We continue the series on basic concepts in Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST). Today’s question: Does “thinking triangles” make leadership easier?

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We continue the series on basic concepts in Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST). Today’s question: What suggestions do you have for pastoral leaders for seeing triangles more clearly? What about how they manage themselves in the inevitable triangles?

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We continue the series on basic concepts in Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST). Today’s question:How does our family of origin influence how we function in triangles?

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We continue the series on basic concepts in Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST). Today’s question: Are there “healthy” and “unhealthy” triangles (or ways of being in key triangles)? If so, what’s the difference?

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We continue the series on basic concepts in Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST). Today’s question: What are some misundertandings about triangles?

Some of the most common misunderstandings about triangles I hear are:

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We continue the series on basic concepts in Bowen Family Systems Theory. Today’s question: What are common triangles in a church and organizational life?

The list can be almost endless:

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A story is told of legendary Packers football coach Vince Lombardi, whose toughness and demand for excellence turned the losing Green Bay football team into a championship organization. The story goes that after a particularly dismal practice he halted the drills and called the players together. He announced that they needed to start from the beginning, by paying attention to the fundamentals. At which point he held up the ball and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”

One fundamental of Bowen Systems Theory (BFST) is the triangle. Sometimes we tell struggling novices to the theory, “If you understand triangles you’ve got 90% of the theory.” Recently I was interviewed by author and consultant Margaret Marcuson on the topic of triangles. It afforded me an opportunity to go back to basics and think about this fundamental concept. In the next few blogs I’ll share portions of that interview and the prompting questions from Margaret. Here’s the first:
How would you define a triangle?

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I was listening to an author speak about his experiences in the inner workings of a major financial firm—one of the several notorious players in the current financial crisis. I was struck at how familiar the company culture, and the speaker’s experiences in it, were to other corporate contexts. It reminded me of those conversations about how universal the Dilbert cartoons are in hitting the mark regardless of where people work—from a large corporate firm to a small business, from a for-profit conglomerate to a non-profit. It begs the question, “Why are all systems so similar?”

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A couple of times in my past I’ve gotten hit on the head hard enough to see spots. One time, blindsided by two linesmen in a game of football who came at me from either side, I saw swirling spots. The experience of getting blindsided can leave us seeing spots, but, in the case of leadership, it would be more helpful if it resulted in our ability to see the triangle that spawened the anxiety that triggered the reaction that hit us with the equivalence of emotional blunt-force trauma. Can you see those triangles coming?

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Today’s brain and learning concept: the brain learns through conscious and unconscious processes. A great deal of the insights we acquire and the patterns that we grasp are a consequence of ongoing unconscious processing, perhaps more than we realize or care to admit. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (1996) wrote that he processes of the “cognitive unconscious span many levels of mental complexity, all the way from the routine analysis of the physical features of stimuli by our sensory systems to remembrance of past events to speaking grammatically to imagining things that are not present, to decision making, and beyond.”

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