There has been some continued discussion recently about archetypes and their use in the workplace, particularly from  Dave Snowden and Graham Durant-Law.

Although the term archetypes is frequently used in the workplace, what is usually being described are stereotypes or Theophrastic stock characters.

According to Carl Jung, an archetype is a fundamental structure upon which human development proceeds.  He originally termed these primordial images, then dominants, and then finally archetypes.

For Jung an archetype was not a simple description that completely captured the essence of a type of person.  It was a fundamental human pattern that often manifested in the behaviour of individual people.

Although sometimes confused with each other, the archetypes described by Jung are different from the types he also described.  These types, or functions as he also termed them, reflect how individuals engage with their inner and outer worlds.

An archetype is a fundamental human pattern in the same way that a musical scale or a drum rhythm is a fundamental human pattern.  A type is more analogous to a musical genre such as folk or jazz or classical. 

In the work place, the many systems that claim to identify and describe type are effectively saying ‘You like rock, these guys like country, and the accounts department are more into ballads’.  This may or may not be useful information.

It oftens leads to situations where methods like the woeful Insights are used in a futile attempt to categorise the behaviour of entire enterprises as if they were folkies, jazzers, rockers or blues fans.

Other systems such as the indiscriminate MBTI try to expand Jung’s original functions by introducing types that are effectively like ‘jazz-rock’, ‘country-blues’, ‘folk-ballads’ or perhaps ‘trip-hop’.

All this seems like harmless fun.  However, what usually tends to happen is that an individual’s behaviour is often pigeonholed by their identified type, rather than using it as a simple platform to explore their potential and purpose.  We hear comments like ‘You’re such a Red‘ or ‘That’s typical of an INTJ‘, without looking beyond these crude and clumsy categorisations.

With Dreamwork, we take a different approach.  Instead of trying to fit individual to type, we identify the constellations of archetypes that are expressed by the individual.  These archetypes may often seem fragmented in a way that reflects our own fragmented identity.  Although our own identity may seem constant and unchanging from our own perspective, we will often appear to show up in different identities to others, depending on circumstance and context.  Sometimes we like to listen to bluegrass, and other times we enjoy listening to reggae.

As a group identifies these archetypal fragments, they naturally begin to connect their riffs and motifs into an authentic voice.  Sometimes it may be more like Stravinsky than Mozart, but it often becomes the soundtrack for their emerging story.