Thinking in Twos and Threes, and Beyond

I once had a boss who would say routinely in meetings, ‘There are three things here...’

I would wait with interest to see the trinity of his thoughts unfold as he summed up the views expressed around the table after an hour.

Often the first two things were lucid and logical, but just as often the third was a thin and flimsy attempt to achieve his triad.

I soon realised that this was simply his way of organising his thoughts.

The world tends to be chaotic. We all need a way of shaping or ordering it in our minds. We need an organising principle that allows us to rationalise the disorder that surrounds us.

In this respect, people often tend to favour either a binary or triad approach.

The binary approach is the most common.

It involves framing the world within a pair of opposites: war and peace, crime and punishment, love / hate, sad / happy, beautiful / ugly, local/international.

Politicians love the simplicity of this method because it is easily communicated and can signal a fundamental change and impression of progress: from despair to hope, from old to new, from poverty to prosperity, from slavery to freedom, from failure to success.

Teachers also like it because it offers a simple learning technique, in which tensions between opposites are established.

Intellectually and emotionally the binary way of thinking can be seductive, offering the promise of a balance between opposing concepts, a satisfying union, or in more recent rhetoric, a ‘hybrid’ solution. 

It is the method of Socrates as recorded by Plato. It is the method proposed by the philosopher Hegel, his thesis and antithesis resulting in a clarifying synthesis.

This method has its limitations, of course. Recent re-imaginings of gender identity, for instance, show how it can restrict our thinking and polarise our thoughts.

Then there is the triad method.

I once saw a lecture by George Steiner in which he spoke about the influence of architecture on the work of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.

He theorised that the typical European three-level house – ground floor, basement, and attic may have had a profound effect on the way these two great thinkers developed their ideas.

In Freud’s schema, the id (the location of subconscious fears and desires) becomes the equivalent of the basement. The conscious ego becomes a kind of ground floor, while the morally superior super-ego equates to the high views from the attic.

In Marx’s structure, the proletariat might be associated with the basement, the ground floor would represent the bourgeoisie, with the attic having its parallel in the aristocracy at the top - the base and superstructure as Marx labelled them. 

Freud and Marx are radically different thinkers. But what is interesting in both is that the equivalent of the ‘basement’ level – the id and the proletariat respectively – if repressed, threaten to rebel against and overthrow the third level (superego and the aristocracy), generating in Freud’s theory a neurosis, and in Marx a political revolution.

This reflects the idea that while we may hide what we don’t want to see in the basement, one day that thing we concealed underground – embodying our fears – might well surface and come back to haunt us.  

In his lecture, Steiner did not mention the work of Dante, but he might have, because the three-part structure of La Divina Commedia has also had a profound influence on the way we organise our thoughts, from a subterranean vision of hell, through a kind of limbo, to an elevated heaven.    

As such, the three-level architecture of the modern home mirrors the way Freud, Marx and Dante all organised their thoughts:

 

These, of course, represent sophisticated and highly developed systems of thinking. But the triad approach is also a favourite of corporate training, often using superficially impressive (but ultimately rather meaningless) triangular diagrams such as the following:

 

Whether you prefer classifying your thoughts in groups of two or in groups of three, each routine represents a way of thinking and a method for developing a line of argument.

The binary pairings together with the ‘list of three’ can also help to make a concept memorable. Two or three things tend to maximise the impact. More than three things can be difficult to remember.

Students know this and understand these techniques. In their English lessons they study rhetorical devices such as the tricolon or list of three.

Once you put two or three things together, they exist in relation to each other and start to build a more complex network of thoughts.

But I leave you to reflect that in order to think originally and not just functionally, in order truly to avoid reducing ideas to a simplistic model, we must think more in terms of both/and rather than either/or.

And in order to think innovatively, we must transcend the useful binary and triad habits and entertain a more pluralistic and more nuanced angle on the world.   

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO