Knowledge Matters™

I don't see anyone pushing archetypes down your throat Graham, so I'm not really sure what all the angst is about. However, since this is your second major tilt at this I'll try to explain why I find archetypes useful. The organisational archetypes we work with are produced by employees of that organisation out of stories they have told about their experiences in the organisation, around a particular theme eg whether or not knowledge and information sharing happens. We might run sessions with 60-90 people, producing several hundred stories. The people who tell the stories also produce the archetypes, and may also work on identifying common issues and themes. We find the archetypes are a very useful sensemaking device to encapsulate key patterns of behaviours, values and attitudes in the organisation, in the population's own language, in a way that an external consultant's thematic analysis cannot match. This gives us the opportunity to look at aspects of culture that are unarguable (because there are lots of stories behind each archetype).The stories are the "real" data that substantiate the archetypes, which is why it's hard to use archetypes well without the underlying narratives. But as a product, archetypes turn out to be a very useful device when you're looking at issues of cultural barriers, opportunities and change needs.To give an example we recently conducted a second archetypes exercise with a client 3 years after the first, to see if we could track any cultural impact from the KM initiatives. What we found was that prevailing perceptions of "don't care" and bumbling management have moved to perceptions of assertive-aggressive management, escalating frustration with underlying poor information discipline, and lots of blameful finger pointing, with some groups just going off and doing their own thing. Overall however, the negative perceptions are now predominantly more actionable (because many of them can be fixed with better processes and systems) than previously, when they were largely attitude and competence based.I don't really see how the value of this can be doubted (though I'm constantly surprised in that department) - because it gives the senior management team a sensemaking filter (with access to the stories behind it) to discuss what's happening with their culture and make some reasonable, informed decisions. They won't be able to do magic using the archetypes but they might be enabled to make better decisions.Now not all the archetypes literature you will surface takes this contingent, emergent approach to archetypes. Many of them, especially those in the Jungian/Joseph Campbell tradition, make universal claims for their archetypes. Both Jung and Campbell processed a lot of narratives to get at their archetypes, so they do tend to be very resonant, if abstracted from normal life. Others are simply snake oil, but what consulting domain does not have snake oil salesmen?Archetypes are simply sensemaking filters. They compress a lot of information into ways that audiences can work with. In the same way that personas are built by marketeers or website designers, they are a useful way of packaging up lots of information into useful and actionable patterns.Not everybody tunes into this (though I've never seen a client group respond as negatively as you to their own archetypes, and that's not because they are gullible, it's because they recognise the lived experiences behind their own archetypes). In the same way there's a bit of a backlash against personas too in the information architecture space. Some people are just more analytically minded. But it's not (all) the hogwash you suggest.