For over a year now, I’ve been stewing on and adapting the independent work of E.F. Schumacher and Ken Wilber (citations below), both of whom explore and explain what a “whole” view of ourselves and our world might look like. As I’ve unfolded it (literally) for a few groups and close colleagues, it now seems useful to unfold it for all of you for your reactions.
The larger question I’ve been exploring is how we might observe, describe, know, and grow a more whole-system, whole-human perspective on collective action (that is, organizations or versions thereof). So much of our current language and thinking discards, discounts, or disdains the inner lives within us and around us. This significant blindness seems to be a problem for healthy and coherent cultural enterprise.
Both E.F. Schumacher (in his beautiful final book, A Guide for the Perplexed) and Ken Wilber (in his densely-packed but brilliant A Brief History of Everything) approach some version of this question for different reasons. Below is a video overview of my adaptation of their work (I shuffled the quadrants, added a central image, and jimmied with some other elements of their extraordinary work).
Eager for your feedback – positive, negative, or neutral.
I was listening to you and looking at the model in relation to the context of children and their developing lives as musicians, and what I have obsernved. At first listening, I am thinking maybe the outer/inner illustration should not be symmetrical in the case of an emergent musician….or grow at different rates. Inner takes time. And sometimes I find myself rushing them toward the outer plural quadrant. That quadrant seems to be where they are judged the most…well, all of us, really.
Great comment, Carolyn. Thanks! (And hello!) You’re right to wonder about the relative strength/capacity in each quadrant, and that it can be highly unbalanced in many cases. There’s a whole additional bit in Wilber’s framework around “levels” within each quadrant — where it’s likely and in fact probable that any individual or community may be operating at a high level in one quadrant and rather rudimentarily in another. That’s an extension for another day! So grateful to hear your reactions.
Hey Andrew,
Happy New Year! It was fun to hear your voice – I hadn’t known about your test kitchen but I love it and will be checking in more often to hear more!
What I started thinking about as I listened to and observed your model is the vast differences that manifest between the individual and the plural. Mostly because, using your model to think about audience growth/acquisition/development…we want to collect a bunch of individuals and put them into the outer plural. So an individual might personally value an artistic experience, but moving that value into the behavior of joining a crowd of others to experience it collectively…when I lay over all the external factors than can change/impact the individual, it helps understand why encouraging the collective is so tough. And why things become popular – it seems like it might be easier, somehow, to move a collective of inner thoughts into external collective behavior.
And on the organization front, bless you for trying to convince leaders that all the parts of their staff, internal and external, come to work each day. I think that is one of the hardest things I was rarely able to achieve in my former life as a manager (managing both up and down); building a workplace that acknowledges and supports all 4 pieces. It’s tough to explain to your boss, for example, who’s singular internal viewpoint is very different from the collective of the front-line staff (let’s say), why the behavior we see is not the behavior we want.
Anyway, this is interesting stuff. Looking forward to hearing more!
Your reflections are so helpful, Jodi. Thanks! And yes, there is a complex relationship between the individual and plural, especially in the “inner” life. That tension is a key component of many theories of adult human development (which I’ll spin into a future discussion).
Another perspective is that you don’t have to “encourage the collective,” it’s already there. People already share a rich tapestry of inner collective lives (their family cultural heritage, the experience groups they identify with, their faith communities, and so on). What if the arts organization’s job was not to draw people INTO an inner plural, but to find and foster an inner plural that already exists in the world?
To your second point, that is intriguing – so the individual artist who’s work forms the basis of presentation (not that it has to be that way, but much of it is, right now) is in that plural and not trying to “change” how that plural is thinking?
Yes, although this model gets really metaphysical really fast. The individual artist lives in all four quadrants, so does any individual observer, so does the “system” of the live performance with artist and audience, so does the building they’re in, and the community around them. Further, ‘thinking’ is only one piece of the inner singular and plural, which includes any and all sensations, impulses, feelings, dreams, and motivations that constitute the lived experience.
In my mind, it’s not so much that we “change” the inner plural, but that we invoke, connect, reflect, and inform it.
But I think artistic practice is significantly about translating across these quadrants, bringing the inner and subjective into the outer and objective world.
Hi Andrew,
This is such an exciting perspective to consider and I love the tree visual. It reminded me of Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham’s Johari window – but taken further to think about not just the individual but the collective and the larger implications of the blind spots and unknowns. Thank you so much for sharing this and allowing us to be part of your thinking. It is so exciting to hear where your research and work is leading you these days.
Warm regards,
Kate
Thanks Kate! I’ll explore the Luft/Ingham materials. Grateful for the referral.
This is, at its essence, as brilliant as Wilber in making the the extremely complicated digestible. I have written two internationally acclaimed books on Integral Christianity (Integral Christianity-The Spirit’s Call to Evolve and Is Your God Big Enough? Close Enough? You Enough? Jesus and the Three Faces of God), both endorsed by Wilber who also wrote the Afterword to the second. I have taught Integral Christianity all around the country. I usually skip the four quadrants and start with the Big Three because people can barely grasp the latter. Wish I had your version before and will now make use of it with credit to you, in my organization (integralchristiannetwork.com) which is in process, and my website (www.revpaulsmith.com).
How lovely! Thank you. I’m not sure that Mr. Wilber would endorse this approach, since I rotate the order of his quadrants. He has many important reasons for placing the inner (subjective) quadrants on the left and the outer (objective) quadrants on the right. But I’ve found that a simple rotation makes everything clearer and more resonant with people’s lived experience. Inner is “underground” and outer is “above ground” — which also happens to connect to a full palette of poetic works.
So grateful that you found this useful.
Good morning, I’m intrigued by your four stories approach. I’ve use a 3 x 3 model to help understand organizational behavior. I’ve been addicted to Graham Allison’s model of decision making from his Essence of Decision text. The three modes-Rational Actor, Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics form the horizontal while the vertical axis is defined by Social, Economic and Political as motives for behavior. Allison concludes his work by saying that a combination of his three models form a Fourth in which all factors influence decision making behavior. My addiction to Allison stems from my indoctrination by Simon’s Administrative Behavior as my first reading on organizational behavior. Thanks again for your “Four Stories”. Richard Swaim
Thanks so much for this comment, and this pointer to Allison’s work. I’ll go take a look!
Thank you Andrew. This explains why it is so challenging, perhaps impossible, to lead organizations and people through change unless you consider all 4 stories. Also thought of the Johari window while listening to you. Sandy