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.
Why it works
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.
How to do it
- Pause for one breath at a point where you are about to make a call.
- Ask: what am I seeing or hearing in the outside world right now?
- Ask: what sensations am I noticing in my body, as I know them from within?
- Ask: which thoughts and feelings are running, and what conclusion are they heading toward?
- Ask: where is my attention going, and what drew it there? Then decide, noting which territories you had covered and which you had not.
Evidence
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.
Sources
- 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.
Common mistake
Treating the four questions as a checklist you complete once, instead of a question you ask again at the next moment of decision.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Torbert’s Action Inquiry: Practicing Timely Leadership
- Notice the attention doing the noticing
Notice the attention doing the noticing, as something distinct from your thoughts, your sensations and what you are looking at.
- Test your reading of someone while you are still talking
Check your reading of another person while the conversation is still going, instead of acting on it and finding out later.
- Research your own action while you are in it
Study your present action while you are in it, and let what you notice feed back into what you do next.
- Sort your question by person and by time
Name whether your question is about you, about the people you act with, or about things at a distance, and whether it concerns the past, the present or the future.
- Keep team feedback in people’s own words
Keep the actual phrases people use when they describe your effect on them, instead of averaging them into one score.
Related concepts
- Torbert’s Seven Action Logics of Leadership
Seven ways leaders make sense of pressure, how common each is, and how to work with your own
- Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
Moving from being run by your assumptions to being able to examine them
- First, Second, Third and Fourth Person Perspectives
How the number of viewpoints you can hold grows, what the research does and does not show, and how to practice it in a real disagreement
- Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
Distinguishing adaptive challenges from technical problems — and leading accordingly
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