Check which territories of experience you are holding

Pause and check how many of the four territories of your experience your awareness is holding right now.

Perché funziona

Torbert’s first-person theory, as he sets it out in his 2013 essay, names four territories of experience: the outside world, your own sensations as you know them from within, your own thoughts and feelings, and the dynamics of your attention itself. On this view a judgment formed from only some of these territories is missing the others, and naming them makes the gap visible so the judgment can be checked against it. Torbert (2013) presents the check as something you can run on the spot, during action, rather than as a diagnosis of the person.

Come farlo

1. Pause for one breath at a point where you are about to make a call.
2. Ask: what am I seeing or hearing in the outside world right now?
3. Ask: what sensations am I noticing in my body, as I know them from within?
4. Ask: which thoughts and feelings are running, and what conclusion are they heading toward?
5. Ask: where is my attention going, and what drew it there? Then decide, noting which territories you had covered and which you had not.

Prove scientifiche

Two different lists appear in the sources. Torbert (2013) gives four territories of experience (the outside world, own sensations as known from within, own thoughts and feelings, and the dynamics of attention itself) as a first-person theory that permits on-the-spot testing during action; he cites Torbert’s 1973 work and Torbert & Associates (2004) for it. Starr and Torbert (2005) give a different four (the outside world, one’s own behavior, one’s own feelings and thoughts, and a kind of witnessing of all of these), and call the simultaneous awareness of all of them triple-loop awareness, their term for seeing all of these together. No study in the sources read tests this check on its own. (mechanistic)

The territories come from the method’s developer and are a conceptual frame. Whether running the check improves decisions is not tested in the sources read for this page.

Fonti

• Torbert, W. R., & Associates (2004). Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
• Starr, A., & Torbert, B. (2005). Timely and Transforming Leadership Inquiry and Action: Toward Triple-loop Awareness. Integral Review, 1, 85–97.
• Torbert, W. R. (2013). Listening into the Dark: An Essay Testing the Validity and Efficacy of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry for Describing and Encouraging Transformations of Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry. Integral Review, 9(2), 264–299.

Errore comune

Treating the four questions as a checklist you complete once, instead of a question you ask again at the next moment of decision.