Lens 3 of 5
The dynamic of three
A three-role pattern that emerges in any group where one person has applied power on another and a third party arrives to resolve the situation. The framework comes from 1980s UK police training, born from a problem they could not otherwise solve. It applies far outside its original domain.
Where it shows up in your environment
The dynamic is not a domestic-violence framework. The original police-training research found it in domestic incidents because the consequences there were severe enough to require naming — but the same three-role pattern fires anywhere power is present. Power has many forms: physical, financial, relationship-based, role-in-a-company, age, expertise, gatekeeping. Where there's power and a third party can intervene, the dynamic can form.
In your environment that means: a classroom where a teacher addresses one student and another speaks for them; a team meeting where a question is asked of one person and someone else answers; a family conversation where one parent corrects a child and a grandparent steps in; a social setting where one person is challenged and a friend leaps to defend. Most well-meaning interventions go wrong because the dynamic is misread — and the cost lands on whoever stepped in to help.
Reading the dynamic correctly — before the cascade completes — is a learnable skill. The platform's simulator and learning content build that skill in your context, with feedback, at the pace of a working week. The work earns its place by being practised, not by being read about.
When integration help is needed
Reading these foundations is one half of the work. Moving them into your classroom, your team meeting, your management practice — the part where the substance actually lands in the environment — is sometimes harder to do alone.
Gary can be called upon to travel to wherever you are and see you through the process of integrating what you now know into the environment that you''re in. At the same time he''ll work with the people you''re now going to be working with — preparing them for the changes they''re about to see and the new style of education or working they''re going to experience. Educating and preparing those people is part of the work, not an afterthought.
If integration help would be useful, write to gary@nowiseeit.org directly, or use our feedback form. None of these foundations are theoretical mumbo-jumbo — they all point at practical good working methodology in your environment, and the partnering offer is here for the moments when getting them landed needs another set of hands.