The 7 Domains in Endeavour

Many frameworks have been discovered and it is now possible to place each of these within one of the 7 Domains defined by the Hierarchy of Will/Endeavour.

In each Domain listed below, you will find a simple explanation of its function in our lives. There are also brief informal notes on the extent of exploration and framework development, plus posting plans where they exist up to the "last updated" info. (There is also some personal historical information, which may be of interest to some.)

TOP Note: This page only offers a brief summary that will require regular revision. All frameworks referred to below require one or more dedicated Satellites of their own. This Personal Endeavour Satellite is dedicated to exploring the basic Root structures.

Action: RH-L1 → PH1

Action is the formal name for the first and most concrete of the 7 basic elemental forms through which will manifests and endeavour is pursued.

Its function is to enable a person to do things i.e. to proceed practically with the endeavour.

A person who does something deliberately interacts with both physical-empirical and impersonal-social reality. It follows that Action-RL1 refers to a process with mental, physical and social components, which must unavoidably lead to consequences that cannot all be anticipated.

Note exclusions: Closed Instinctive reflexes and actions taken without awareness, deliberate intention or any personal judgement.

The primary hierarchy of action is still tentative. Provisional formulations are used in investigations within the Architecture Room.

However, the decision methods (Principal Typology) have had decades of development, testing and application. Hence there is a high degree of confidence in the formulations and the various derived frameworks.

The Spiral deals with the management culture.The Spiral-Tree and derived Structural Hierarchy deal with achievement and employment from both a personal and a management/organizational perspective.

Posting took place during 2011.

The set of Decision Types [PH'1] was the first THEE Principal Typology discovery. Jimmy Algie was the primary collaborator. Action [PH1] was subsequently analysed following the work on Inquiry [PH2]. There was a conscious aim to explore potential similarities and differences in their formal structure.

Consulting work in organizations led to a discovery that had ramifications far beyond anything that I first imagined. I saw that there was a natural «spiral» trajectory which enabled a leader to strengthen the management culture.

Henri David Thoreau (1817-1862) noted:Closed "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

The Spiral is based on plotting Decision Types in a particular way, a way that Jimmy forcefully persuaded me to see , given it was analysis established over decades in the management literature. How wrong I was then, but how right I was to listen to him. Still, it took me decades till I understood the fundamentals of that plot, now called a TET: Typology Essences Table.

The Q-expansion of the Decision Types has been worked out provisionally in the Architecture Room. It seems valuable, but has not been developed in detail.

The Action-PH1 frameworks are accorded a high priority as they are intrinsic to healthy work arrangements, personal achievement within organizations, and the effectiveness of management generally.

Inquiry: RH-L2 → PH2

Inquiry is the formal name for the second of the 7 basic elemental forms through which will manifests and endeavour is pursued.

Its function seems to be to obtain knowledge relevant to decisions required for the endeavour (i.e. the inquiry is related to practical activity).

The basic formulations were developed decades ago and parts of them published. Not much has been done since then, although not from a lack of interest on my part. Inquiry shows up in two parts of THEE:

  • as part of obtaining useful knowledge about reality i.e. PH2.
  • as part of knowledge produced by academic work i.e. PH'5-QH3.

The academic work aspect uses, indeed takes for granted, phenomena that come into existence within the pure inquiry arena. It seems that «New Economy Businesses» are doing work that is similar to academic inquiry in producing conceptual products rather than tangible things.

Frameworks for pure inquiry have been systematically posted in Frameworks for Development since Q2-2015, revealing some modifications of the structures originally published in the systems science literature.

Inquiry was an early topic of interest as I was in the midst of academia and it was my job to inquire. Churchman and Mitroff’s work on inquiring systems interested me as they showed a parallel to the decision systems [PH'1].

I tackled the Primary Hierarchy initially, identifying Levels 1-5 and writing it up for publication.  Churchman was the referee for Systems Research who approved the paper: Measurement and the Structure of Scientific Analysis.
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I subsequently concluded that Churchman’s 5 «Inquiring Systems» were correct, being both beautifully described and placed in a THEE-style order [PH'2:L1-L5]. I was then able to add two additional systems [PH’2-L6 & L7]—which were required following the discovery of two more Levels in the Primary Hierarchy. This study was also published by Systems Research.
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TOP Note:Closed A taxonomic ordering error in the two published papers, as explained briefly here , was identified in 2012. 

ClosedNaming Issue

Change: RH-L3 → PH3

Change is the formal name for the third of the 7 basic elemental forms through which will manifests and endeavour is pursued. My understanding is still rather conjectural.

The function seems to be to identify, adjust or adapt a state (in whatever aspect is relevant) so as to handle environmental pressures and ensure that endeavours can and will proceed.

So Change-RL3 is not "doing something" or "finding oneself or the endeavour in a particular condition". It seems to be about determining and enabling a specific state of existence of relevant entities.

There is a lot of material and some provisional frameworks, much of it illuminating and some of it probably valid.

Despite this, progress has occurred, and current understanding of the PH3-Primary Hierarchy and PH'3-Principal Typology has been sufficient to support most of the investigations within the Architecture Room.

See Personal Historical Note for further explanation.

Change has proved the most difficult and intractable of the Root Levels to appreciate properly. I have picked it up and put it down many times over decades. Often there has been what seems like great progress, but then something looks wrong and I am right at least about one thing: it is wrong! However, something definite and seemingly on the right track is now in use within the Architecture Room.

My initiation into change came from an appreciation of political ideologies: these, at their hidden centre, seemed to be about change or not changing in response to a representation of reality, as well as other social fundamentals. I still hold to that view.

Based on that, I determined that the Principal Typology dealt with representing the world and contained «approaches to modelling-PH'3»—otherwise how would anyone know any change had occurred? But I recently had to re-order the approaches in the light of work on the Primary Hierarchy.

Hierarchic patterns here have been gratifyingly enlightening on many matters (e.g. leadership), while being rather frustrating in terms of formal analysis. Nothing at all is known about the Q-complex.

Experience: RH-L4 → PH4

Experience is the formal name for the fourth and central Level of the 7 basic elemental forms referring to inner states (e.g. feelings, thoughts) through which will manifests and endeavour is pursued.

The function of these inner states seems to be to provide a reference gauge for any aspect of the endeavour. Taxonomic elements only come to light through the awareness which is mediated via conscious experience (i.e. consciousness).

The Primary Hierarchy, Principal Typology and Spiral have been developed in some detail. The PH'4-Typology originally named as developing an identity was worked out and presented in numerous settings in the early 1990s. It was finally published in Ch.7 of Working with Values (1995), which is available for free download. However, more recent investigations suggest that it deals with ways to ensure mental stabilization.

There are many frameworks here, perhaps especially in the Q-complex, that would surely be relevant to understanding personal growth, and perhaps other matters. I use a vague term like "other matters" because:Closed a regular feature of THEE frameworks is that is quite difficult to know what is going to be discovered, until you actually start exploring in depth and discovering things.

Details of this domain have been progressively posted since 2015.

I started my medical career in psychiatry and immediately gravitated to its psychotherapeutic aspects. This led to a great deal of reading in the area.

Training to be a psychoanalyst exposed me to the intense conflicts between different theoretical schools. I finally worked out that this must be a version of the hostility that characterizes adherents of different identity-defining THEE-Types.

I made my own psychoanalytic contributions blithely ignorant of THEE factors and my inner biases. However, when I came to look at PH’4 in the late 1980s, it was rather easy to see that it dealt with different ways of being a person i.e. developing one’s own identity based on experiences and identifications.

Psychoanalytic schools were aligned in the PH'4 Typology with L'3, L'4, or L'5. The fraternity did not welcome and validate the existence of L'1, L'2 and L'7. There was also L'6 that Jonathan Cohen and I had developed in detail. We thought our paradigm was strongly aligned with Freud. The papers are available for download.

The new taxonomic principles and conceptualizations completed in 2015 has enabled more progress within the Experience Domain.

Communication: RH-L5 → PH5

Communication is the formal name for the fifth of the 7 basic elemental forms through which will manifests and endeavour is pursued. Communication is the primary shaper of endeavour.

Its function seems to be to provide an account of the realities relevant to the endeavour: these realities will be both psychosocial and empirical.

Communication-PH5 is amazing and extraordinary. For starters, it creates psychosocial reality.

Given that THEE Online Project is an exercise in communication, Communication-PH5 has been a focus of investigation. Rather than take the safe option and attempt to work it all out before posting, the inquiry has been proceeding in relatoion to a list of challenges posted here. Results are being posted in Frameworks in Development.

The fundamentals of communication is a rather recent concern by contrast with a long-standing preoccupation with levels of work responsibility.

My introduction to this and to THEE was provided by Elliott Jaques in his General Theory of Bureaucracy. He noticed but did not, to my knowledge, pursue the fact that the work levels reflected communication.

I took this further—although I cannot recall now how I did this—and identified initially 20 and later 28 levels of work. These emerged from approaches to using language.

I left communication-PH5 untouched for about two decades, but then looked at work (and use of language) within «new economy businesses» that generate intellectual products. Following theoretical developments, work to support more arcane associations could be investigated: specifically societal institutions and schools of philosophy in 2021-2023.

Purpose: RH-L6 → PH6

Purpose is the formal name for the sixth of the 7 basic elemental forms through which will manifests and endeavour is pursued. It is the primary source of control over endeavour.

Its function seems to be to determine direction and structure for the endeavour.

Socially, purposes are statements that specify a future state of affairs to be realized via endeavour. They help bring the future state into existence. Purpose-PH6 includes values i.e. all values are purposive in nature, but not all purposes are values.

The main frameworks have been developed and published in Working with Values (1995).  Until posted, the principal Chapters and Tables can be downloaded free from this website.

Two Satellites are part of the Purpose Domain: Politics (Spiral complex) and Interacting-for-Benefit (4th Q-Arena), both deriving from the Ethical Choice Approaches (PH'6).

When I was surrounded in the mid-80s with my notes and pictures, I realized that no-one was going to believe any of it unless it was worked out carefully and in detail with citations to key authors. I therefore picked one area that I intuitively felt was important, «purpose», and spent the next 10 years discovering what it was about and writing it up in detail.

The result was Working with Values: Software of the Mind, 1995. I learned a lot including a realization that, despite striking into an area that was new to me, I had accidentally hit the jackpot in terms of social significance and practical relevance. Structures first discovered there were tested and generalized in other domains.

Additional frameworks within the Purpose Domain await proper development and posting.

Willingness: RH-L7 → PH7

Willingness is the formal name for the seventh and most intangible and imaginative of the 7 basic elemental forms through which will manifests and endeavour is pursued. It is a primary demonstration of both freedom and transcendence.

Its function seems to be to sustain a positive disposition towards the endeavour and its actualization.

Several components have had some preliminary development : the Primary Hierarchy, the Structural Primary Hierarchy, and the Principal Typology. There are no plans to post any of these, as per the Personal Historical Note.

However, as with Change-RL3/PH3, provisional understanding has been sufficient to support several investigations within the Architecture Room.

I came to Willingness very late. It was only identified following the realization that there was a Root Hierarchy. At some point it became evident that something was needed above L6-Purpose to complete the necessary transitions and to protect endeavours.

Some work has been done on frameworks, but not intensively enough. I have tentatively proposed that the Principal Typology deals with approaches to enhancing ability.

The widespread neglect of the importance of willingness is impressed on me daily.

The task in this Satellite requires us to turn away from the internal differentiations and complexities of these 7 levels=domains. Instead, we must treat each as a simple entity-element in its own right i.e. as a «Level of Will» or a «Level of Endeavour». Each entity-level then contributes to a truly human macro-perspective on our endeavours. Once we start,Closed I trust it will become clearer.

Originally posted: 27-Jan-2011. Last updated 15-Jul-2023.