Submitted by Patrick Lambe on Thu, 20/03/2008 - 00:00.
Being "almost convinced" is probably the safest place to be ;) I love the Tolstoy quote, I assume from War and Peace? Do you have the reference? If only Dave Snowden had a time machine, he could have sold Sensemaker and a bunch of narrative projects a hundred times over with Tolstoy as his advocate.I agree on the effect that the size of the population has both in the stories/archetypes production end, and on how they can be interpreted (this is part of a bigger issue of how common ground is maintained in an organisation), though we've found we seem to get relative homogeneity in organisations up to around 1200 people - unless they are physically dispersed, in which case there's more variation in the stories and archetypes. I'm used to giving health warnings with SNA, maybe I should consider the same with archetypes descriptions... what do you consider are the potential ill effects from misusing this technique? (Apart from simply ending up having no value)
Make a round of the troops immediately after a battle, or even the day after, but before the reports have been drawn up, and ask any of the soldiers and senior officers how the affair went. You will be told what all these men experienced and saw, and you will form a majestic, complex, infinitely varied, depressing and indistinct impression; and from no one – least of all the Commander in Chief – will you learn what the whole affair was like.
Re: Archetypes Still Don’t Matter!
Being "almost convinced" is probably the safest place to be ;) I love the Tolstoy quote, I assume from War and Peace? Do you have the reference? If only Dave Snowden had a time machine, he could have sold Sensemaker and a bunch of narrative projects a hundred times over with Tolstoy as his advocate.I agree on the effect that the size of the population has both in the stories/archetypes production end, and on how they can be interpreted (this is part of a bigger issue of how common ground is maintained in an organisation), though we've found we seem to get relative homogeneity in organisations up to around 1200 people - unless they are physically dispersed, in which case there's more variation in the stories and archetypes. I'm used to giving health warnings with SNA, maybe I should consider the same with archetypes descriptions... what do you consider are the potential ill effects from misusing this technique? (Apart from simply ending up having no value)