The Regenerative Practitioner™
Harnessing the Power of Framework Thinking: Shifting How We Think
In the welcome email prior to Session One, we wrote, “The Regenerative Practitioner™ is about
reimagining how we work and who we are as we work, and building capability to integrate
these insights into our work. The series begins with a focus on how we are thinking—how we
process the world.”
Over the next several weeks, you will be working with a technology that was developed
specifically to enable a different way of thinking. And you will be working “live” on developing
this new way—applying it to something real, perhaps something you are working on
professionally and that you care about. You will be asked to hold the work of explicitly adopting
new ways of thinking and progressively expanding the content this thinking is working on, while
producing a progressively integrated set of results in terms of new thoughts or ideas.
We realize that at times this will feel as if someone has handed you a unicycle and asked you to
learn how to ride it while competing in a 10 kilometer race—oh, and teaching the rest of your
team how to ride at the same time. So at this point we want to step back from the starting gate
and take some time to reflect on what it means to work on how we think. The following is
offered as a context for reflecting on how
what you will be working on in this series
relates to that. Much of the following may
make intellectual sense, but not yet
experiential sense. Thus we encourage you
to come back and reread this after we
complete the web sessions but prior to the
intensive gathering.
At one level, all of this work deals with how
to actually leverage real change in the
systems that we’re working in. A desire for
change starts when we recognize a pattern
in which actions aren’t creating the results we want, whether we’re talking about a child’s
behavior, our business, or a community. The tendency is to start by focusing on the actions,
changing what people do. Incentives, penalties, taxes, and regulations are all aimed at shaping
behavior to create the desired change. Unfortunately, this approach requires an extraordinary
amount of effort and oversight. Because it is continuously reacting to what is emerging, it can
only produce incremental and ultimately ephemeral change.
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© 2013 Regenesis Group, Inc.
Another tendency when we see that change is
needed is to introduce a new subject. That is, to
change what we want people to think about before
taking action—sustainability for example or, on a
narrower scale, the subjects included in
sustainability metrics from LEED to Living Buildings.
While this has a better ratio of effort to effect,
adding lists or menus of what to think about leads
to an atmosphere of tradeoffs and compromises in
which change is primarily limited to amelioration
and mitigation.
Tapping the full power of a change effort to
make a real difference requires going way
upstream to work on how we think. How we
think shapes what we think about, what we
pay attention to, and thereby what we do.
Only by working from this point can we shift
from reactive to regenerative design.
The challenge, of course, is how to do this.
How do we work on the process of thinking
when for most people most of the time our
thinking operates pretty much invisibly and
very rapidly. Most efforts to shift how we think usually end up focusing on what’s visible to the
senses, what we do and what gets manifested as a result or what’s visible to the mind, which is
what we think about—the thoughts we have rather than the process that’s producing them.
We can see the results, but we don’t see where they are coming from. In other words, it’s easy
to say that we need to change how we think, but it’s hard to do.
The emergence of the ecological paradigm has led a lot of people to talk about the need to
develop a new way of thinking more appropriate to the dynamic, complex living world revealed
by that paradigm. In Regenerative Development, we use dynamic systems frameworks and
developmental work concepts to work on that. We think of them as the Regenerative
Practitioner’s secret weapons. These frameworks and concepts are part of an integrated
thinking technology developed over the last half century. This is a technology for non-entropic
processes, those which bring increasingly higher order to things.
Dynamic systems frameworks and developmental work concepts are ways of seeing and then
holding in mind the forces that are at play when we are undertaking the work of manifesting, or
enabling the manifestation of something at a higher order of value. One of the main reasons we
use them is that they allow us to work on complexity without fragmenting what we’re working
on into parts and pieces. This is a critical capability if we’re going to design for and engage with
the dynamism of a living world.
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These frameworks and concepts also let us manage a range of diverse or even divergent
perspectives and bodies of information without ever losing our sense of the whole. This is rare,
and it’s what makes this approach so powerful once you’ve begun to develop some mastery.
One reason they are able to be so effective is that they enable essence thinking—thinking that
allows us to hone in on what’s core in what we’re working on and to ignore what’s superfluous.
Details of a situation often confuse us with their complexity. Frameworks provide a means for
circumventing the confusion of details to hold and to understand the larger or underlying
patterns of behavior. Good designers learn to develop their intuitive capacity for getting to the
core of something. Frameworks enable us to manage the intuitive process, making it more
explicit, easily replicable, and sharable with others.
By helping us create an image in the mind, frameworks help us understand the behavior of
something that is systemic. The process of systems thinking is one of seeing the framework that
is forming the system and the dynamics thereof, and then using this framework to develop the
how, why, and consequences of its working as a basis for developing ways to
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Bring about its more effective working
Achieve harmony between the “structuring” produced by the system and the desired
“pattern” for that structuring as reflected in its environment.
Developmental work concepts such as self-observing and self-remembering, and external
considering and internal locus of control, play an essential role in embedding the ability to
develop and improve the quality of our thinking processes. Combined with the frameworks,
they enable us to see and make explicit—to ourselves and in working with others—the frames
or paradigms that are shaping how we see and understand the world, and the implications of
that shaping. This is in many ways the most powerful aspect of the technology, in that it is the
source for continually regenerating our thinking by disrupting mechanical assumptions and
automatic patterns with new ways of seeing. Think about what happens when we don’t
develop that capability to be conscious in the moment of what is shaping how we think about
something. Lacking that makes it pretty much impossible to change how we’re thinking.
Review: The Generic Tetrad
The tetrad is one of a progressive set of frameworks developed by John Bennett as part of
Systematics, the discipline he developed for understanding systems in which we’re participants
rather than observers—or, in Bennett’s words, “for understanding organized complexity.”
Bennett has defined systematics as "the study of systems and their application to the problem
of understanding ourselves and the world."
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Like all the dynamic frameworks, the
tetrad is an instrument of
understanding, not of knowledge. It
represents the form or pattern of all
intentional and directed processes or
activities, ones that create a change
in state from one order to another.
The term activity, as we use it here, is
defined as “a process that transforms
something through time from one
state to another, adding value to the
lives of those involved and the living
systems in which the process
unfolds.” This transformation
includes some material structuring or restructuring, a change in ableness, and the fulfilling of an
essence pattern.
The four points of the tetrad represent sources for the activity that need to brought together to
realize the potential present in the ground through manifesting greater value. The tetrad
enables us to develop a core understanding of what’s happening and why by seeing the
association of patterns sourcing the process, or that we want to source it. That understanding
provides the basis for upgrading or evolving the activity. Two of the sources are concerned with
motivation (need and aspiration) or why we want to engage in the activity; two are concerned
with the how of engaging or the means (directive force and instrument).
The six lines between the different points reflect the continuous interplay that occurs between
the sources as the activity unfolds and responds to the hazards and dynamics of the
environment in which it is taking place. We focus primarily on the two inner lines in this series.
The horizontal line or connectivity is related to the ends of the activity. It connects the need or
urge for the ground to become more ordered and complete and the goal, which provides the
vision and aspiration (ideal pattern) for manifesting the new order and completion that is
potentially possible for the ground.
Details of a situation often confuse us with their complexity. A framework like the tetrad
provides a means for circumventing the confusion of details and understanding the larger or
underlying patterns of behavior. We develop mastery of such frameworks by applying them
first to something we’re familiar with and have first-hand experience in. We can then relate the
understanding that is derived to less familiar situations and see similar underlying patterns. For
example, we can see the nature of and interplay among the four sources in any activity, even if
we are encountering the activity for the first time.
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The Thinking Technology behind the Frameworks
Perhaps the most essential thing for a continuing education is to develop the capacity to know what you
see and understand what it means. Many people seem to go through life without seeing. They do not
know how to look around them. Only when you have learned that can you really continue to learn about
people, about conditions, about your own locality… If you can develop this ability to see what you look at,
to understand its meaning, to readjust your knowledge to this new information, you can continue to learn
and to grow as long as you live and you’ll have a wonderful time doing it.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Most technologies, including the ones we rely on in our industry, are drawn from the science of
the physical world that explains and deals with the things that run down in the universe. We
have come to know a lot about run down and entropic processes in the physical world as a
result of that focus and study. In contrast, the technology we use in developing a regenerative
practice is a technology for non-entropic processes—for value-adding processes. Rather than
run down overtime, these are processes that bring increasingly higher order to things.
That’s why this technology works on understanding and on being and becoming, as distinct
from knowing and cataloguing. You could describe it as a discipline for the intuition or for what
some call right brain thinking, not for the analytic mind or left brain thinking. This isn’t to say
that we don’t need analytic thinking; it’s just that for centuries that’s pretty much the only kind
of thinking that science and our culture has paid attention to. So we have a lot of research and
practices for developing analytic thinking and until relatively recently a lot of ignorance about
intuitive thinking.
As it turns out, while analytic thinking is good for counting and measuring, intuitive thinking is
the power behind our ability to think systemically, to grasp and understand complex wholes,
and to perceive and make sense of the patterns shaping their behavior through time. In other
words, this is the nature of thinking required to become co-evolutionary partners with a living
world. We’re also learning that because intuitive thinking is extremely rapid and largely
unconscious, all of its power can also be used to subvert understanding and reinforce our biases
without our even knowing that we’re doing so. Both aspects have significant implications for
our ability to understand complex living systems and to engage with them as partners in
evolution. Dynamic systems frameworks and the developmental work concepts help us harness
and develop the power of intuition while avoiding the hazards that it raises when it works
unconsciously.
Based on what we now know about the basic dynamics of how intuitive thinking works, there
are two interlinked cognitive processes that are particularly key to understanding how
frameworks relate: 1) perception, specifically pattern perception, and 2) conception or
interpretation, making sense of patterns. These two processes, which we might simply call
seeing and understanding, enable us to predict outcomes and develop appropriate behavioral
responses. A common example is body language—the better we understand a person, the
more accurately we can predict and respond to what their body language tells us is likely to
unfold.
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Pattern perception provides the raw material for making sense of patterns. It is essentially an
act of attention, and like all attention it requires selecting out what to pay attention to and
what to ignore.
Making sense of patterns uses what Daniel Kahneman calls the “coherence creating
mechanism” in our brains, which we rely on to make sense of our world. We make sense of the
perceived pattern by drawing on our neural net—the vast collection of interlinked ideas and
associations our brain accumulates and stores over time. We then create a logically and
emotionally coherent story about what it means and the implications moving forward.
So what is the importance of this to regenerative practice? Two things stand out. First—the
power of intuitive thinking lies in its capability to perceive what patterns are important or core
and then to make sense of them as a basis for assessing future trajectories and implications.
Pattern literacy (reading existing patterns and writing or generating new patterns) is an
essential capability for understanding and engaging appropriately with the dynamic, multidimensional complexity of a living world. We build our pattern literacy through developing our
ability to bring consciousness and conscientiousness to our pattern perception and pattern
interpretation processes.
The second important aspect is what we might call the shadow side of intuition. Analytic
thinking, the slow, orderly assembling of blocks of information, requires conscious effort. In
contrast, much of the time we are literally unaware of our intuition and unable to connect the
thoughts it produces to the process that creates them. One consequence is that while intuition
is a powerful instrument for perceiving and making sense of patterns, it can be an equally
powerful instrument for reinforcing our biases and actually subverting understanding. Think
about how easily we make instantaneous assumptions about people the first time we
see them. In nanoseconds we fit them into patterns and tell ourselves whole stories about
them, only to find out later, sometimes painfully, how off base we were.
Frameworks and developmental concepts help us to harness the power of intuitive thinking by
intervening at two key points, in both cases slowing the process down and making it more
transparent and collaborative. Since intuitive thinking starts with and unfolds from perception,
that’s the first intervention point. An experienced practitioner usually has an immediate initial
intuitive hit about what’s core or important to pay attention to. The frameworks don’t discount
that; rather they help develop it by opening up and slowing down the perception process that
created intuition in order to enable multi-perspective thinking and to make us conscious of the
basis for the choices we’re making about what’s important.
The second intervention point is in the process of understanding what we’ve seen.
Understanding occurs when the internal mental image we’ve generated correlates with an
external structure in what we perceive. When that process is unconscious, our associative
memory runs it, calling up and then reinforcing already existing associative patterns. But it’s
what our brain does next that’s really harmful. Because we are ambiguity-averse creatures, it
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continues to reinforce that interpretation by discarding any contrary evidence—all done so
quickly that we literally don’t and can’t see it. We produce the opposite of understanding, and
then go about building a case to justify it. And being experienced or an expert not only doesn’t
help, it can make it worse. A recent Yale study showed that people often twist basic
mathematical data to fit their preconceptions, and the more mathematically competent they
are, the more likely to twist the data to fit their worldview or biases. In contrast, we apply
associative intelligence through framework thinking to develop an explicit and conscious
foundation for our interpretation—one that can be shared, tested, and continually evolved as
our understanding grows.
In summary, and at the risk of over simplifying, one of the ways the frameworks and
developmental processes help us change how we think is by enabling us to intervene at two key
points—at the point of first perception and at the point where we tap into our neural net to
interpret that perception. The more mastery we gain, the more we can preserve and enhance
the power of intuitive thinking to grasp and understand the working of complex wholes and
make it an instrument of regeneration.
There is one more aspect of this thinking technology that is also an important differentiation
from the science of entropic processes: it is developmental in nature and in application. That is,
it works on being, not just function. When engaged in non-entropic, value-adding processes,
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Individuals design work in ways that are developmental and contribute to the evolution
of their own being, of the beings of those they work with, and the being of what they
are working on.
Each person continuously expands boundaries and extends their capacity to perform
different roles.
Capability is developed as they work.
Without this aspect, the frameworks alone can quickly devolve to mechanical, functional
procedures with no regenerative or evolutionary power.
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