Stage Five Engineering
How stable Stage Four tribes can seize or create opportunities to achieve transcendent, history-m...
Stage Five Engineering describes how tribal leaders can create conditions for the rarest and highest level of organizational performance. Stage Five ('life is great') accounts for less than 2 percent of workplace cultures and is characterized by innocent wonderment, absence of competitive framing, values that are vital (life-giving rather than merely important), and a noble cause that serves as the tribe's only compass. At Stage Five, competitors do not disappear; they become irrelevant. The tribe is guided entirely by its values and noble cause, and performance becomes history-making. Stage Five cannot be directly achieved; it emerges when a stable Stage Four tribe encounters or engineers a history-making opportunity. The prerequisites are: all Stage Four infrastructure must be in place (shared values, noble cause, triadic networks, tribal strategy), the tribe must have the business results to sustain Stage Four, and a market opportunity must exist or be engineered that is big enough to transcend competitive framing. Stage Five tribes often describe the experience using words like 'miracle,' 'wow,' and 'we couldn't believe it.' The mood is closer to a prayer of thanksgiving than a victory celebration. Critically, Stage Five is unstable in most organizations: after a burst of history-making activity, the culture waves back to Stage Four, then back to Five when a new opportunity arises. Stabilizing at Stage Five is the frontier of organizational development.
- Stage Five cannot be forced or willed into existence; it emerges when a stable Stage Four tribe meets a history-making opportunity
- The mood of Stage Five is innocent wonderment, not tribal pride; the difference between 'we're great' and 'life is great' is the difference between pride and awe
- At Stage Five, values become vital (life-giving) rather than merely important; without them, the culture collapses back to Stage Four and keeps falling
- The noble cause is the tribe's only compass at Stage Five; without a competitor to define itself against, the tribe navigates by purpose alone
- Stage Five uses resonant values rather than shared values: the only requirement is that values can work together, even if they are different between partnering groups
- Culture and strategic performance must move together; a Stage Five culture without the business results to sustain it will degrade one stage at a time, potentially all the way to Stage One
- Stage Five tribes act as magnets for other groups that can help pursue the noble cause; the natural impulse is to partner with anyone whose values resonate
- Stabilize at Stage FourStabilize at Stage Four
- Ask the Transcendent QuestionAsk the Transcendent Question
- Engineer or Seize the OpportunityEngineer or Seize the Opportunity
- Navigate by Noble Cause and Resonant ValuesNavigate by Noble Cause and Resonant Values
- Recognize and Sustain the MomentRecognize and Sustain the Moment
The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team was a group of individual captains united in opposition to their demanding Coach Herb Brooks, stable at Stage Four.
Gallup Organization under CEO Jim Clifton had achieved stable Stage Four with strong values around human potential and a global brand.
The discovery of Stage Five happened by accident at Amgen in the 1990s. The researchers expected Stage Four tribal pride but found something different: employees who described their competition as disease rather than companies, spoke in whispers of gratitude rather than boisterous pride, and exhibited innocent wonderment rather than competitive triumph. This forced the researchers to add a fifth stage to their model. They subsequently found Stage Five in dozens of organizations: for-profit companies, nonprofits, Boys and Girls Clubs, think tanks, and technology start-ups. The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team provided a dramatic example: a team stable at Stage Four (united against Coach Herb Brooks) that transcended into Stage Five during the game against the Soviet Union, playing not against a competitor but for values and sport itself. The Gallup Organization under Jim Clifton provided another example: after stable Stage Four success, Clifton asked whether Gallup was helping six billion people or just the best corporations, and the organization engineered a Stage Five moment through the world poll initiative.