Where do your beliefs come from?
That’s one of the questions that Dave Gray explores in his book Liminal Thinking. To answer it, he shares with us a simple yet profound hand-sketched model.
It starts with a base layer of reality. This represents reality in its full complexity, which is what makes it unknowable, at least in its entirety. We live within that reality, but we only get to experience some finite subset of it.
But here’s what’s interesting: we don’t really appreciate the full breadth of any individual experience that we have. That’s because our attention is finite – we can only place it in one direction in any given moment. As Dave says, it’s kind of like the needle of a record player tuning into just one small slice of your experience.
From that attention that we give to our experiences, we develop theories about how the world works. We see patterns. We develop expectations about what things will look like when we enter a grocery store, for example.
And then on top of those theories we develop judgments about how the world should look in any given situation. And those theories and judgments form the basis of our beliefs, things about the world that we believe to be true.
This is where you and I and everyone you know stands, not necessarily on the same set of beliefs, but we have each constructed our beliefs in a similar fashion, working our way up. What that level represents, everything above the dotted line, is what we consider to be obvious.
But even though we think we’re on solid ground here, two of the lower layers show us that it’s actually pretty precarious: the fact that any individual only experiences a small subset of reality, and that those experiences are filtered through a needle point of attention.
So all of those theories, judgments, and beliefs sit on a pretty weak foundation. The whole thing could easily topple over.
Dave calls this model The Pyramid of Belief, and not only does it explains how your beliefs are formed, it also helps you create important change in your life.
Dave identifies the liminal space in between the line of reality and the line of the obvious. That term liminal refers to a kind of in-between space, like a doorway, moving from one world to another, from one context to another.
And liminal thinking involves becoming more conscious of the belief-construction process. That takes conscious attention because it’s easy to stay just in your own world of the obvious and not really think about what led to your particular understanding of the world, of a situation going on in your own life, of a topic that you see in the news. It’s not until you investigate where those came from that you’ll be able to see how strongly or not to hold onto those beliefs.
I wanted to share this here because first of all I really enjoyed the book, and because I very much appreciate Dave Gray’s visual thinking style. You’ll find lots of great sketches throughout the book, so if you’re working on developing your visual thinking skills, you might practice sketching out the visuals you see within the book.
I also wanted to share that pyramid because it’s a great example of a useful model that explains how something works, that gives you an entry point into the complexity of a topic like belief formation. It’s simple to sketch out but rich in meaning. That’s what we shoot for as visual thinkers.
Finally, I wanted to share it because I think there’s a lot that this pyramid has in common with the general act of creating models, as I have shared within the Sketch It Out framework, which is a process that I use to take incoming information, process it, and create a visual artifact that helps me to explain that particular topic, sometimes just to myself, sometimes to other people.
What this pyramid of belief suggests is that not only should you hold your beliefs loosely, but if you too are engaged in the process of making models in the form of drawings and diagrams, I think you should also hold those models loosely.
This gets at the iterative nature of sketching it out that I often talk about. It’s why I think it’s more helpful for your models to live in your hand and to be sketched out regularly, so that each time you sketch out a model that you’ve developed, you have the opportunity to adjust it based on new experiences or even just newly placed attention.
Dave’s work on liminal thinking is an encouragement to be a little bit more conscious of where we’re placing our attention and the overall belief formation process. Perhaps whenever possible, try sketching out what lives within the liminal space that led to something that you think to be obvious.
Visual thinking is a tool to explore that liminal space and perhaps identify where some of your beliefs and judgments and theories might need some tweaking.
Cheers,
-Doug