When a pilots fly into cloud, they lose all external references and rely on their flight instruments to interpret the behaviour of the aircraft. There is no one instrument that gives pilots the whole picture of what the aircraft is doing. Instead they have to collect fragments of information provided by a variety of instruments and assemble them into a meaningful picture.

If a pilot cannot create a meaningful awareness, or perhaps becomes fixated on one instrument, then there can only be one outcome. Without sight of any external references such as the horizon, the aircraft’s wings will begin to tilt to one side or another, and that bias will continue to increase. Soon it will enter what pilots term a graveyard spiral from which there is no recovery, and it will plummet into the ground.

Graveyard spirals also occur when we try and interpret human behaviour by trying to impose a theory without external reference to real and observed behaviour. Clare Graves’ system of Spiral Dynamics categorises all of human behaviour into eight mutually exclusive categories, which results in large groups of humanity being judged to have the same behavioural patterns.

This ia classic example of trying to impose a theory on to a behaviour and then wondering why it crashes and burns. Instead we should observe and experience meaningful patterns of behaviour and dynamically assemble them into the real big picture. Human behaviour is not a black box recorder.