Dave Snowden needs to play mediator recently, due to argument between Graham durant-law and Patrick Lambe about the usefulness of archetypes. Graham proposed that archetypes don’t matter because they oversimplify complex matters such as corporate culture. While Patrick Lambe viewed archetypes as communication tools and nothing more. (Note: this is based on my understanding after working with Patrick on KM Masterplan in a public organization). The latter view seems to be shared by Mark Gould.
I would like to add several points on the usefulness of archetypes in analyzing corporate culture. One reason why we like to create and use archetypes could be our natural instinct to avoid curse of dimensionality (CoD). The curse of dimensionality refers to the phenomenon that many types of data analysis become significantly harder as the dimensionality of the data increases. In our quest to comprehend complex situation (multi-dimensional) such as human behavior or corporate culture, we often simplify (normalize) the data to suit our understanding.
While archetype has its merits in describing complex situation, the usefulness of archetypes in change management or knowledge management consultancy is limited because archetypes assume common stories that occurred from focus groups storytelling session are important. Unfortunately, quantity does not always equal to quality.
In the process of collecting archetypes in organization, KM professionals or consultants often encounter various types of archetypes, some are of contradictory nature. To manage such wide variation of archetypes or stories, KM professionals often disqualify less frequent archetypes in their cultural analysis. However less frequent stories doesn’t necessarily means insignificant stories. The danger here is to miss out on less frequent archetypes with huge impact.
Concentrating on the positive side of archetype, do not make it a better tool to analyze culture. Given the flaws of archetype, ignorance would only lead to incomplete description of corporate culture, which results in ineffective change management effort. Rather than continuing to use flawed tool, we should find an alternative.
An alternative to overcome the pitfalls of archetypes would be using Most Significant Stories (MSC) to depict a corporate culture. Unlike in archetypes, stories in MSC have to be scrutinized several times by organization hierarchy to determine the one with most impact. Such multiple review would eliminate the less significant stories, no matter how common they are.
