Triangle Theory – Refs, Further Reading & Links
This section contains all the research I did when looking into my triangle theory to see if anyone else had come up with something similar. It’s a big long ramble, so please feel free to skip it, or have a pootle through the references at the end.
So, has anyone else ever formulated a Triangle Theory like mine? You can imagine trying to discover the answer to that innocent-sounding question would be a mammoth undertaking. How on earth does anyone start to find out something like that? A few years ago, I accidentally got a Masters in Research, so I dusted off my atrophied skills and headed to Google Scholar. ‘Triangle Theory’ was my first search, although I wasn’t expecting much. However, I got LOADS of Triangles referenced in the results. It appears that Triangles are definitely ‘the thing’ when it comes to explaining a concept.
I found Triangles to describe:
- Employee fraud tactics
- Detection of explosives
- Responsibility-avoidance excuses (yes, really)
- Management styles
- Energy harvesting
- Rent seeking (?!)
- Change process
- Destination marketing
- Dynamics in adult education
- The CBT framework
I’d clearly found another one of those never-ending lists, as everyone seems to have a lovely theory and decided to use a triangle to depict it. I was particularly interested (and thought I’d got close to what I wanted) in the paper The Metaphor of the Triangle in Theories of Human Development.1 Actually, a fascinating read, but it only described the Triangles themselves and not really WHY a Triangle.
Was what I was asking too … simple?
Next up I searched ‘why a triangle works for explanation diagrams’ and came across a wonderful entry about diagrams in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy2 which, after some time (quite a lot of time), led me to another angle about the usefulness of diagrams in explanations,3 but still no satisfactory explanation of (or even acknowledgement of something similar to) my Triangle Theory with its ‘concept, framework, energy’ configuration.
However, I now understood my Triangle as a theoretical representation, so thought I’d try the ‘why do projects have three parts’ as a search term.
Well, funnily enough, that rubbish search term actually got me a bit closer. I arrived at a LinkedIn article4 where contributor Joe Dager proposed that creative project management had three elements to it: concept, vision, production. This is very similar to my Triangle Theory, as I could see those three labels mapping very closely on to my own. BUT this was, again, just another EXAMPLE of a Triangle, not an explanation of WHY the balance of these three elements was in … well, everything.
Any reasonable researcher will tell you it’s the quality of the question that determines the quality of the answer. It was becoming clear I wasn’t very good at coming up with the right question. So how about if I came up with a statement instead? I searched ‘conceptual triangles are in everything’ and came across a paper that made my heart sing: Facts, Concepts and The Shape of Psychology’s Epistemic Triangle.5 As I read the paper, this sentence in particular leapt out at me:
“the harmony of the triangle must be restored before the problems can be solved.”
Yes! That was much more what I was looking for: the Triangle as a continuum, not a fixed proposition or completed process. My Triangle Theory is expressing a continuing balance between all the elements. That was why it was so essential to find the Triangle in everything: it made you consider the balance of the elements. Referring back to the example Triangles of Movies and Projects in the Triangle Theory Intro; try making a movie without a producer, or a story. Or expecting a project to work out when you haven’t got a plan. Every time a Triangle popped into my head had been because I could suddenly see a balance in something, or there was an element missing and I couldn’t figure out where. It reminds me very much of the importance of Belbin’s Team Roles in organisations.
References – for those that like this kind of thing 🙂
1 Zittoun, Tania & Gillespie, Alex & Cornish, Flora & Psaltis, Charis. (2007). The Metaphor of the Triangle in Theories of Human Development. Human Development. 50. 208-229. 10.1159/000103361. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/39731534_The_Metaphor_of_the_Triangle_in_Theories_of_Human_Development
2 Shin, Sun-Joo, Oliver Lemon, and John Mumma, “Diagrams”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/diagrams/
3 Larkin, J.H. and H.A. Simon, Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand
words. Cognitive Science, 1987. 11: p. 65-99 (no hyperlink as this paper is firmly behind paywalls, grrr).
4 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-stages-creative-project-management-joe-dager
5 Lourenço, Orlando & Machado, Armando & Silva, Francisco. (2000). Facts, Concepts and Theories: The Shape of Psychology’s Epistemic Triangle. Behavior and Philosophy. Behavior and Philosophy. 1-40.
6 Gaisean, F. (2021). Information in the Universal Triangle of Reality for Non-living/Living Structures: From Philosophy to Neuro/Life Sciences. Philosophy Study, August 2021, Vol. 11, No. 8, 607-621 doi: 10.17265/2159-5313/2021.08.003
https://www.davidpublisher.com/Public/uploads/Contribute/613a23ae7fc67.pdf