What

Clare Graves sadly passed away in 1986, before his life’s work had been completed.

As is so often the case when something important is uncovered, lots of other people pick up the threads and seek to continue the research, or commercially exploit, or spread the word. Sometimes all three.

This phenomenon is common to almost all major discoveries. (It is something we have lived for the last twenty-five years in two other domains.)

One of the first consequences is that, in the desire to clarify and simplify the original thinking, a lot of the important content gets stripped out.

Another is that the ideas and concepts become fragmented, as different ‘experts’ seek to put their own spin on the original work.

And then, when these two things come together, what results is a series of cults, more interested in arguing with one another about who’s more right than the other.

The net result of this is that ‘outsiders’ that accidentally hear about Graves’ work find themselves not only confused by all the different fighting factions, but also failing to pick up the important ideas that accidentally got stripped out.

To some extent, you could argue that Everythink is just another group of experts doing exactly the same thing. Creating a new cult, with an even more simplified, stripped-down version of the original. We hope this turns out not to be the case. Graves’ ideas are too important to languish in cult-land.

What we have been doing for the last fifteen years is solving an important contradiction: how to retain the vital core ideas and concepts that emerge from Graves’ work, and at the same time make it simple to grasp and – more importantly – be able to make meaningful use of them.

We’ve sought to do this by first distilling Graves’ work down to a first principle level, then by integrating his important ideas with those revealed by others – Altshuller, Matchett, Kegan, Ashby, and other giants of the worlds of psychology, creativity, innovation and change – into a whole that works.

We are, first and foremost, skin-in-the-game innovators, whatever we do has to work or we lose our money.

Our aim has been to be faithful to Graves’ work, but acknowledge where there have been holes that have prevented the work from being useful – for example, in help people to change the way they do things – and then filled those holes in. The journey has taken fifteen years and several hundred client projects. Now, finally, we think we are ready to take on any and all challenges.