Hello guys.
I’m at a Steven R Covey training and I see the framework for thinking. Very nice. Lots of threes. Thing is, Dramatica has trained me to see in Quads. So whilst the training is very solid, I’m seeing loopholes (some big, some small). But I see them all. Thanks to Dramatica I see more deeply. Cheers guys.
Awesome!
I went to Tony Robbins earlier this year and smiled when he showed a slide that was undoubtedly Knowledge Thought Ability Desire – just with different labels. 
My favorite three-that-is-obviously-a-four is the “three-act structure,” popularly understood as I-IIA-IIB-III. For those of you can count, yes, that’s four acts. And they wonder why they all complain about the sagging second act! 
Another good quad that pops up in other theories is… I’m gonna have to go double-check who this is from, but basically it starts with a duality–life/death, let’s say–adds out a third–“a fate worse than death”–and then fills in the quad–“sleep/coma,” somewhere between life and death.
Some month ago I was collecting 4-quad-models (mainly from Business Consulting).
My thinking was: If the storymind is trying to solve a problem, why not taking e.g. a problem solving model as a starting point
E.g. for a Courage Story follow the “Circle of Courage” as blueprint for the Signposts
It didn’t really work out (for me), as a story comes from within and can’t be forced into a model.
A lot of models used in consulting business are four of … something, be it steps, stages or steps within a circle
Here a few examples:
I was learning about deforestation in Thailand in the early 2000s and everyone was talking about it like a lack of education (Knowledge/Thought) and I saw it as a way for people to do what they could to get money (Ability/Desire).
It’s amazing how deep Dramatica is! The thing is that the labels they have on there are still tinged by subjectivity. Take the image below. This is clearly a Physics Quad. But the more subtle transition from Learning (gathering information) to Understanding wasn’t captured. Our classic LUDO was butchered! Imagine that! It was implied though; when the facilitator spoke, but it was so…lacking. I had to talk or I’d have exploded. So I simply smiled and pointed it out to her privately after the presentation (Cos I didn’t want to cause any embarassment - I’m a nice guy hehe…). Her eyes lit up like a wildfire!
I’ve started doing this too! It’s a real paradigm to live by once you’ve made the choice. It’s akin to catching wild Pokemon. Gotta collect em all. 
I’ve noticed that speakers sometimes do something like the following. Instead of saying something like ‘I’m going to talk about Physics’ and then exploring LUDO, they’ll say ‘I want to help you understand x topic better’ and then will talk about L, D, and O as they relate to Understanding. And it’s not that they’re leaving out Understanding or combining it with another item, necessarily. It’s just that they’re presenting the quad from a perspective of Understanding instead of Physics, so they can’t look directly at Understanding.
This is where the splay and display come in. Either the speaker is using a splay and telling the audience how L relates to U, how D relates to U, and how O relates to U, or they are using a display to describe how L, D, and O relate to each other when seen from Understanding. I’ve only noticed this recently and only a couple times and they both looked more like a splay than a display. And each time i initially assumed the speaker was combining items until i realized that the point of the talk was to get a better view of the fourth item by looking at the other three.
I wonder if such a presentation benefits from taking this “inside the quad” perspective or if it would be better off moving up to Physics and taking a complete look at LUDO. Probably depends on each presentation.
@actingpower - I think you’re talking about Robert McKee’s diagrams for “taking story and character to the end of the line” - it’s in the chapter, The Principle of Antagonism, in his book, Story. I really like it - I don’t know if it follows the same sort of construction rules as a Dramatica quad but yes, it’s very similar. Not as rich in its usage as Dramatica, but another nice tool to have along the way.
