Now that I think about it, I realize that I usually don’t bother explicitly naming the subagents. Rather, I have each subagent iterate on how they feel—and about what—until it’s clear what’s going on and what the concerns are. This may or may not involve actual names for the agents.
I also do IDC exclusively in my head, substituting feelings and thoughts for explicit mental verbalizations when convenient.
I wouldn’t recommend this to people just starting out—having a format in which you name the sides and write out the positions seems helpful to quantify your process. As you become more familiar with what the right emotional textures feel like, try streamlining.
For me, naming the subagents is ~85% of the work. Once that’s happened, they usually iterate back-and-forth a bunch of times (e.g. 5) and then it’s solved in a matter of seconds (i.e. <5 mins).
“Ally-building” vs “Risk-neutrality” was a recent one, where the former thought that a low probability high reward strategy was bad and so I felt bad when I failed. Once I realised this was the debate, it was easy to let risk-neutrality ask the right questions and bring ally-building around to the true position (and no longer feel bad).
It sounds like your naming process is actually focusing. For me, the names don’t matter as much, and I just have a conversation involving focusing to figure out what the parts want.
Now that I think about it, I realize that I usually don’t bother explicitly naming the subagents. Rather, I have each subagent iterate on how they feel—and about what—until it’s clear what’s going on and what the concerns are. This may or may not involve actual names for the agents.
I also do IDC exclusively in my head, substituting feelings and thoughts for explicit mental verbalizations when convenient.
I wouldn’t recommend this to people just starting out—having a format in which you name the sides and write out the positions seems helpful to quantify your process. As you become more familiar with what the right emotional textures feel like, try streamlining.
For me, naming the subagents is ~85% of the work. Once that’s happened, they usually iterate back-and-forth a bunch of times (e.g. 5) and then it’s solved in a matter of seconds (i.e. <5 mins).
Do you use one word names or more descriptive ones?
“Ally-building” vs “Risk-neutrality” was a recent one, where the former thought that a low probability high reward strategy was bad and so I felt bad when I failed. Once I realised this was the debate, it was easy to let risk-neutrality ask the right questions and bring ally-building around to the true position (and no longer feel bad).
It sounds like your naming process is actually focusing. For me, the names don’t matter as much, and I just have a conversation involving focusing to figure out what the parts want.