Tetralemma: A 3,000-Year-Old Method for 21st Century Decisions

by Andreas Schoetz

It is safe to say that human life is decision-making. Yet, when it comes to the more important decisions in our lives, more often than not, we get stuck, hesitant, and tend to brood over alternatives. And when we finally have decided what to do, it frequently turns out that we made a poor choice. Fortunately, there is a method that can help us to get unstuck and make much better decisions. Surprisingly, this technique doesn’t originate from any contemporary luminary in the field of psychology or business, but from ancient India.

According to a recent study, one of the most frequent reasons for seeking out a coach is to improve decision making. Coaching professionals have therefore taken a special interest in helping their coachees to make better decisions and developed a set of effective tools to support their clients regarding both business and personal decisions. In this article, I will present the method that I personally consider one of the most useful: The Tetralemma.

The Tetralemma was developed, or rather „re-discovered" in the 1990s by Matthias Varga von Kibéd, a philosophy and logic professor at LMU Munich and Insa Sparrer, a psychologist and coach, also from Munich, Germany. The Tetralemma method produces clarity and insight and opens new perspectives when it comes to making decisions, i.e. choosing between different options.

A Coaching Example: Daniel’s Choice

Allow me to illustrate the wonders the Tetralemma can work with the case of a coachee. Let’s call him Daniel. Daniel is working as a creative director in an advertising agency. He has been quite successful over the 5 years that he is with the agency: he has been able to grow both in responsibility and salary, and has become the right hand of the owner and CEO.

Nevertheless, recently, Daniel feels the need for change. He senses a certain uneasiness and dissatisfaction with his current situation. He realizes that he has other ambitions, and frequently thinks about quitting his job and founding his own business.

Daniel’s Dilemma

Often, when facing decisions, we only see two options, just like Daniel. After months of ruminations, he seeks a coach to help him with the question “Should I stay or should I go?”. Neither of the two options is unambiguously preferable for Daniel as both come with risks and downsides, the classic “dilemma”. If he stays, he feels that his engagement and finally his creativity would suffer. If he goes, Daniel realizes, he would have to face uncertainty and the risk of failing with his start-up.

But the two options also have competing upsides. Daniel earns good money at his current job and has a very good relationship with his boss, the owner. On the other hand, with his own company Daniel could concentrate fully on digital marketing where he sees the future of the advertising market, a field that he is also much more passionate about than traditional advertising.

This illustrates that every decision is also a renunciation, and often, like Daniel, we don’t want to renounce the benefits of either alternative. The late medieval philosopher Jean Buridan found a very appropriate parable for this positive dilemma: “Buridan’s donkey”. The poor animal starved to death because of its inability to choose between to identical piles of hay.

Thus, the coach finds Daniel trapped oscillating between two possibilities, a most uncomfortable situation, accurately described by the idiom “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”.

Most probably, Daniel’s dilemma has to do with his thinking in the western tradition. A tradition that postulates that either a proposition is true, or its negation is true. This is also known as the law of the “excluded middle” or “excluded third”. For example, I either quit my job or I don’t. I can’t do both, i.e. there is “no middle”. This kind of thinking is very useful in mathematics and logic, but in real life it often leads to limiting our options.

Solving Daniel’s Dilemma

For coachees like Daniel who limit themselves to seeing only two options using a personal “law of the excluded third”, the Tetralemma offers a widened space of alternatives with the help of millennial knowledge: Old Indian logic (complemented by Buddhism) dating back to the 7th century before Christ.

The Tetralemma played a prominent role in society back then, including the judicial system where it was used to describe the 4 options of a judge’s verdict: Either one or the other of the parties in the dispute is right, or both are right, or none is right. It is also called the “four-fold negation” or simply “four-corners” (catuṣkoṭi in Sanskrit). Although the Tetralemma originates from India, today it is known under its greek name: Tetra = Four / Lemma = Premise, Assumption.

No alt text provided for this image Building the 4 Corners of the Tetralemma

Daniel’s coach introduces the Tetralemma and invites him to look beyond the two original options. Together, they develop 2 additional alternatives to Daniel’s dilemma:

ORIGINAL MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE OPTIONS (“Dilemma”)

Option 1: A (Daniel stays in his job)

Option 2: B (Daniel quits his job and becomes an Entrepreneur)

NEW OPTIONS

Option 3: A & B

(Example: Daniel does both, i.e. stays in the company and has his own business on the side / Other Example: He convinces the owner that a new digital marketing branch of the agency would be very successful and that he, Daniel should lead this branch)

Questions by the coach that are helpful to find Option 3:

Which aspects of option 1 and 2 each are most important to you? (e.g. regular income in option 1, self-determination in option 2) Which aspects of option 1 and 2 could you do without? (e.g. Daniel doesn’t need interaction with many colleagues as in option 1 or the title of owner/CEO as in 2) Are the important aspects of the two options necessarily mutually exclusive? (Identification of “false opposites” / a “false dilemma”, or black and white thinking, e.g. could you have both a regular income and be independent? Or at least have a lower regular income but more independence – e.g. working half time while building a start-up?) Sequence: Are there possibilities to realize first one and then the other option? (e.g. You could continue to work at the agency and save money that would later serve as a safety net for rough times with the start-up.) … Option 4: Neither A, nor B

(Example: Daniel could change to a creative director position in another company that is fully dedicated to digital marketing)

Are there situations when the dilemma is not present? (e.g. Daniel might not feel the need to act when he works on a digital marketing project for the agency.) What does the dilemma keep you from doing? (e.g. Daniel might notice that while concentrating too much on just two options he is losing other opportunities.) What is the advantage of dilemma and your indecision? Does your indecision make something possible? (e.g. Daniel might learn that he is afraid of admitting to himself that he is not an entrepreneurial type. Or that he needs the social interaction of a team.) What could you do if neither option 1 or 2 were possible? (e.g. Daniel could assume new responsibilities in his current position, could achieve more independence, or work in another agency etc.) … With these additional options being available, Daniel feels more relaxed and positive. He also feels strengthened in his belief that with creativity one can solve almost every problem.

Stepping out of the Four Corners: The Fifth Option

Much to Daniel’s surprise, his coach tells him that there is a fifth option that they have not examined yet. Historically, this fifth position can be interpreted as an expansion of the traditional Indian logic by Buddhism. It postulates that with the four alternatives or four corners one can never fully explore a situation.

The fifth position is an external view, an expansion of the context. During many coaching processes, it turns out that the original subject brought up by the coachee is not the real issue, that the real issue lies on a higher level. Good coaching is about taking the conversation to this higher level, and going beyond the practical. A good coaching session covers the coachee’s beliefs, values, his identity, and even his “mission in life”. The fifth position is the equivalent to this higher level.

The higher-level perspective can be used to evaluate any of the four other options of the Tetralemma. For example, the coachee can examine which of his values support an option or which of his motives or higher-order goals are behind an alternative.

No alt text provided for this image The fifth position serves to find totally new solutions that fulfill the motives equally or better than any of the four other options.

Option 5: C, none of the above, something totally different

(for example, take a sabbatical, go back to university as a professor, dedicate more time to family, create a family etc.)

Is there something that forms the background of the dilemma? (e.g. Daniel might notice that what he really is looking for is change and personal development rather than a start-up.) Beyond the subject – What is really the issue? (e.g. Daniel might notice that what he really wants is to make an impact, to leave a legacy – something that not necessarily implies a start-up) What would I like to do independent from the original dilemma? Passing through the 5 Options – Thoughts and Feelings

After new options and the higher-level perspective are available, coach and coachee pass through each of the options and reflect on the thoughts and feelings they evoke in Daniel.

Daniel notices that his main motives for a change are intellectual curiosity and having a higher impact. When further examining option 3 (combining A&B), i.e. becoming the leader of a new branch of digital marketing in his current company, Daniel notes that this is the option that he is most passionate about. Daniel prefers the challenge to build a new branch to entering an already established digital marketing business.

Daniel also decides to network with people in the digital marketing field to learn more about the area and build relationships.

Daniel leaves the session good-spirited and agrees with his coach to use the next session to develop strategies for achieving his preferred option.

Conclusion: The Tetralemma changes Lives

The Tetralemma is a very useful and practical tool for making complex decisions. It enables coachees to structure their thoughts, and at the same time invites creative, lateral thinking. This method is ideal to help coachees when they are stuck in a supposed dilemma and allows them to find innovative solutions.

It is Varga von Kibéd’s and Sparrer’s merit to have re-discovered and adapted this 3,000 years old method for our times. The Tetralemma method is quite well-known and successfully used by many German coaches but little-known outside of Germany. This has certainly to do with the fact that there are only a few publications about the Tetralemma Method in English. Therefore, I hope to contribute to a broader interest in this valuable method with my article.

Sources: 1) Building a Coaching Culture, ICF with HCI, 2014. 2) Ferrari, E.: Wege aus dem Dilemma: Ein Beides finden, 2013 3) Varga von Kibéd, M., & Sparrer, I.: Ganz im Gegenteil. Tetralemma-Arbeit und andere Grundformen systemischer Strukturaufstellungen, 2011 4) Ingala Robl, Constelaciones para el Éxito en el Trabajo, 2015

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