Re: Archetypes Still Don’t Matter!

Re: Archetypes Still Don’t Matter!

Submitted by Patrick Lambe on Wed, 19/03/2008 - 19:23.
  1. Objection 1: I'm inclined to agree with you on the whole, although I still think archetypes built on massive narrative analysis (eg Campbell on folktales and myths) can have more resonance and generalisability than you would credit. In the Vices and Virtues presentation that you refer to I used a selection of archetypes as a somewhat whimsical way in to an off-the-wall look at knowledge management, and didn't/wouldn't claim it to be either scholarly or authoritative. But sufficiently grounded in knowledge managers' experiences to be a catalyst for good, rich conversations... which is what has happened on both occasions I've used them that way.
  2. Objection 2 : I didn't make it clear that by "employees" I meant a complete cross-section of the organisation. We try to ensure we have different seniority levels, different functions, and different lengths of service represented in the focus groups that produce the stories and the archetypes. We know we're hitting a representative sample when the same archetypes keep appearing over and over again. We also take care to ensure that the composition of the groups does not bias the stories being told - eg supervisors/managers with their reports in the ame group; and we deliberately ask for both positive and negative stories.
  3. Objection 3: In the emergent use of the archetypes I described, we're looking at a set of archetypes coming from a coherent community (an organisation) with a common context (its working life). There's a shared body of stories behind them. So I think it's very unlikely that you'd get as widely varying interpretations of them as you describe, although such variances are interesting to pick up, because they tell you more about the relative homogeneity/heterogeneity of the culture. In fact, where I've noticed the most variation is when we show an archetypes set to audiences that are not from the producing community - they don't have the common context that helps them interpret the archetypes with any sophistication or nuance, so they tend to see them in very caricatured ways that can vary widely according to the different backgrounds they bring.
  4. At the end of the day, I think the question is whether they are productive and useful. We have found them so, and so have our clients, in general. Some of them use them more productively than others. They represent a particular view onto a population, however, and we never use them in isolation - we very frequently do this kind of exercise alongside knowledge audits, SNA exercises, other forms of more analytical evaluation techniques. Just like network analysis, the archetypes give you insights that may or may not be interesting in terms of needed action. They need to be followed up, investigated for relevance, and validated by other means (eg whether similar themes are coming through from other views onto the organisation's life). And the archetypes only tell you about what's happening in relation to the question you ask to gather the stories - again like social network maps.
Archetypes Still Don’t Matter! By: Graham Durant-Law (14 replies) Tue, 18/03/2008 - 21:29