Sensory - Conceptual - Metaphoric : 3 ways of thinking
Today I talked with someone who works as a coach and is just beginning to explore Clean Language. She had started reading Marian Way’s Clean Approaches for Coaches, and felt “overwhelmed” by the “rigidity” of the method and the “academic” quality. She’s an experienced coach who could notice her reaction and express curiosity about her resistance. I realized that I responded strongly to her use of the word “academic.” Am I here again? I wondered. I like academic writing. I like rigorous thinking. But I don’t like failing to communicate with someone because I haven’t connected with their way of thinking, and this happens often when I write (influenced by my time in graduate school) or when I share resources.
As I started exploring in a blog post on my company website, I like Systemic Modelling because I understand it to be a package of models, routines, and tools that makes space for three types of thinking: sensory, conceptual, and metaphoric. As I said in that post, “Including all three types gives the group more information than it would have than with one or two types alone and maximizes the group's potential to identify and reach desired outcomes.” I also believe that including all three types contributes to creating the conditions necessary for epistemic justice and non-domination (Miranda Fricker). In other words, training in Systemic Modelling makes it more likely that members of a group will respect one another as knowers. This is an ethical and political effect that I value and support.
I made this chart for myself, and I’m finding that it is giving me a new frame for directing my attention. (At the time that I made the chart, the structure came from this article by James Lawley. I explain here. James subsequently pointed me to this article, where he first connected David Grove’s work to Robert Dilts' model of Logical Levels.)
A meta way of understanding Systemic Modelling? In any case, a chart that I’m finding useful.
During a moment of fuzzy intuition, I had the idea to revisit drawings and paintings that I’ve done in the past using this “3 ways of thinking” frame.
Sensory - discovered by looking outward
Conceptual - discovered by considering what I know and making connections
Metaphoric - embodied, discovered by looking / feeling inward
I already knew that the categories of sensory, conceptual, and metaphoric were heuristics and that really they are always in relation and informing one another. The images make this especially easy for me to recognize. Questions come up. Why should “sensory” have an external orientation? Look at all that body stuff going on in the metaphoric image. I can hold my categories lightly and stay curious about them.
Even more interesting to me is how looking at past drawings and paintings made me consider a new category. After decades of not drawing, I started again because of a Zentangle book given to me by my mother in December 2012. Considering this drawing and how I felt making it made me deeply understand for the first time the connection between this kind of structured doodling / pattern making and “mindfulness and flow.” Instead of being a 4th way of thinking, this image for me is tied to “state.” In terms of what is happening with my attention, when I am making a pattern drawing like this, I am immersed in the present task and my attention is fully on the paper and the choices that I’m making with my pen. Systemic Modelling brings attention to state with the Triune Brain model and “managing your state” is an important principle, but bringing attention to state and working with it seems different to me than intentionally working with the three ways of thinking highlighted in my chart.
Mindful - related to “my state”
I’m aware that these blog posts are kind of a public journal and so are likely mostly for my benefit. That’s okay, because my priority at this stage is to make a record of my thought so that I can reflect. One outcome for me from this post is that now I want to try drawing with intentional shifts of attention among the three ways of thinking, and to return to Zentangle with more curiosity about the relationship between the practice and my state.
