Social construction of meaning, rather than interpreted by experts
This gave us an idea from which we evolved a series of experiments to see if from a body of culturally situated narrative, we could enable the emergence of archetypes that would allow insight into issues relating to culture and perception. Those experiments were successful and also established the importance of the social construction of meaning, rather than meaning mediated or interpreted by experts that is the norm in cultural studies and practice.
Although it took some years to develop the process of archetype extraction is relatively simple to describe, but requires normal patterns of consultant and academic behaviour to be disrupted, as they have no interpretative role and loose their power. A position that can cause severe trauma as it appears to render them powerless. This is especially ironic for those who think their expertise allows them to de-construct ideological aspects of stories in order to challenge the powerful
The social construction of archetypes is critical as it carries with it a high level of objectivity; it is not the result of an expert opinion and cannot be controlled by management. The process has been constructed to prevent participants from having foreknowledge of the outcome. It is of course an indicator, a means of enabling new perspective, breaking pattern entrainment and can be defended by reference to the process. The process was a first experiment with using emergence as a concept to generate meaning; increasing agent interactivity around artefacts, preventing premature convergence, managing issues of proximity and volatility. Rather than analytically studying a situation, or simulating through agent-based modeling we replicated the principles underpinning the operation of a complex system to stimulate the emergence of cultural indicators
Interestingly the people who find this most difficult tend to be higher performing consultants and professional trainers. The following opinion is based on anecdotal evidence, but trainers and consultants have been brought up to be outcomes focused, to make expectations clear in advance. Emergent processes make them very uncomfortable, often to the point where they can’t engage. This outcome focus is interesting; it can lead for example to a focus on prediction rather than working on the conditions from which outcomes can emerge.
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