Developmental Levels of Maturity …Recursion Replaces Regression
Why All Levels Work Perfectly When You Know Who You Are
[NOTE: These excerpts are from my upcoming book on the OLAM | Ontological Levels of Awareness Matrix model.]
“We don’t need better strategies.
We need a new kind of human.”
— Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
We are living in the long shadow of a failing paradigm.
The world has been ruled by performance psychology, productivity hacking, leadership development models, and coaching methods engineered to drive better results. The problem is not that they fail to produce outcomes. The problem is that they succeed at the cost of our sovereignty.
We have optimized for everything—except being.
Most coaching today starts with action: set the goal, identify the obstacle, engineer the outcome. And when that doesn’t work, it retreats one level deeper into mindset, belief systems, or somatic patterns. But even that is downstream of something more fundamental.
The Collapse That Opened the Field
OLAM wasn’t created in a lab.
It was born in collapse.
It emerged in the unteachable space where high-functioning leaders, elite performers, and gifted entrepreneurs were unraveling—not because they lacked tools, but because the tools had become the very thing in the way.
It was forged in the field, where models failed.
Where language disintegrated.
Where clients wept without knowing why.
And it was in that moment—on the threshold of breakdown—that a new signal came online.
Something deeper than goals.
Something older than identity.
A re-orientation that made the chaos meaningful.
Not because it solved the problem—but because it revealed the deeper structure of self through which the world was being lived.
From Graves* to OLAM
How developmental theory cracked the code—but missed the recursion
“What I am trying to do is to put into words the beginning of a new theory about the psychology of man, a theory based upon emergence, the idea that man’s nature is not a finished product but an unfolding, emergent phenomenon.”
— Clare W. Graves
The most important truth in human development theory isn’t what anyone got right.
It’s what no one could fully account for—until now.
Clare W. Graves saw something no one else did:
That human development doesn’t proceed in fixed, linear stages, but unfolds in emergent, adaptive layers that arise in response to existential conditions.
His model—the foundation of what would later become Spiral Dynamics—was a departure from all previous developmental psychology.
Where others saw maturity, ego strength, or cognitive complexity as the goal, Graves saw a living, recursive, conditions-based emergence of new levels of being.
He didn’t frame it in terms of behavior, values, or identity.
He framed it in terms of fit—how humans adapt to the world around them by restructuring their own reality in order to survive, succeed, and, eventually, transcend.
But even Graves didn’t see the full recursion that his own model implied.
Not until Level 7.
What OLAM Sees That Graves Only Hinted At
The Ontological Levels of Awareness Matrix (OLAM) inherits Graves’ conditions-based emergence, but expands it in three crucial ways:
From structure to signal: OLAM locates the self not by values or cognitive structures, but by the signal being transmitted in real time. It doesn’t ask what level you “are”—it reads the ontology you’re broadcasting.
From linear to recursive: OLAM does not ascend through levels. It maps the current field recursively—fluidly tracking moment-to-moment shifts in awareness, collapse, adaptation, and sovereignty.
From content to stance: Rather than decoding beliefs or behaviors, OLAM orients around ontological stance—the pre-conscious configuration of self/world relationship that gives rise to all perception and decision-making.
In short, OLAM moves development from stage theory to signal sovereignty.
And it makes recursion operational.
Graves Set the Stage. OLAM Is the Stagecraft.
Graves gave us the clearest early map of adult human evolution.
But he stopped just short of the most important turn in the spiral.
He noticed that Level 7 looked different.
OLAM shows us why.
At Level 7 and beyond, we move out of narrative identity and into ontogenic transmission.
We stop asking “what stage am I at?” and begin tracking “what signal am I in?”
We stop trying to develop forward, and begin learning to navigate awareness fluidly across the entire ontological field.
Because every level is still in us.
And every collapse is a call to reorganize.
Footnote:
* Clare W. Graves was a social psychologist looking at adult development through the lens of culture, society, psychology, biology, and values. He developed a highly researched and validated model of adult human development that was dialectically organized to address explaining how humans make meaning and response to the advances in complexity that unfold as civilization advanced. His model was then further developed and popularized by Don Beck and Chris Cowan as “Spiral Dynamics.”
Reflecting again on this, it makes me wonder how to reframe graves 8+. It was presumed that they mapped onto 1-7 again, in a contextually different way, but linearity 8, then 9, etc, in a similar way to before.
Joe, I believe that you are now reflecting that this isn’t the case. Having been on the inside looking out, from the perspective of “operating at a maximum level”, now there is the perspective of being on the outside looking in. A whole form perspective. There isn’t really another go around the spiral, but instead a transformation of the relationship to the first time around.
Man, I can't wait to read this book!!!