The agile mind is pleased to find what it was not looking for. —Lewis Hyde
I didn’t just decide that what the world needed most (or what I wanted to create most) was another system for classifying people. Instead, Personal Operating Systems developed organically, sparked by an innocent question. Since then, curiosity and inquiry have continued fanning the flame.
In the Beginning…
You can’t always pinpoint the moment when something momentous starts, especially when that start is inauspicious. But in this case, I know it was on Sunday, October 28, 2018 during the very first session of the very first CYOS(2) course I’d ever facilitated. The full name of the course is Create Your Own Story, Part 2: Trickster Makes the World. It follows Create Your Own Story, Part 1: The Universe Is Made of Stories, Not of Atoms, and it precedes Create Your Own Story, Part 3: Architects Translate Desire into Reality.
The subject of CYOS(1), our inner narrator, is a robust psychological concept that has been embraced by neuroscientists who study the self and the sense of self. Our inner narrator creates our sense of self by maintaining a consistent story about who we are, where we’ve been, and what we’re up to. The narrator is a force for stability and continuity.
The trickster, on the other hand, is a force for disruption and discontinuity—in other words, change.
Even people who don’t know much about mythology are familiar with the hero and the hero’s journey popularized by Joseph Campbell. What they probably don’t know is that tricksters are every bit as ubiquitous in world mythology as heroes. In fact the oldest myth on record—inscribed on clay tablets—is the 5,500-year-old Sumerian story of Inanna’s journey into the underworld. Inanna is a female trickster who likely had a trickster for a father.
Tricksters are travelers just as much as heroes are. But while the trajectory of the hero’s journey is predictable and requires passage through a particular sequence of stages, the trajectory of a trickster’s journey is anything but predictable. Tricksters travel in liminal space, where uncertainty and possibility go hand-in-hand, and you can never predict what the outcome will be.
Campbell could just as easily have written Trickster with a Thousand Faces—a book I think might have been more interesting and instructive, since I find the hero mythology rather stodgy. But Campbell wouldn’t have written that book, given his personal operating system.* It was entirely appropriate and logical for him to have written Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Tricksters of mythology, literature, and real life have been the subject of a surprisingly vast amount of academic research along with some intriguing speculation as to how they relate to the brain and why humans “had to” create them.
…There Were only a Few Correlations
Back to that Sunday in October 2018: as we began to discuss tricksters, I was surprised to learn that the three people in the class had varying degrees of wariness about getting to know these dubious characters. I commented to someone that her Enneagram type might have something to do with her reaction. I was then asked which Enneagram types, if any, were likely to have a positive view of tricksters. I said me; my type! Furthermore, I postulated that was probably also the case for the other two aggressive types of the Enneagram.
A couple of days after the session, it occurred to me there might also be correlations between the inner narrator and inner architect and the other two Enneagram stances. The obvious connections were inner narrator with withdrawing types and inner architect with compliant types. When I brought this idea to the next class session, the response was affirmative. That insight was immediately useful in identifying how each one of us might access and relate differently to the three inner aspects (narrator, trickster, and architect).
But it wasn’t until several months later, at the first session of the next CYOS course, that I created a chart that correlated the inner aspects, the Enneagram stances, and the three functional brain networks (which the class was already familiar with). It looked like this:
The purpose of the colors was to make reading the chart easier. Subsequently they became the labels for the three operating systems, a nomenclature that was readily adopted. The term operating systems came out of a class discussion; it wasn’t my suggestion, but it fit.
Over time, other sets of correlations such as thinking styles were added. The number of aspects included in the chart expanded from three to five, then to six, and suddenly 15 (at which point I thought I was finished). Now that there are twice as many and the chart fills five pages, I recognize Personal Operating Systems as a powerful tool that may always be a work in progress, as well as a lens through which to view the world.
One thing I discovered while looking through this lens is that the world often settles for binaries rather than seeking multiple choices. It seems satisfied to identify this or that (either/or, black or white) rather than this or that or that.
As an example, not of one of the aspects included in the chart, but of what I’m talking about, traditionally people have been classified as either introverts or extraverts. But it turns out that those are both extremes and a majority of people are actually ambiverts, somewhere in between.
So in several cases where a set of either/or definitions fit two of the operating systems, I spent some time and did some research to find out if there was a third option. In nearly every case so far, there has been.
But…So What?
Viewing people and their behavior through this lens has caused me to listen differently and to investigate whether a behavior or a response is unique to an individual or applies generally to their operating system.
Looking through this lens makes it apparent that we are not having the same experiences as people with different operating systems even when we are literally in the same place at the same time. We don’t always understand each other. Sometimes it seems as though we’re speaking different languages.
We don’t process information the same way. We don’t view time the same way. We don’t connect the dots the same way (we don’t even connect the same dots). We don’t think the same way. We don’t measure the same things. And while we all have the same three functional brain networks, we definitely don’t access them the same way or to the same extent.
We approach making choices, pursuing goals, and tracking progress differently. Some of us are good at making distinctions; some of us are not. While there is something that habitually gets in the way of making a full commitment for each of us, that constraint is different for different operating systems.
To me, this is interesting in and of itself. It’s useful to know that the world is composed primarily of aliens. (Of course, my operating system is likely in the minority, which would make me the alien.) But it’s sobering to realize that everyone who is teaching or training or coaching or otherwise advising people is doing it from one of these operating systems, while their audience or class or clients are more likely than not coming from different operating systems.
That explains why so many good ideas don’t work at all for many people who try them, even when they have the best intentions. It explains why communication misses the mark, and training that works for some people is ineffective for others. It explains why I started out eight years ago teaching the right class for me but the wrong class for my clients.**
It’s sobering to consider the scope of the problem. But it’s also expansive to realize there is a potential solution, which is to match the tool or the system or the training with the individual based on his or her operating system. It requires being creative, reimagining a tool or an exercise from a different perspective, and getting “inside” other operating systems. I’ve just started attempting to do it, but I’ve already had some interesting results.
But the real purpose of this system is to facilitate change. Once we become intimately familiar with our own operating system, so that we can observe and understand the mechanics of it, we can learn to modify our responses and experiment with responses and behaviors from the other two operating systems. We have access to all three, but our brain has grooves worn in that keep us on our particular track.
Personal Operating Systems is the one thing I wish I’d known about in the beginning of this work. If I had, I definitely would have done some things differently. But I know about it now. And that knowledge hasn’t just helped me understand others better; it has also given me a much clearer picture of myself.
*Joseph Campbell had the Teal operating system.
**When I started Farther to Go! the first course I offered was Goals, Habits, and Intentions. GHI is a Green operating system course. It’s packed full of information, and its main purpose is to provide practical tools, based on the way the brain works, to get from here to there. What I didn’t realize until much later is that I created that course because Green is the least accessible operating system for me. (It’s difficult to factor in your own perspective, even when you’re aware you must have one.)
What most of my clients needed was the What Do You Want? course, which I developed as soon as I recognized how many people couldn’t use the tools in GHI effectively because they had no idea what they wanted or even what was important to them.