People and their organisations come into existence, go through stages of growth, periods of good health and bad, times of relative calm and predictability and other times of intense turbulence, chaos and uncertainty. Every organisation and every person gets born, grows, gets stuck and lost and off path, learns, gains, loses, finds new ways, develops knowledge and wisdom and comes to an end. Every day, as individuals or organisations, we create this journey. When we have to surrender and die to things, we want to be able to let go as easily as we can, suffer the least uncertainty and use the change creatively, to realise an even better situation than we left behind. Basically, we all want to play the game as engaged and empowered people. We don't want to waste unnecessary time, angst or resources. We want to show up well in the world.

How can we bring more of this about? What do we need to know and how can we discover it, sooner than later? What do we need to do and how do we best do it, and when? What must we learn and how do we go about that? What has to end, what has to be invented and how do we find that passion, that fire in the belly that will keep us going?

Transition, change, learning, renewal, rebirth and invention all started with somebody's change of Mind. It may have been stimulated by an earthquake, an unalterable force of nature, but the resulting adaptation and becoming of the humans involved, occurred in the Mind. What makes our story interesting is the progress and evolution and transformation of Mind as it dances with the world.

The interactive journeys of the four domains produce continual tensions in the cycle. The possibility that the cycle can ever be truly stress-free is not worth talking about. Every domain is turbulent, unpredictable, surprising.

The most practised Behaviour of a championship athlete or performer may appear to the untrained eye to be mechanically precise. But to the experienced coach or the performer the self, their action is full of nuance and difference, experiment and discovery. Learning is required. Some change of Mind, some difference in Situation, a new request or alignment for a key Influence. No matter how perfected the Behaviour, it will still occur with a degree of uncertainty and error or possibility and surprise, depending on how we interpret it.

Situation is a factual measure of physical conditions. But there are vast uncertainties and room for error in how we actually, scientifically measure. Influence is the ten thousand things. Really a zillion things. When we attempt to contemplate the immensity, our brains hurt.

And Mind, itself. One science of mind suggests there are more than one hundred and fifty sub-personalities at work within us. Each with a point of view. Each with experience. Each with a Head, Heart and Feet component. And all competing for attention and a voice. So our dynamic ecology of Mind is as diverse and surprising as is the dynamic ecology of Influence.

Increasingly the world seems to be going faster and faster. Influences are changing more frequently driving more rapid changes in how our Behaviour transforms into the Situation in which we find ourselves. As this happens, the world seems to run away from the state of our being, forcing more and more change of Mind.

Some of the stories we tell ourselves imply that we can make transitions from one stable state to another. But when we really look at the dynamics of the cycle, it is clear that the game never stops. There is no such thing as a changeless time. We may have periods of less of more uncertainty driven by more or less tension between domains.

Our work is to become masters of the art of Changing Our Minds.

When we are confronted with a story which needs help, we use the cycle to understand and elaborate the story in the four domains where we can get some access to changing minds. There are four activities to pursue.

Find The Four Domains In The Story

Our first job is to make sure we have story material for every domain on the board. What sells novels and movie scripts are dynamic Situations, conflicting Influences, changing, twisted, inspired and struggling Minds, and the surprising Behaviour which springs from the inevitable collisions. But, people often leave out up to three of the four domains in their story. A financial analyst does just that by describing company Situation measured solely in profit and loss. The Personnel department reports on employee attitudes and mood - measures of Mind. The Marketing team tracks changes in the Influence called 'consumer expectations'. Production managers offer a history of the operation of the order entry process, a story of pure Behaviour. None of these domains, taken by themselves, are very interesting.

Sanity Check The Logical Flow

Putting the story elements into the domains must reveal a clockwise logic in the story. If it isn't there, then we have to dig into the content of the domains and the links between them to locate the logical breakdown, which may well be the reason for the unhappy story in the first place.

Even without all the details of the story, we can still see if what we do know fits the circular relationships in the cycle. Does the cycle hang together? By organising the story around the domains and telling it with a logical flow, the cycle has now revealed itself to be a logical, mystery story.

Use The Known To Infer The Unknown

When we are missing data, or the story gets stuck, we have to speculate, using what we do know about the domains to infer information for empty or illogical domains. Speculation brings some uncertainty and we will have to assume a range of possibilities to the story. This is better than nothing.

If our first level speculation does not get anywhere, we have specific and profound procedures to apply, linked to distinct domains. Any of the procedures can be used on their own, or in any context of the cycle. The answer to this is a brainstorm. A make-it-up exercise. We need to get lots of ideas and find some patterns before we are confident to go forward.

Add Up The Transformational Drivers

When the imbalance in the cycle is in the extreme, we can assume that the humans involved must accomplish changes of Mind which will take up some or much of their energy and attention for some while.

We can examine each domain for the size and frequency of endings, reinventions and realisations which must be accomplished. The more we find, the more imbalance and resulting uncertainty in the cycle. The more imbalance and uncertainty, the larger the collective change of Mind is needed.

When the organisation of the story into domains and the logical checks and simple speculation are not enough, it is time to use the maps derived from the Insight Cycle. There are four and each has a fundamental link to one of the domains in the cycle.

Mind and the TransforMAP

Organisations making big changes cause lots of people to have to change their minds through many endings, reinventions and realisations. Forcing a change of mind onto people produces resistance, uncertainty, and waste.

The TransforMAP is a map of the journey we each take to change our Mind, whether learning, transforming or renewing ourselves. It is also a scheme for listening, reflecting and coaching which acknowledges the complexity of the transformation at hand and which keeps us moving on the journey.

Behaviour and Implemento

When our Behaviour stalls, or is not producing desirable results, we are usually caught in a dilemma, big uncertainty, or are pretty out of touch with how the world works. We don't have enough information to make a decision and act.

Implemento will reveal what we truly want and need to accomplish and a success path which we can use as a temporary structure to keep moving.

Influences and Impacto

Impacto is a superior method for enrolling our most important Influences into our journeys.

Impacto weaves all the domains of the Insight Cycle into a logical story. It provides a balanced process for telling and listening. In a conscious, honest organisation, such a comprehensive framework is required for group communications from leaders down as well as from the bottom up.

Situation and Stucco

Often, we cannot seem to improve the results we are getting, no matter what we attempt. When our Situation is stalled in a negative condition we are likely caught in a degenerative loop of actions and results, mired in a grand mess.

Stucco is an enquiry and inference procedure which uses the domains of the Insight Cycle in a specific way to find the root cause of the loop and find optimal experiments to run which reveal the way out of the mess.

Download a copy of the Insight Cycle map

Download the Map Of Maps