In most organisations, individuals are often regarded as discrete units whose identity can be fully described by personality profiling tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Insights.

These tools presume that there are only a few types of people and their complete identities are located within specific categories of theoretical pyschological structure.

However, in reality, we become aware of much of our identity and sense of self by the experience of projecting it into our personal space and having it reflected back to us from our environment.  Rather than being an easily quantifiable unit, we create our individual sense of self from the fragments of inner and outer experience.

In his 1999 paper, The Heterogeneously Distributed Self, Stanton Wortham described how contemporary understanding of human cognition had moved beyond merely viewing it as an internal psychological structure.  Rather than the self being located in the individual physical body, it is observed to emerge from various contextual structures such as linguistic, social and cultural activity.

Wortham goes on to describe the processes of distributed cognition where knowledge is distributed across members of a group, and situated cognition where knowledgeable action emerges from non-cognitive artefacts and structures as well the knowledge of others.  He then continues by applying these concepts as a way of describing the self.

However, this would suggest that some of the distributed self may continue to be present in a group context, even if the individual self were no longer present in the group.  It would also suggest that the situated self was still present in the artefact, even if the individual who had previously distributed their self  into the artefact was no longer associated with it.

In Dreamwork, rather than viewing the self as a psychological, distributed or situated structure, we experience it as the Ambient Self, an awareness that surrounds and envelops the individual.  This mirrors our experiences in dreaming, where we immerse our selves in persons, places, events and objects that we create as fragmented reflections of our self projections.

Using the Dreamwork Space, we can identify these reflections as archetypal fragments of Persons, Places, Events and Objects.  Rather than being discrete unconnected pieces, these fragments are archetypally connected and coherently describe a unique sense of self.

From an organisational perspective, instead of trying to fit the identities of our people into predefined and limiting personality profiles, we simply allow them to uniquely self assemble from individually identified fragments.   This enables us to see how a group of selves might connect with each other and their circumstances to create a desired and brilliant outcome.