Ken Wilber’s ideas were very influential when Penny Tompkins and I were attempting to find ways to describe what happened between David Grove and his clients, outside of the models and explanations that David used himself.
In particular, Wilber’s Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (1995), came along at just the right time. Penny tells the story of when, in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, I first opened a copy of this book and started reading it. 15 minutes later Penny came back to find me standing in the exact same spot, still reading. She led me by the elbow to the checkout while I continued to read the book!
Once home I devoured all 816 pages of SES.
At the recent online ‘unconference’, Metaphorum 2024, François Bachmann led a discussion about the intersection of Ken Wilber’s quadrant model and Clean – particularly in the context of Organisational Development.
The quadrants
Wilber’s quadrants arise when the distinction between individual and collective is crossed with the distinction between interior and exterior. This gives four “dimensions”:1
Every individual knows about their own interior, subjective experience.2
Others can observe the exterior of an individual.
Every group or collective has an interior culture, history and ways of relating that creates a family, team or community.
Every collective also has an exterior containing overt rules, roles and institutions in a network that can be seen to operate as a system.
There are several ways to present Wilber’s four quadrants, here’s one way:3
My contribution to the discussion was to provide examples from the world of Clean for each quadrant. Having thought about it, I’ve added a few more:
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Most Clean approaches that work with the interior of individuals fit in this quadrant, e.g. • Facilitating a client to self-model using Symbolic Modelling. • Eliciting Metaphor through Clean Language. See the article in the British Journal of Management. Vol. 25, 629–646. Download a free preprint: epubs.surrey.ac.uk/807943/. • Many of the applications described in Clean Language Interviewing: Principles and Applications for Researchers and Practitioners, Editors: Heather Cairns-Lee, James Lawley & Paul Tosey (2022). See Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 & 10. |
There are as yet only a few published Clean applications which use an exterior ‘objectivist’ view of individuals. • One such approach is the Cleanness Rating, an instrument for assessing the questions asked during an interview, coaching or therapy session. See also Chapter 2 of Clean Language Interviewing. |
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Examples of Clean approaches that work with the interior of collectives are: • Creating group metaphor maps (e.g. Caitlin Walker’s Metaphors at Work process in From Contempt to Curiosity, 2014, pp. 76-77). • Systemic Modelling described in Caitlin’s From Contempt to Curiosity (2014). • Modelling Shared Reality (Original article in Dutch published in Kwalon: Journal of the Netherlands Association for Qualitative Research, Vol 3, October 2012). • Group Clean Space processes. See section 5 of Clean Space Revisited and Chapter 7 of Insights in Space: How to use Clean Space to Solve Problems, Generate Ideas and Spark Creativity, James Lawley & Marian Way (2017). • Interviewing groups. See Chapters 8, 15 & 13 of Clean Language Interviewing. |
Clean approaches that seek to map the exterior of a system include: • Management Systems Auditing. See Clean Language Interviewing, Chapter 14 by Yugi Yamagami & James Ramirez. • Collating witness interviews of serious injury or fatality incidents. See Clean Language Interviewing, Chapter 16 by Sharon Small. |
I’m keen to add other examples to the two right-hand quadrants. Please let me know of any you think should be included.
A technical note
Wilber refined his thinking when he recognised that each quadrant represents a perspective. And, that there were in fact “8 native perspectives” since from each quadrant there is both an inside and an outside ‘view’.4
For example, in the Upper Left quadrant, an individual can perceive what is happening inside their body and/or outside their body. Both are personal, first-person, interior, subjective perspectives.
The inside perspective of Upper Right quadrant has special significance for me.
This “native perspective”, an interior (of an “I”) looked at from the outside – i.e. a third-person modelling of a first-person reality, from their perspective – is the nearest scientific description I have found for the perspective I take when Symbolic Modelling.
This approach was pioneered by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela who called it “biological phenomenology” (p. 13, 1987) or the “view from within” since it attempts to describe the phenomenal inner world of the organism from the outside.
There’s more on this perspective at: cleanlanguage.com/pointing-to-a-new-modelling-perspective/
References
1. The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything, Ken Wilber (2007).
2. ‘Knows’ in the broadest sense of Maturana and Varela’s view that “All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing”. The Tree of Knowledge, (p. 26, 1987).
3. Penny and I have mapped the cybernetic notion of feedback on to Wilber’s quadrants in Feedback loops: Ten principles (2005).
4. For a detailed description of Ken Wilber’s “8 native perspectives” see his Excerpt D: The Look of a Feeling: The Importance of Post/Structuralism.
