Circling the Hologram: The Four Territories of Awareness
This diagram is so pregnant with so many beautiful principles that it has tightly held my attention since I first saw it.
To unpack this diagram most easily, we’ll start with what’s most familiar to most people, depicted in orange. The ”Behaviors” box represents our actions--the things we do in life. But any doing we do that's uninformed by the results of our doing equates to the well-known insanity of doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. Which is to say that nearly everyone understands the first type of learning shown here--known as single-loop learning. But that doesn’t mean it’s a given. The person who knows their marriage is struggling (a result) may not fully know how their behavior has contributed. An expansion of awareness is needed--one that includes both results and behaviors. And when this expansion of awareness leads to new behaviors, single-loop learning has occurred.