Intentional Society: Modeling considered useful
Not this week but next Saturday, newcomers can register here for our next orientation video call on January 21st at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).
Hey, you know that old saying "all models are wrong, but some are useful"? I've noticed that it's wrong. And useful, ha ha. (Woah, self-exemplifying koan 🤯) Yes, it gets at an important distinction, and it also goes too far. I'd prefer to say instead, "all models point at some truth, and all are incomplete". Or perhaps "no map contains the whole territory, yet every map has some helpful correspondence to the territory" though that's a little too verbose.
But the original does capture something helpful about some models being more useful than other models (at least for certain purposes, I would add) — which my re-representation doesn't! Modeling is all about compression, which isn't "right or wrong" at all, other than to the extent that the simplified representation helps us in some domain or task.
Okay so, this bring us now to The Relating Languages of Sara Ness, which she and her team brought to Intentional Society this last week for some workshopping. If you want to see what the model is like, the article linked above is a great intro, though some of the words/labels in the model have changed and moved around a bit so I won't focus on the names.
The form of the model is a set of four types. Not types of people or types of personalities, I'm quick to add — there can be a trap in the Enneagram or MBTI models of labeling people as "being" a "type" — but types of modalities or styles for interpersonal communication behavior. It's laid out on a 2x2 grid. But then it's more accurately a 2x2x2 flattened into two dimensions, which brings out to me the challenges of finding the right dimensions to emphasize with the representation of the modeling.
I like the dimensions underlying the types, the dials or knobs under the behavior. As I received and synthesized them, I'd say the main two are:
- The "amount of expression" people like, sort of the water-pressure of speaking v listening
- How big people assume the "turns" of interaction are, from long speeches all the way to constantly interrupting
Then there's a third dimension on the model, of how internally or externally oriented someone's focus is (and I didn't grok this as much personally, which is a comment on me and not on the model). How much does that help or hinder the usage of the model? In many domains there are tradeoffs between power and ease-of-use, and I think that's true here.
Or, as one IS member observed, there's potentially a "speed/pace" or "amount of silence" dial dynamic that could be incorporated — but, is that mostly captured by the other dimensions of the model already? I offer that as example of what field-testing this model looks like in practice, and we enjoyed serving as fresh eyes to the refinement process of the Relating Languages model. We didn't practice trying or embodying different styles, but I paraphrased someone in my breakout room as saying, "Seeing this gives me permission to try out some different styles" and I think that's a great kind of freedom/flexibility benefit that a good model can bring.
Cheers,
James