Model L can become difficult at exactly the point it becomes interesting. Once there are sixteen positions and several derived group systems, the words begin to look like an extra vocabulary pasted over the same old picture. Vergence and Interest are worth keeping because they do not answer the same question. They let us distinguish an idea that is readily available from one that is constantly working, and a concern that is important from one that has simply captured the mind for an afternoon.
Take a familiar scene: a small team is deciding whether to cancel a public event after a speaker withdraws. There is a practical replacement to find, a roomful of people to notify, a budget, a reputation, and a question of whether the whole occasion still means what it was meant to mean. The team may agree on every fact. The difference begins in what rises first and in what holds attention.
Vergence: how a position comes into play
Vergence is derived from Phenomenal State and Modal Engagement. Its four groups—Overt, Apparent, Persistent, and Tacit—concern availability to awareness and default mode. In the Model L glossary, Overt means explicit and default: it surfaces in consciousness as a matter of course. Apparent is explicit but alternate: it can be brought forward, though a shift of mode is needed. Persistent is implicit and default: active below the threshold, yet part of the ordinary running of the system. Tacit is implicit and alternate: neither directly present to awareness nor the habitual first gear.
In the meeting, an Overt concern has the character of the thing a person can name while everyone is still taking their coats off. “We need to decide whether the event still has a coherent purpose.” An Apparent concern may be perfectly articulate once it has been invited in—someone is asked to review the numbers, or to say what the audience will feel—but it did not announce itself. A Persistent concern shapes the person’s sense that the meeting has gone wrong before they have words for it: they keep returning to a certain unease, a missing condition, a pressure no one else has named. A Tacit concern may only show itself later, through a surprising decision, a refusal, or the fact that nothing was said about it at all.
This prevents a common flattening. What is easy to talk about is not necessarily what is most continuously active. Silence is not absence. And a person who needs a prompt to give a lucid account of something is not thereby insincere or incompetent. Vergence tracks the route by which a function reaches the scene.
LII: the explicit architecture and the tacit reserve
The LII makes the structure concrete. Its Model L bridge places Ti(N.) Intellect at A1 Base and Ne(T.) Ideation at A2 Creative. Both are Overt: explicit and default. In the planning meeting, the LII can readily say what has ceased to cohere—what promise was made, which category has been confused, why a replacement speaker does not solve the same problem. Ti(N.) is also Salient: it gives concentrated attention to what is directly decisive. Ne(T.) at the Creative position is Overt but Tangential: visible and available, yet broad and incidental in its attentional pattern. It produces alternatives, comparisons, and possible re-formulations without itself deciding the standard by which they are judged.
The contrast inside the same type matters. The LII's Te(N.) Reason at A3 Ignoring and Ni(T.) Apprehension at A4 Demonstrative are Tacit: implicit and alternate. Te(N.) is Tangential; the LII may competently cite the facts, costs, and available evidence, then treat them as insufficient until a framework says what they mean. Ni(T.) is Salient but Tacit: the LII can make a strikingly exact long-range or consequential observation, especially where the internal structure of a situation makes a trajectory visible, without experiencing temporal forecasting as the point of the exercise. A judgment that looks from outside like 'strategic vision' may therefore be a quiet automatic resource in service of conceptual integrity.
The lower central positions add a necessary friction. Fi(S.) Animus at D1 Role is Overt and Salient: the LII may consciously attend to the exact propriety of a relation, an obligation, or the personal terms under which a decision is being made. Se(F.) Impetus at D2 Vulnerable is Overt but Tangential: immediate force, pressure, and territorial assertion can be plainly visible precisely because they are hard to integrate. Fe(S.) Affect at D3 Suggestive is Tacit and Tangential, whereas Si(F.) Stimulation at D4 Mobilizing is Tacit and Salient. The result is not a list of traits. It is a readable pattern: conceptual clarity is openly central; a personal or sensory need can be intensely important while arriving more indirectly; practical facts and temporal forecast remain usable, but do not set the LII's agenda.
Interest: what the attention is doing
Interest is derived from Focal Concentration and Attentional Concern. It crosses intensive or extensive attention with what is pertinent or incidental, yielding Salient, Adjunct, Germane, and Tangential. These words are more useful when treated as four recognisable patterns of work than as four personality adjectives.
Salient attention goes deeply into the immediate issue. In the event meeting it might mean examining the exact promise made to ticket-holders, or the one sentence in the programme that the replacement speaker cannot honestly inherit. Adjunct attention also goes deep, but into material peripheral to the immediate decision: the history of a previous cancellation, the exact wording of a rival venue’s announcement, a question of design that has become oddly absorbing. Germane attention ranges widely across what matters: the organiser surveys the audience, the budget, staff capacity, the speaker’s welfare, and the downstream relationships at once. Tangential attention ranges just as widely, but at the edge: names, adjacent possibilities, background comparisons, things which may prove useful later but do not decide today.
None of these is a moral ranking. Adjunct attention can discover the detail that saves a decision from being crude. Tangential attention can protect a group from mistaking its immediate frame for the whole world. A purely Salient meeting may get the answer right and damage the surrounding ecology; a purely Germane one may never stop widening the question. The distinction is not between serious and unserious minds. It is between different distributions of attention.
EIE: when the decisive question is what the room can become
The EIE has the same position architecture and therefore the same group pattern at each position, but the elements transform the lived scene. Its A1 Base is Fe(N.) Sentiment: Overt and Salient. An EIE in the same cancelled-event meeting does not merely notice that morale will suffer. The emotional meaning of the decision and the force it may carry for a public become the directly grasped centre of attention. Ni(F.) Reverie at A2 Creative is likewise Overt but Tangential: it supplies images of what this moment could mean, possible narrative turns, and a felt future, while Fe(N.) decides what must be made emotionally real.
At A3, Fi(N.) Soul is Tacit and Tangential: private affinities and the fine grain of one-to-one valuation may be present, but they are not automatically made into the public criterion. At A4, Ne(F.) Inspiration is Tacit and Salient: a compelling possibility may be seized with great force and then used to illuminate the larger dramatic situation, rather than being offered as an open-ended menu. The EIE's demonstrative possibility can be more focused than its creative temporal imagination—not because the EIE lacks range, but because a particular opening can become the thing that makes the whole moment intelligible.
Its D positions show the different pressure points: Te(S.) Praxis at Role is Overt and Salient, so the EIE may make a conscious, focused effort to get the practical account right; Si(T.) Observation at Vulnerable is Overt but Tangential, making bodily conditions and material calibration easy to register yet awkward to centre. Ti(S.) Habitus at Suggestive is Tacit and Tangential, while Se(T.) Actuation at Mobilizing is Tacit and Salient. In practice, this can mean that a question of force, collective resolve, or what the group will actually do becomes intensely compelling without first arriving as a fully articulated calculation. The contrast with the LII is not that one type 'has logic' and the other 'has feeling'. Both can reason, imagine, notice facts, and address a room. The different elements in the same Vergence and Interest positions change what becomes explicit, what stays underlying, and what attention treats as decisive.
Use the two maps together
The practical gain appears when the maps are not collapsed. Someone can have a concern that is Overt yet Tangential: readily voiced, broad, and peripheral to the task. Another can have a Persistent Salient concern: difficult to formulate at first, but deeply tied to the central issue. Neither pattern tells us an element or a type in isolation. It tells us how a position may be encountered within the larger Model L composition.
This is why the groups belong alongside, rather than beneath, the familiar language of strength, value, and position. Capacity says something about a position’s broad region; Vergence asks how it surfaces or recedes; Interest asks the shape and relevance of attention. LII and EIE share the same positional group map, yet Ti(N.) at LII A1 and Fe(N.) at EIE A1 make very different centres of explicit, concentrated attention. A person can be skilled without being preoccupied, preoccupied without being ready to explain why, and ready to explain something that is not what will decide the matter. Those are distinct facts about a life.
For readers working with the system, the next useful move is modest and concrete. Instead of asking only “what element is this?”, ask two further questions in a real conversation: did this concern arrive openly, by invitation, as an undercurrent, or only after the fact? And is the person going deeply or broadly—toward the task itself or toward its edge? The questions do not diagnose anyone. They make Model L’s group architecture available where it belongs: in the texture of actual attention.
Structural sources: the Model L Glossary, Model L overview, and the Model L dichotomy explorer. Model L is the original framework of Kimani White and Aleesha Lowry; the examples and interpretation here are TetraTypes editorial work.