one corner, corrupt; a finance chief and an IT director, covertly in a relationship, quietly exited once their conspiracy to defraud the company was uncovered. For the first three years after the merger, the two organizations’ management teams fought for supremacy. Decisions were blocked. A straightforward technology choice was weaponized. The strength of the acquiring culture was probably the only thing that prevented outright disaster.
The due diligence on that deal had been thorough: financial structures, logistics, market impact, systems compatibility, personnel costs. All properly done, all entirely mechanical. Nobody asked whether the two organizations’ underlying value systems were even compatible. That question wasn’t on anyone’s checklist because nobody understood why it would matter, nor did anyone have a tool built to ask it.
That’s the gap Spiral Dynamics closes – not as another initiative – but as the lens that tells you what you will be getting yourselves into, where to focus your avoidance strategies, what initiatives will be needed, or even when to back away.
The systems you already recognize
Spiral Dynamics
, drawn from the research of psychologist Clare Graves and developed further by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, maps a sequence of value systems that people, teams, and whole organizations move through as their circumstances change. Each is given a color purely as a memory aid, and each is a coherent, self-consistent way of deciding what matters, what’s safe, and what’s worth defending.
Five of them dominate most contemporary workplaces, though the others are important too, and you’ll recognize all five without having had labels for them.
- Red is the power, initiative and dynamic drive that gets things done.
- Blue values order, procedure and doing things properly; rules exist for good reasons and shouldn’t be shortcut.
- Orange values results, competition and visible progress – if it works, scale it.
- Green values fairness, inclusion and the well being of the whole community.
- And Yellow values the health of the whole system above any single part of it, comfortable holding several of the above as simultaneously true, seeing their contributions and knowing that they need to work together.
Each of them has its downsides too, when applied in excess or in an unhealthy form. Taken together, these voices in the system explain a great deal of what HR and OD leaders spend their days negotiating.
Watching it work
A simulation used by the organizational consultant Bruce Gibb in a very different context – building new manufacturing plants for a US automotive supplier – makes the underlying mechanism visible without needing any of the color vocabulary at all. A group builds small circuit-board assemblies over three rounds. In the first round, they work under a conventional top-down structure, and output is modest. Before the second round, they’re invited to suggest improvements to the layout and process; output improves only marginally. Before the third round, they’re reorganized into small self-managing teams, given the target, and left to plan their own way of hitting it. Output roughly quadruples, and satisfaction maxes out – with the same people, the same skills, and the same equipment throughout.
Nothing about the people changed between rounds. What changed was the value system the structure was operating with – control and procedure in round one, versus ownership and shared purpose in round three – and the results tracked that shift precisely. That’s the core Spiral Dynamics claim in miniature: the underlying logic on which a structure is built shapes what it produces more than the individuals inside it do.
Peter Senge observed that people don’t resist change; they resist being changed; Peter Drucker made a similar point. Both were describing exactly what that third round demonstrates – invite the system to build its own solution, rather than imposing one on it, and resistance mostly evaporates. Their observations also imply that, people-wise, you have to work with what you’ve got, and that is easier if you know what it is.
Across the HR/OD stack
Once you can see value systems operating, rather than just behavior, the priorities most HR and OD leaders are carrying stop looking like unrelated fires. You gain insight into the whole corporate system and can develop a coherent approach.
Talent, retention and skills gaps. Attrition may be misdiagnosed as personality clashes or as a pay problem when it’s a values mismatch. Someone whose day-to-day reality has drifted away from what they prioritize will leave for a modest pay rise elsewhere, while someone whose values are genuinely met will often stay despite a lower one.
To give a real-life example, in 2025 I worked with a small, values-driven organization of sixty staff that was quietly falling apart: two rounds of emergency funding, a senior leader hesitating to return from burnout leave, another stepping back, a third resigning.
Rather than opening a difficult conversation about leadership directly, I proposed something more measurable ~ a structured values assessment of the nine-person senior team, covering twenty-seven dimensions, mapping the culture the organization aspired to and believed it had, against the one it was actually delivering. The gap was concrete and specific for the first time: an aspiration toward shared, consultative leadership that simply wasn’t being lived. That data reshaped the leadership conversation in a way their unstructured discussions hadn’t managed, because those addressed surface behavior rather than the reasons they were happening. The organization went on, in 2026, to be shortlisted as an innovation prize winner in the World’s Best School awards.
I later received this feedback – “Your Spiral Dynamics work and report were definitely catalytic. Looking back, almost everything you predicted needed to happen actually did.”
Leadership development. What is the leadership that you need, and how do you create a strong pipeline? The SD development sequence also has implications for the complexity and bandwidth of individual capacities. It parallels the frameworks of other developmental models, such as Kegan or Torbert, but goes beyond them. What is an individual ready for, beyond questions of competence at the current level? How do you know, for any given team or department, what leadership is needed? Change programs are not all alike, so how do you determine what type of leadership they need? Here, we find a basic question that SD asks and helps answer. WHO should lead WHOM to do WHAT, using which TOOLS in which CONDITIONS? Having asked that question, it is easier to place people in the most effective way and to know and tailor the developmental support that is required.
Culture and engagement. Burnout, hybrid-work friction, and managerial capability/fit all tend to trace back to unrecognized value mismatches rather than process or structure failures – a Blue-leaning function wants clear structure and predictable hours; a Green-leaning one wants autonomy and trust; a manager driving for Orange objectives is caught between the two, with no framework for naming what’s actually colliding, and ends up managing symptoms instead of causes. Culture change efforts fail for a related reason: they usually target what an organization says and does ~ its structures, its mission statement, its poster campaigns. Meanwhile the actual driver sits one layer beneath, in why those things matter to the people living inside them. You can change the what without ever touching the why, and the change won’t hold. And there you have the reason for a well-known, decades-old, documented reality: over 70% of major initiatives fail. They don’t have to.
Transformation and change fatigue, including AI adoption. This is where the pattern is currently highly visible. Roll out a generative AI tool anywhere, and you’ll see a range of reactions in the same building. There are the ones who want to leverage it quickly for personal power, while another group won’t touch it until risks are understood and policies have been established, whatever competitive ground is lost while they wait. The third is already using it everywhere, sanctioned or not, and often without guardrails, grasping the obvious because waiting feels like losing. Another segment is genuinely uneasy – not about capability, but about whose judgment gets displaced and what gets flattened in the name of efficiency. Perhaps a smaller fifth group holds all of that at once, treating it as one more capability to weave thoughtfully into how the organization works rather than a battle to win or a threat to defend against. None of those groups is irrational, and none will respond to an argument tailored to one of the others.
This pattern can be applied to almost any change proposal. Recognizing which value system is driving a given pocket of resistance tells you which case to make, and in what language, rather than making the same case louder. An argument that looks good to you may be entirely logical while based on a preconception about what is wanted that others don’t share. How might you frame an overarching goal that many will share because their “why” is also included?
Compensation and reward. What an organization pays for is one of the clearest public statements of what it values, whether that’s intended or not. Gibb’s plant-design work made this explicit: moving deliberately from pay tied purely to position, toward pay that blended position with competency and shared profit, and from a model that served shareholders alone toward one that recognized all stakeholders. These weren’t just compensation tweaks – they were a rewritten statement of what the organization was rewarding, and behavior shifted rapidly to match. Pay equity and transparency pressures are, underneath any legal requirement, a Green demand dealing with a structure that’s still fundamentally Blue or Orange in how it decides who gets what. How might your organization reframe and reshape its compensation structure to flex around different priorities, so that money isn’t your only motivational lever?
Compliance and legal risk. This is Blue’s natural home – procedure, documentation, doing things by the book – and it’s frequently the value system that feels dispensable to an Orange-dominant strategic leadership impatient to move fast. That friction is exactly what produces the shadow-AI-adoption problem above: compliance and process voices aren’t being difficult for their own sake; they are defending something genuinely at risk. That is not only external compliance, but the quality and reliability that underpin reputation and customer retention. Both sides need a shared language that finds a balanced bottom line to resolve tension that would otherwise simply escalate.
The examples above are systemic expressions of the same underlying question – how do you harmonize these different voices, all of which have something of value to offer? And beyond that lies the question of what this organizational entity actually values, why it is in business, and whether the lived version showing up in real-life actions aligns with the stated intention.
A recognizable example, at scale
There has been a visible opportunity to see the Orange/Green tension above resolved well ~ it’s on public record in what was once one of America’s best-known values-driven businesses. John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods Market, has openly said that he came to understand his own company through Spiral Dynamics and describes Whole Foods as a Yellow, “Integral” organization. His account is that most large corporations sit firmly in Orange – growth, competition, efficiency – while the natural-food co-operatives and early Whole Foods staff he built alongside sat firmly in Green – community, fairness, real discomfort with profit itself. Those two don’t naturally get on: Orange looks at Green and sees naivety; Green looks at Orange and sees exploitation. Mackey credited the company’s growth to learning to hold both at once, rather than making either side win – and he’s been explicit elsewhere that an organization can’t outgrow the developmental level of its own leadership, which is exactly the succession-planning point above, playing out at the very top of a Fortune 500 company. Outsiders eventually destroyed that vision: shareholders who made a purely monetary choice to sell to Amazon, but only after it had built a thriving, multi-billion dollar organization.
A newer, simpler cousin
You may have come across a lighter version of this same idea, framed as organizations each running a set of hidden “games” – survival, belonging, power, order, achievement, care and so on – each with its own unconscious rules and its own resistance to change. It’s a genuinely useful way in, and if that’s what first caught your attention, you’ve already grasped the essential move: that beneath the org chart, something else is actually running the show, and it will quietly reject anything offered in the wrong language. That framing is a simpler form of Spiral Dynamics, describing the same territory at different levels of depth. What the fuller model adds is what comes after the diagnosis: a real developmental sequence, evidence for how a value system can shift once you understand what it’s protecting, and decades of applied practice, including proper values assessment, not just a name for the pattern.
What to do with this awareness
For example:
Before your next merger, restructuring, or AI rollout, ask what a due diligence process would never think to check — whether the value systems involved are even compatible, not just whether the numbers work.
Translate change into more than one voice. A case built purely on competitive advantage will move an Orange-leaning team and stall a Green-leaning one, and the reverse is equally true. Most changes that stick get offered in at least two languages at once.
Understand what types of leadership are needed, and how to develop them. Create a more nuanced and balanced relationship that supports different teams, purposes, and circumstances.
Treat resistance as information, not an obstacle. Every value system, even one that looks stubborn, is defending something that was genuinely functional once, and possibly still is.
Get an objective read before you intervene, not after. A structured values assessment gives you something far more useful to work from than everyone’s private theory about what’s really going on.
Where this goes next
Everything above draws on a subset of the eight core value systems in the full model, running from Beige through Turquoise. I have left the others out for simplicity of presentation. The earlier ones are also essential, providing the foundations, and the later ones are where the organization increasingly becomes a self-managing, living organism.
If any of this resonates with something you’re currently living through – a change program that’s technically complete and quietly not working, an AI rollout stalled in ways nobody can quite explain, restructured teams where the numbers work but the people don’t – there’s a great deal more terrain here than one article can cover. The best next step is to learn more of the richness that the Spiral Dynamics model offers. We run regular public courses in the model and its tools, and you can start here. We can also offer in-house programs if your organization wants to rapidly develop full fluency and self-sufficiency. Other languages besides English are available.
Consultation is also an option, and my colleagues and I are happy to help you discern the best pathway for you.
I look forward to connecting with you.
Jon
Jon Freeman is a partner of ValueMatch and one of our most experienced practitioners. He has worked closely with Dr. Don Beck and is one of the teachers in our Academy.
He can be reached at jon@futureconsiderations.com
