Immunity to Change – Musings on Visualizing our Change Immune System

I’m into week 12 of the Immunity to Change course offered through EdX at Harvard.   This is my second time through the I2C process and this time is just as productive as the first.

The magic of this process is that it helps you surface an artifact of your personality that drives many of your actions and behaviors.  This artifact is called the immune system by creators Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey.

I can see real assumptions (some are quite irrational) that drive many of my behaviors.   I2C spends most of the course unearthing these assumptions, the situations that trigger them , the resulting interior experience of emotion and thoughts – and the resulting behaviors .  Once you watch this mechanism in action as if you are sitting in an audience and watching a movie, you are hooked!

So I can describe my immune system in words.  My musing is whether we could visualize these structures.   As I write this, I realize that the I2C instructors use cartoons to exhibit elements of the immune system — (e.g. icebergs showing the “bigger assumptions” looming under the surface).   But I wonder if there is an opportunity to use Ken Wilber’s “Kosmic Address” scheme to graph our immune system. Current state vs. target diagrams, or before and after diagrams- can help us appreciate where we’re headed – or the progress we achieved.   Indeed, the before and after diagram would be a suitable background for the certificate of achievement!